CES: Apple iPhone
Apple, Inc is up 8% in the stock market after they announced a new cross-technology product at Macworld 2007 today, the Apple iPhone:
The iPhone is a smart phone running some version of OSX, sporting a wide-screen touch-sensitive display, iTunes, Safari, Widgets, and other mac apps, 8 GB of Flash Storage, support for GSM, Wifi, Bluetooth, and Edge networks, 5 hours of talk time, and 16 hours of music time. The phone is just 11mm thick, and will go for $599 ($100 less for a 4GB version) exclusively from Cingular. Deals were also announced with Yahoo for push-mail, and Google for Maps. Some problems with this in the future:
- Vendor tie in w/ Cingular will limit market share
- Availability will be a big issue–can Apple meet the demand?
- Battery-life issues will be important. Everything here is innovative, except for battery life, which has not improved
- Can Cingular provide the iPhone with enough bandwidth?
- Scratching, smudging and assorted damage to the touch-screen
- TM lawsuits from Cisco / Linksys, who own the iPhone trademark
- Lack of open standards for programming in the new “OSX-like” iPhone OS
I predict, like the iPod v1.0, future versions of the iPhone will solve these problems and more. I’m still buying one in June, though! Update: Engadget has a nice comparison of the size of this baby on their blog. It’s a nice size!
CES: Netgear Storage Central Turbo
The coolest thing I’ve seen coming out of the CES announcements so far is this personal Netgear SAN (Storage Area Network) device:
It supports “terabytes of SATA storage” and disk mirroring (RAID?) options, and gigabit speeds. According to Gizmodo, they also claim it’s “6-7x faster” than competing products. And, with a $249 price tag, it’s quite affordable. Think of it as a giant network-ready external enclosure, fill it up with SATA drives to suit, plug it into your network, and your bulk-storage needs are magically solved.
