20 Apple iPhone Mysteries

February 21, 2007 by dennis

Introduction

It’s been almost a month and a half since Steve Jobs gave his now famous iPhone presentation at Macworld 2007. Since then answers to a lot of questions about the Apple iPhone were found, but even more questions still remain. This article is based on publicly available information, as well as information reported by other publications. It discusses the most important things that we don’t know about the Apple iPhone.

Apple iPhone

Global iPhone Issues

- The #1 question that bothers us — will it still be known as the iPhone? Apple is currently in the middle of a legal dispute with Cisco in USA and UK regarding the iPhone trademark, and with Comwave in Canada. If it loses those, it might need to rename the iPhone to something else. iMobile, anyone?
[Post Note: This question now has an answer -- Cisco and Apple resolved their dispute amicably, allowing each other to keep using the iPhone name.]
- Our #2 is a very interesting question – Cisco demands for “interoperability” between the two iPhones. Cisco’s iPhone is a VOIP Skype phone. Does that mean that if Cisco’s demands are met, the iPhone will also feature out-of-the-box VOIP Skype support?
- Our #3 question is something that bothers a lot of people that don’t want to switch to Cingular or Rogers — when will the exclusivity period end?
- A lot of people are wondering whether there will only be one exclusive carrier in every part of the world. This business model can be very risky in Asia, Latin America, and some parts of Europe, where not one mobile carrier is big enough to justify the exclusivity clause.
- Yet a lot of other people are wondering: why should it take so long for the iPhone to get to Europe/Asia/Australia/South America? By the time it gets there, iPhone’s competitors could catch up and release comparable phone models, thus killing the market potential for Apple iPhone.

Apple iPhone

Technical iPhone Questions

- Will it have 3G when it gets to Europe, and later on to Asia? Needless to remind, China rolled out the world’s first 4G network just several weeks ago, and for the iPhone to stay competitive in similar conditions it’d need to offer something better than its current 2.5G.
- How soon will the second version of iPhone be released? Will Apple iPhone 2.0 be introduced already when it arrives in Europe later on this year and Asia next year? Will it feature 3G technology?
- What is the actual speed of the CPU? So far all we’ve managed to gather is that it’s some sort of ARM11 Samsung CPU, without knowing the actual specs.
- How about the Apple iPhone’s battery life — how many hours can it spend in standby mode? We know the specs for watching movies and talking, but no specs are yet available on actual standby time.
- Will there be a vibrate option? Lack of thereof could really ruin the phone for a lot of people.
- How about voice dialing on the iPhone? While it’s a feature that probably wasn’t mentioned in the presentation because it’s so obvious, we’d still like to know the answer.
- Are we going to be able to record videos with the Apple iPhone? So far we’ve only heard about still shots…
- Will it have a flash feature on its camera? That’d be quite useful, and once again, we haven’t heard a thing about it.
- Does it matter which way the iPhone can be rotated to switch from vertical to horizontal mode? We’ve seen it rotated only one way, if it can’t be rotated in the other way, that could be an issue for left handed people.

Apple iPhone

iPhone Software Questions

- While Steve Jobs originally said that there won’t be third party applications support, apparently it’s not entirely true. Otherwise, how could we explain EA Games’ and Apple’s negotiations about making games for the iPhone? So, we really do wonder what the real deal is: will it only be select, Apple approved third party applications that will get to the iPhone, and how will they be distributed? iTMS comes to mind as a possibility for approved third party applications.
- What will Apple iPhone’s calendar look like – will it be something like iCal? We’re not sure, because Steve Jobs never showed it.
- Will Apple iPhone offer support for select instant messengers, or iChat? A lot of people are craving for instant messengers support…
- Microsoft Exchange compatibility is a big selling point for some folks. Will Apple implement it by the time Apple iPhone will ship, or will they do it later, if at all?
- Similarly to the last question, some people really like Entourage. Will Apple iPhone be compatible with Entourage once it’s released, if ever?
- A very useful feature would be stylus support. A lot of folks are used to PDAs that offer handwriting recognition. In reality, considering the intricacy of iPhone’s touchscreen and OSX that runs it, adding this feature should be a matter of firmware upgrade. Will Apple do it?

Apple iPhone

As you can see, there are still many holes in what we know about the Apple iPhone. These questions really bother the potential iPhone buyers — many of them originated from our forum readers. While we won’t get the answers right away, we’re really hoping that we’ll know them soon.

By: Dennis Sloutsky

Tags: app, Apple, application, Asia, Canada, China, Europe, Flash, game, iPhone, Mac, Microsoft, News, OS, Rogers, Steve Jobs, UK, USA, voip

Article by dennis

Dennis Sloutsky is one of the oldest members of iPhoneWorld.ca, having co-started the site in January 2007. He stills owns an iPhone 2G and uses it sometimes just for fun. His hobbies include traveling, writing and playing his guitar.

gigi

for the exclusivity of the carrier, it’s not a mystery, they said 2 years in the keynote
smegdude

you can’t use a stylus with the iphone due to the touchscreen technology used, as i understand it, the display only response to human touch.
Sebas

During the Keynote, Steve Jobs said “YUCK !”, talking about a stylus…

So no stylus from Apple for sure… Perhaps from 3rd party ?
Mmmm… not sure reguarding the “hard” screen.
http://www.amazing.com/user/show/1 David H Dennis

I suspect the reason for the long delay before introduction to Europe and Asia is the need to support 3G in those countries. Even the Philippines, which is a desperately poor country, has an ultramodern cellphone infrastructure which already supports 3G in most urban areas.

I’d be very surprised if the calendar support isn’t a version of iCal designed for the smaller screen. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about there.

RoughlyDrafted magazine is reporting that Apple’s new Leopard Server is going to do tighter integration between an open source calendar server they’re using and email. The iPhone is obviously going to fully support this, through the iCal available on it. I would think that push email to the iPhone would be another option they could throw in to sell their Leopard Server/iPhone combination as an alternative to Exchange/Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone.

If you think about this, it means Exchange integration with the iPhone is unlikely, but companies that can standardize on Leopard server and iPhones for their employees are in for a real treat.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft server and client access licenses in all their glory are so expensive that an xserve running Leopard server with Mac Minis as clients might be fully price competitive with a Microsoft solution.

Of course the price of iPhones will have to come down quite a bit for this to happen, but I’m sure individually negotiated bulk purchase contracts would take care of that.

This is still going to be a somewhat tough sell because RIM users love their Blackberries, but for anyone not in the RIM camp it’s going to look like a really interesting idea, for new companies at any rate.

D
dennis

#1 gigi,

Thanks for that, I probably missed it in the keynote… However even in this case, 2 years is only for Cingular in USA, how about Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, etc…?

#2 smegdude,

So no possibility of firmware upgrade that you foresee? That’d be a big disappointment for Asian markets, where they have thousands of hyeroglyphs which you can’t really input normally…

#4 David H Dennis,

Yes, my thoughts exactly about 3G and the amount of time it will take for iPhone to reach outside of North America. Thank you for the other thoughts, your input is much appreciated.
http://www.podtech.net Macslut

Another unanswered question…

Will the phone support video out and does it use the same audio/video 1/8″ mini-plug?

In the demo, Steve never showed video playing out of the phone, instead he showed hacked demo which put the entire display of the phone on the screen.

This may be an obvious “of course it does”, but it hasn’t been stated specifically.
Jeremy

1 – It is already listed on the Apple webpage as the “Apple iPhone” and it won’t change.
2 – Cisco’s demand for interoperability is a boondoggle. the issue is indeed VoIP, and if Cisco caves it will be in the iPhone, if they don’t then not.
Most of the questions “in the middle” here are irrelevant stupid things that are either already answered, are so bloody obvious that it pains one to read them, or are simply too far down the road to have any meaningful response to. Will the iPhone have a cigarette lighter in the back? Who knows?
8 – Voice dialing? wow what a *crucial* feature. Out of the thousands of folks I see using cell phones each day there are somewhere between zero and 0.001 that use that feature. Who really cares.

The end of the list is a muddle… but basically the iPhone will not support all the Microsoft applications mentioned (why the hell should it?), but it will offer all the same functionality in open-source, better designed versions of the MS’s crappy Entourage/Exchange stuff.
dennis

#1 is no longer an issue, at least for the USA — iPhone will keep the same name http://www.iphoneworld.ca/news/2007/02/21/cisco-apple-iphone-dispute-settled/
billybob

One question I have not seen anyone ask:
Will video on the iPhone be playable through AppleTV? Theoretically, it should since they both have WIFI capability. It would be really cool if that was the case.
http://awarmgun.net/ Ian Adams

The lack of an optional stylus is kind of weird. I mean, the OS presumably has Inkwell built-in like it’s big brother on the Mac, so why have that technology if you’re not going to use it?