The Hanover Collaboration

In case you hadn’t heard, Apple made its first foray into the mobile phone market yesterday with the announcement of iPhone. And if the live report on Engadget is any indication, Mac and PC users alike are willing to knife their own grandmothers to get their hands on one this June.

But, just as they did with the release of iMac in 1998, Apple has overlooked a critical component for their of their new “gotta-have” machine: with the absence of a flash reader, USB, or FireWire port, there’s simply no way to get large amounts of data onto and off of iPhone without a fast wi-fi connection.

Like most folks reading this, I’ve got a fairly speedy wireless network up at my home. But iPhone is a primarily mobile device, and there’s no way (for the next five years, at least) people can reliably expect to find fast wireless networks wherever they go. This fact puts some serious dents in the iPhone’s usability.
rural hills of Western Massachusetts. Earlier, while still at home, I’d downloaded a movie to my iPhone, and now we all want to watch it on my friend’s computer. But since he only gets dialup at his house, there’s no way to connect the two devices, and we’re stuck crowding around the iPhone to watch.

Though iPhone can communicate, sans network, by using Bluetooth, that protocol’s speed tops out at a paltry 2.1 Mbps. At that rate, a single feature-length film would take as long to transfer as to watch. Cingular’s EDGE service, which iPhone also
supports, is an even narrower pipe, at just under .5 Mbps. But when I want to get pictures and movies off my current phone, I just pop out the flash card, stick it into the reader attached to my PC, and watch as the data zips off at 450Mbps, over 200 times as fast.

While I can understand Apple omitting a FireWire or USB port for aesthetic reasons, or to avoid any association with wire-dependent technology, a built-in flash reader is wireless and unobtrusive. Judging from the technology’s current integration into much less sophisticated equipment, adding a microSD slot to the iPhone wouldn’t have significantly impacted the device’s $500 price tag.

Furthermore, flash compatibility would have given the iPhone some much-needed storage space. While the high-end model’s 8 gigabytes of storage is unprecedented for a cell phone, it’s downright pedestrian for an mp3 player. That’s mportant, because while the styling and unique features of the iPhone may have widened eyes at its presentation, it was the prospect of reducing all mobile devices to a single, pocket-sized unit that brought the crowd to its feet.

Of course, none of this will deaden the iPhone’s success. The device is gorgeous, and technologically speaking, years ahead of its closest competitors. But the decision leave off a flash reader, like the decision to omit a floppy drive on the original iMac, will significantly hinder iPhone’s ability to become dominant in its target market.