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After this year’s WOW factor nº1, and the more than 100.000 blogposts written on the device in less than a week, it’s pretty hard to come up with something that hasn’t been said yet on the iPhone. BTW: I love the way Steve is able to stir and shake a whole industry with another truly innovating product. Viva innovation! Besides all the good parts, there are definately more points to look into in detail: the keypad user experience, for example, and the habits of people using a phone to call and to text… I explain.

Watching the keynote of Steve Jobs on the iPhone, you can notice that Steve types his SMS text with one hand holding the phone in one hand and typing with one finger from the other - not doing this with a thumb holding the phone in one hand as we ususally do, or with 2 thumbs as most kids do over here; it’s a difference between smartphone and normal phone use that’s acceptable for the first but not for the latter.

Following Kelly’s one-hand interaction comment, and devices becoming more ubiquitous, there is still a lot to explore and test how people use phones while on the move doing many different things with the same device, in the street, on a train or in a car (forbidden over here in Europe, Kelly

Anyone having the ability of using speech recognition to command your phone and it’s applications? Especially in a car while driving… like getting to your contact list and make a connection. Max OS X has speech recognition integrated, but what and how people are really going to use the new devices? Habits are existing and are difficult to change, look at the mouse still on our side after all these years of invention, and for this to know, we still have to wait a couple of months…

As Yasmine is pointing out: “the forbidden fruit is tempting our senses, reenacting old or invented memories. Herein lies his latent success!“, even after this weeks’ excitement, there’s a lot still to tempt, and invent, and test… but please keep going, Steve!

At Macworld San Francisco 2007, a couple of hours ago, Steve Jobs unveiled (finally!) the iPhone. You can watch the full keynote here and how the phone works here.

After more than 2 years of speculations everywhere, the iPhone became probably the most ever hyped device before it’s launch. Note that exactly one year ago was the last time I wrote about the iPhone in my mobile & wireless predictions for 2006: “My guess is that if Apple makes a move into mobile, they will come up with something more then just a mobile phone.”

Damn was I right! Apple - btw dropped offically ‘Computer’ from their company name today, comes up with an awesome hybrid device that stays true to Apple’s core: to design high-class technology products… And it’s no less with the iPhone, bypassing all it’s competitors with a full surface touchscreen device for better UI, and reconfigurable/adaptable UI’s:

iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone.

I will leave you the pleasure to discover the new device, some first thoughts on the features I read about as of now:

• Visual Voicemail = great!
• 3G Radio = ??? Cost? Can you imagine this while roaming
• Exlusive carrier deal = all Apple fans will need to switch to Cingular in US
• 1 more year for iPhone launch in Europe = Apple has time to deal with EU operators
• iPhone runs Mac OS X = developers: start developing those widgets!
• Touchscreen display = seems fragile to carry in your pocket
• Multi-touch support = that’s really complex in tech dev -> chapeau!
• Proximity sensor = turns off the touch sensitivity when close to your face, can you dig?
• WiFi automatically engages when in range = Apple has AirPort experience here

All the rest, no real surprises, except that everything looks SO much better on an Apple device!

FYI: next hype to come: the merging of the iPhone and the iPod = the ideal device

Note to Steve: do something about the iTunes way too closed DRM, buying CD’s might become another next trend to be able to digitalize and listen to the music I bought on ALL the devices in my family…

Excellent Q&A with Steve Jobs in Newsweek: ‘Good for the Soul‘ on the cultural impact of the iPod the last years… Questioned if he’s worried since the anouncement of the iPod competitior, Microsoft’s Zune “…designed around the principles of sharing, discovery and community,…” Steve answered:

In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear.

Something that every mobile developer and mobile startup should bear in mind before starting developing products: keep it simple and make things usable with only a couple of clicks, there’s easily the one click too much for the mobile user…

Nokia to unveil the Nserie Music Collection. From Darla’s blog:

As you can see, the N73 and N70’s have been made over in a new color… black is back! The N91 gets an external and internal make-over. Also dressed in black, the new N91 has upgraded its HD from 4gb to 8gb, hence the device name… Nokia N91 8GB. Just when you thought you couldn’t have any more music. That should keep someone musically entertained for a long time!

Nokia is definately serious in challenging the ipod right in it’s heart, the music (& video) player, while offering all those extra and excellent mobile phone features.

I have been writing on the Nokia N91 is (busy) killing the ipod before here. The story got picked up at geek.com - Is the N91 really an iPod killer? where an interesting debate is brewing amongst readers.

Related to Nokia’s music phones and one of my favourite apps I use, the Nokia podcasting application: Apple is now trying to claim the term podcast. Read more about it on Robert Scoble’s blog, Wired News, and The Guardian. I think Apple is not applying a good strategy here, maybe because competitors, such as Nokia, are using podcasting-named applications on their phones or devices? And now with Microsofts’ Zune coming in, it won’t get better, more and more podcasts will be created and listened to… for sure!

As an Apple fan at heart, I think they don’t have a right to claim the term “podcast”, the term submerged on the internet - inspired on the ipod - and was used before Apple introduced it into iTunes, trying to claim it will not help their excellent credibility market status they have amongs consumers nowadays. Some common sense cannot hurt these days in business… On this regard, I would like to point you to the famous Marx Brothers and Warner Brothers quarrel:

Note: The following is an excerpt from pages 159-165 of the PDF version (pages 147-153 of the print version) of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, published under a Creative Commons License. A free, legal copy of the entire PDF of this book can be found here. The content of the original Groucho Marx letter can be found here.

“There’s a famous story about a battle between the Marx Brothers and Warner Brothers. The Marxes intended to make a parody of Casablanca. Warner Brothers objected. They wrote a nasty letter to the Marxes, warning them that there would be serious legal consequences if they went forward with their plan.This led the Marx Brothers to respond in kind. They warned Warner Brothers that the Marx Brothers “were brothers long before you were.”The Marx Brothers therefore owned the word brothers, and if Warner Brothers insisted on trying to control Casablanca, then the Marx Brothers would insist on control over brothers.An absurd and hollow threat, of course, because Warner Brothers, like the Marx Brothers, knew that no court would ever enforce such a silly claim. This extremism was irrelevant to the real freedoms anyone (including Warner Brothers) enjoyed. ”

However, Nokia might be better introducing “Ncasting” for their Nseries podcasting

(*) sub-title: “Connected Holidays (with the N91)”

Back from a 2-week holiday… time flies… just realizing it’s the end of the week… and I haven’t blogged yet (!) … while there are so many interesting things happening to write about…

Before I left with my family and some friends to enjoy The Emporada Triangle I managed to buy the Nokia N91, the phone David Williams from Nokia demonstrated to me in November last year in London and which has been described in the blogosphere as the iPod killer.

Regulars of m-trends know about my passion for music-on-the-move and I had the pleasure to experience the Apple iPod 40Gb for over a year until it crashed unluckily and unreparable, too bad for such a solid music device. I decided to wait for the first real music-phone, it came later then expected but it has been worth the wait.

Apart from some adress book sync problems I managed to counter quickly thanks to Justin’s post and some Mac hacks here, my whole experience with the N91 has been just brilliant!

The first thing that impressed me was the quality of the sound watching a Real Player video… impressive. I added some 500 of my favourite tunes to the 4Gb harddrive, synchronised from my iTunes library and created new playlists on the fly while I connected the device to a hi-fi stereo… this is the first phone I know of with whom you can create instant parties everywhere, anytime I have been writing before on my doubts how to scroll big music libraries without a scroll wheel (as the ipod) but this doubt vanished completely after the first use.

The rest of the HD space I used mainly to download some podcasts with the Nokia Podcasting Application, I also installed Shozu (probably one of the best mobile apps around!) to upload some holiday pics with a click to Flickr.

Our host had a wi-fi connection in the house so I could browse the mobile web the first time for free (!) The latest Nokia Web Browser for S60 is probably the best I have experienced on a phone, with it’s zooming capabilities you can ‘browse’ a webpage the way you want it. The same browser lets you subscribe and store your favourite feeds; I can tell you I haven’t missed a thing on the news side though I had planned to disconnect completely for at least a couple of days

I could perfectly browse my MyStrands Mobile account, I had some problems though listening to the Real Player audio previews due to some tough operator proxy settings. I read Justin Oberman selected my Connecting Cultures through Music article as Post of the Week of his Carnival of the Mobilists #41 hosting. I’ll accept the invitation for the brownies, Paula! I also installed the Free Mobilists’ Mobile RSS Reader package so I stayed tuned on my mobilists friends’ feeds, nicely bundled.

I wouldn’t type loads of email with that phone - there are other models for that, like the BlackBerry killer, but I could easily configure my regular email account and check my mails once in a while. I read Caroline launched the Wireless Industry Partnership and she informed me the 2nd CTIA Gathering of the Mobilists was fully booked for the 2nd time, great!

Well, this is basically a sum-up of the apps I used the most upto now, there’s still lots to discover - oh that SIP Client - and Visual Radio, no stations avilable yet in Catalonia… but too much to mention in one post, so I will have to update you on more experiences I guess…

So, what has this article to do with my title? Simply, it looks much more obvious that Nokia can add now easily more music features and storage to it’s phones than seeing Apple creating all those phone features to the iPod…

And oh btw: one of the features I appreciate the most is the ‘one touch button’ to switch from music listening to an incoming call and the ability to create a ringtone from any song in my library. You won’t get bored with this phone, Nokia is listening to it’s users… Mobile 2.0 is definately here… Driewerf hoera!

… Then he came home and did a Phone Software Update… better get used to it!