So here we are. September 12, 2012. A big, exciting day in the Silicon Valley. An iPhone launch.
I confess I did hang on till the end, hoping for that one killer feature which Apple will toss out for the other companies to copy (and improve on ...). Will there be a revolutionary keyboard? Augmented reality? Some NFC brilliance? A rock vaporizing laser? ANYTHING? No. At 11 AM the iPod announcements started. I closed the engadget live stream.
My expectation are not sky high. In fact, this is what I really wanted, and why:
1. Micro-USB: Because it is universal. It is small, and it is convenient.
2. Really, micro USB: Because the world will be a better place if all chargers are uniform.
3. Keyboard: I don't know what I was expecting. But my fat fingers cannot get enough of Swype. And because my phone connects to a physical keyboard through, yes, micro-USB. And because a keyboard is what will make mobile devices kill the PC. Something which slides out, projects, somehow, makes me forget about the tiny keyboards on a phone.
4. Augmented Reality: I want to see through my screen. Navigation over actual view, not on a cached map. That is cool.
I am not being unreasonable. All of these exist, and exist in mobile phones. This is called progress. Apple has forgotten this word.
Instead, they do this:
1. Lightening connector: Why, you may ask. What purpose does it solve which makes it superior to micro-USB? It is not USB3.0 compliant. It is not smaller. It will not allow 1080p data transfer over it. And it will cost $40 to get an adapter.
2. Brag about LTE: LTE has existed in phones which came in 4 months after iPhone 4S. It has always been faster than average Wi-Fi. It has always been this capable. What have you added? Nothing.
3. Mess with the aspect ratio: The single biggest pain of Android developers is the aspect ratio. Every device has it different. So you write XML files to deal with it. Apple now brings this problem to iPhone.
And your old app runs beautifully in a letterbox, confined in black boundaries while it dreams of the 1.5 aspect ratio.
It is one thing to launch a technologically inferior product. Apple has been doing that since iPhone 4. You can do that in the name of quality, which is undoubted. But it is another thing to piss people off, almost intentionally, and then brag about it.
