Apple Unveils iPhone

One thing I was not able to definitively find out today was if the Apple TV acts like a TiVo and records TV for you or not. It didn’t look like it. All those TV connectors look like they are for output TO your TV, with nothing going in. I’ve been planning a Mac Mini based DVR for a while now, but wanted to see if they came out with a complete, integrated package first. Basically, my Mac Mini based system would use something like EyeTV to digitize the video signal so the Mac Mini could save it as an MPEG, which I could later watch in iTunes or on my iPod video, as I already do with TV shows and movies I already downloaded from iTunes (Firefly and Battlestar Gallactica). You can also "rip" movies and put them into your iPod as well.

The movie The Great Raid took up about 1.42GB on my hard drive, so you should be able to fit a fair number of feature length movies on the smallest iPod. The quality was just fine, and my only gripe is lack of subtitles (for when you are in a noisy environment).

I travel a lot with kids and we lug around a case with about 40 DVDs in them and a DVD player with two screens for them to watch. It would be kind of neat if I could unplug the core of my Mac Mini system (maybe with an external hard drive to augment disk space), and maybe even use it in my car. I’ve read a couple of articles where people put a G4 or a Mac Mini into a car for various reasons including playing movies, so it should be pretty straight forward. I’ve also run computers in my car for years off of an AC converter. My reasoning here is that the Mac Mini system could replace all those DVDs and prevent me the headache of worrying about every disk change. I could mount it so it is fairly well protected during the trip. One aspect I am doing more research on with this is game playing. I hooked my son’s PS2 up in the car with a TV/VCR combo to play DVD movies and games one time a long time ago (before the portable DVD players got cheap enough). Both my son and daughter got ferociously car sick and my wife abruptly ended the experiment. I was hoping that something more interactive would do them good versus passively watching a movie. The real motive here was that I was going to use the Mac Mini system to get them to play educational games on the road, although both of them have now pretty much outgrown Reader Rabbit.

It’s interesting to note how the stock market reacted to the iPhone news. Apple (AAPL) is up 8.31% on the day while BlackBerry (RIMM) is down 7.85% and Palm (PALM) is down 5.69%. Do you think this is a temporary bounce or will this increase when the phone is launched in June?

I did not expect the phone to be a PDA replacement. The iPod has been so successful based on their simplicity that I expected more of the same. I would like to see a bare bones iPhone without all the PDA features. Do you think that is coming?

As a worker in the IT industry, I have to wonder if we’re too connected. Surrounding me in the company where I work every day are iPods. In fact, I think (other than the CEO/Owner) I’m the only person in the office without an iPod. Nor do I own a ‘smart phone’. I get paged if I have a problem with a server, and I can connect from the outside to look at the servers I support. I can access my e-mail remotely, so I don’t see the need for a smart phone. Both the CEO and my boss have ‘smart phones’ that get their e-mail routed to them 24×7. Is this truly necessary?

I drive to work daily on ultra-alert because (best guess) between 5-10% of the cars I see on my way are listening to their iPods/MP3 players via earbuds and paying little to no attention to what is occuring around them. Or, conversely, reading their e-mail on their PDA device. I actually quit a company a little over a year ago where we carried Blackberries, and were expected to check and answer e-mail constantly. It’s bad enough having a cellphone as a distraction while driving (let’s be honest, how many of us really do pull over while talking) but at least there you have the option of a hands free handset.

Do we really need to be this connected? Companies have survived for decades without all of this connectivity, maybe we need to rethink and retool and scale back just a bit.

Apple’s dropping of "Computer" from its name isn’t too confusing, but what about Cingular’s change to AT&T ___ ? I wonder how much they would have to spend just for promotion of the iPhone…then again, they might not choose to put out mass media ads until they’ve switched names anyways. Darn, I thought I was onto something silly.

I checked out the product specs the day of the release, and didn’t see anything about actually recording TV with this device, and confirmed my suspicions when I listened to the NPR: Science Friday podcast on consumer electronics. It does NOT record TV by itself. You should easily overcome that by getting an eyeTV or just about any USB video digitizer, so that’s no sweat.

I just wish there was a way to embed the closed captioning without flattening it into the composite video, but keep it as a layer that can be turned on and off.

By the way, the same NPR: Science Friday podcast on consumer electronics was almost entirely on the iPhone.

Here are a few highlights:

o Cingular actually changed its network to accomodate the device—usually carriers dictate menu composition and all the details of the phone to the manufacturer. This allows the iPhone to give you a list of your voice messages for you to select in any order you wish, rather than having to listen to the William Shatner immitation: "You…Have…Six….Voice…Messages…………Message 1 from…phone…number….5….5….5…1…2. (etc)" before you can actually listen to the message.

o Apple will not allow third party apps to be developed for the phone, but perhaps widgets (ala Mac OS X Tiger’s widgets). This really sucks, because I currently carry an iPod, a cell phone, and a Palm PDA. If the iPhone can’t replicate all the features my Palm can, it’s a no-go. This is especially true of the core apps, and currently I don’t know of any to-do lists in Mac OS X. Some of my third party apps include converstion tools (like millimeters to inches and all that).

o Oddly, no new Macs were mentioned at the expo, unless you count the AppleTV.