I'm not one to get excited about gadgets, nor do I believe that Steve Jobs is bigger than Jesus, but still, I want an iPhone. It looks like a technological marvel, combining a mobile phone, an internet communications device, an iPod, a camera and, er, a paperweight, in one slick, slim little box. The iPhone doesn't necessarily do anything other products don't do already, but it's the way it does them that gets me excited.
It looks like it lets you access all those features through a big doorway rather than the tiny keyhole current devices seem to offer. In true Apple style, it has all been stripped down to something that's beautifully simple - and therefore looks beautiful. No ugly, poky little fingernail keyboards. Instead, a smooth, black screen rimmed with silver that bears as much resemblance to your average mobile as an iPod does to a Walkman. And there's just one button! All the other buttons are on the touch-sensitive screen, which means you can match the keyboard to what you need it for - typing, dialling numbers, navigating music, etc. You can do useful things like select which voice message you want to hear, rather than having to roll through them all. Added to which, there's a whole new vocabulary of futuristic commands to learn, involving swiping your fingers across the screen, a bit like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
Actually, if we're talking movies, I think Jonathan Ive and the Apple designers are really channelling Kubrick's 2001. This is the nearest thing we've yet achieved to the black monolith: its minimal, sophisticated, and less highly evolved beings will have no idea what it does or how to use it. So when you slap it on the meeting room table amidst all those BlackBerrys and Nokias, what you're really saying I:, "I am looking down at all you scum from a higher branch of the evolutionary tree." Who doesn't want that?
There are sure to be plenty of teething troubles and techie shortcomings I haven't thought about: low memory, short battery life, some glitch whereby you end up taking pictures of your ear while sending all your phone numbers to U2 (here's a link to some). But I'm not planning on exchanging my phone or iPod for anything else. Or have I just been seduced by the Jobs' seer-salesman shtick?
