smallchou.com/blog

so where are we now, a couple of weeks after the complete and utter hysteria of the iPhone? well first of all, from what i can tell, it looks like most of the lucky folks who went out and picked up an iphone have now stopped floating in the thin air of pure euphoria.

but more than that, it seems like we’ve moved past the standard and expected sequence of reactions: first, “holy crap, this is the most amazing thing i’ve ever seen in my life! where can i sell my first-born for it?!” and then, “pssh, that thing ain’t shit. it doesn’t even have a cupholder, steering wheel, or lava lamp. and it doesn’t wash my car.”

to me, i think the impact of the iPhone is going to be most dramatically seen in two places within the US, and both of them for the better:

1) us mobile internet: i think those of us in tech generally realize how absurd the us mobile internet industry is. internet access on the phone is ridiculously slow and the user experience is usually awful. i think the new safari browser on the iphone, coupled with the countless complaints about how slow at&t’s edge network is, can only help to drive adoption of mobile browsing.

seriously folks, as we speak, there are 10 year-olds in korea and japan that would laugh at how awful the us mobile experience is today.

2) creativity in phones: i’ve been spouting this off to everyone who has the misfortune of listening to me speak daily, but i’m hoping/expecting that the iPhone will be a tremendous catalyst for creativity among the phone makers. sure the iphone product is nice, but i think it’s much more important that they looked at the phone features with a fresh pair of eyes. it’s not all perfect, but at least it’s DIFFERENT.

trying out my brother’s new iphone, i couldn’t help thinking that apple threw out the book and started with fresh sheets of paper in designing it. instead of looking at some master matrix of “these are your four options when choosing the keypad,” apple chose entirely new approaches to the design. it’s refreshing, especially when you consider the commodities that are called cell phones in the US today.

i’m not looking at buying an iphone any time soon, but i am excited to see what other new phones pop up. at least apple’s gotten me that excited.