Why I’m Not Getting an iPhone nor ModBook
The iPhone was announced amidst much hoo-hah last week at MacWorld. Those who know me know that I’m a gadget person but have been surprised to find I’m still using a Nokia 6100 phone - the same phone I’ve had for three years. Make no mistake, I’ve been shopping for a good integrated phone for a long time, checking out the latest and greatest every time I am in Hong Kong to visit my family (which I failed to do this past Christmas due to circumstances).
What I found would inevitably be disappointing. Too big. Too clunky. Too ugly. Too expensive. Too little memory. Too unusable. I wanted a phone that had mp3 playback, at least a 2MP camera so I wouldn’t have to lug a compact camera, some level of web and/or email capability, and a decent product and interface design. Apparently, this was too much to ask. The only ones that were close were priced far higher than the value I perceived, and required the additional cost of memory cards to make them even close to useful for some of the functions I mentioned.
When I last looked, it was actually cheaper, smaller, more flexible, and better usability and design for me to buy an iPod Nano and velcro it to the Nokia I had of similar dimensions than to buy any of these bricks. So I bought a Nano.
The iPhone is exactly the kind of integration with almost the form factor I desired and a price tag that was comparable when you compared apples to apples. However, I probably won’t be getting one. Why?
First, Apple has a track record for releasing rather buggy first generation products. The iPod had battery issues, the Nano had scratching issues, the MacBooks had a number of problems reported, etc. So a brand new product line and new market seems ripe for bugs that need to be sorted out.
Second, Apple has a track record for quickly releasing a second generation product that’s not just an upgrade, but usually a complete annihilation of the previous generation. Look at the iPod Mini, which became a bit of a joke to own when the Nano was announced. Besides, there’s rumors that an iPhone Nano may be in the works.
Finally, there’s the deliberate crippling of the technology that seems to be going on. EDGE instead of 3G connectivity is almost certainly a deliberate oversight that will be fixed in the future. The MacWorld live demos showed just how long it took for any given webpage to load. In addition, there’s a noticeable absence of GPS capability in a device that’s begging for it.
So I won’t be getting an iPhone, at least not yet.
Drawing much less attention was Axiotron’s ModBook, an after market conversion of a MacBook to a tablet laptop. A friend of mine once messaged me after the announcement of BootCamp and Parallels:
Now you have no excuse not to switch to Mac!
He was referring to the fact that I stated the lack of videogames on Macs as a primary reason for not switching. I responded:
One word: Tablet
Well now that reason is gone as well - or so it would seem. However, the ModBook lacks some key features which I think will ultimately prevent me from getting one. It’s not the huge price tag, I was willing to pay similar prices for my Toshiba M200 when it first came out. It’s not the overall technology - a built-in GPS and WACOM Pen-abled technology gives it a ton of potential. However, two major pieces are missing: a decent video card, and a keyboard.
Because the ModBook uses a MacBook as its base, it usese the Intel built in graphics card instead of an ATI card, thus failing to fulfill my videogame requirement (not to mention any other intensive graphical usage like SketchUp). How can it be missing a keyboard, you ask? Well, the ModBook is what’s called a slate tablet (as opposed to a hybrid swivel like the M200). Keyboard usage is limited to connecting a USB or bluetooth keyboard separately to the laptop. The whole point of a laptop is portability and carrying two separate pieces of hardware is just unacceptable to me.
I still don’t understand tablet manufacturers and marketers to be honest. They primarily seem to target the “doctor” use case where a doctor does his rounds in a hospital and is taking notes on a tablet PC. Maybe I’m clueless to the level of demand in that market but it strikes me that professional artists, CAD users, designers and such could really make use of affordable tablets and yet, they never seem to cater to that market.
Hey, Axiotron, if you’re paying attention, I’m interested, but I’m typing this blog entry, not writing it by hand.
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