Local review in the
Chicago Tribune:
Steve Johnson
Hypertext
A Chicago Tribune blog
Originally posted: June 29, 2007
iPhone? Fine, but the Net still wants a big screen
I'll take my Internet sitting down, thank you.
The iPhone is being released Friday, you may have heard. It's Apple's alleged breakthrough cell phone/iPod/Web browser/e-mail combination device -- hand-held technology that melds as many themes as a Tom Stoppard play.It's being treated as if it were the second coming of Pong or something, more cultural touchstone than uber-gadget. I have no way, yet, of assessing Apple's claims for the phone. The company released iPhones for advance reviews only to a handful of favored journalists (and tell me how that doesn't incline them toward liking it?).
But I do know that every experience I've had with the Internet on a smaller screen leads me to believe it is, fundamentally, a big-screen medium. And if you take the Internet out of the iPhone, what have you got? A keypadless telephone and an iPod mashed together like peanut butter and chocolate. It's a nice combination, but how much is a peanut butter cup really worth to you?
Yes, you can get things done on a mobile-device Web screen. My Black- Berry phone/e-mail/Web device will render some version of most pages, enough to find the 800 number or store locater you're looking for, for instance. Example: I was in Hyde Park not long ago, and I used the BlackBerry to visit the Court Theatre's Web site and, after much scrolling down, call up a map that showed me how to get from the restaurant to the theater.
Ditto for the various hand-held-device screens I've messed around with at the Nokia store on Michigan Avenue. The iPhone, the early reviews suggest, is better than those or the BlackBerry at displaying and navigating the Net.
But still, ultimately, the Web wants real estate. It is a medium of connections. Link A leads you to B, B reminds you of C, and C lands you at the completely unexpected delight of D.
The iPhone has a 3½-inch screen, and I don't even like using my 12-inch laptop screen for an extended Web session. It's just so much better with a proper mouse and keyboard and a 19- inch monitor to let you see the full flow of information, the full gamut of linkability.
The next great improvement, incidentally, will come when Web video quality is good enough that you can actually watch it in fullscreen mode without wondering if somebody draped cheesecloth over your monitor.
Then there is the question of speed. The other thing the Internet requires, beyond size, is that when you click on a link, it loads in less time than it would take you to design the Web page on your own.
The iPhone, unfortunately, uses AT&T's Edge data network for its Internet service, when it can't find a WiFi connection. I have Edge on my BlackBerry (the 8700g model, via T-Mobile) and as it loads pages, you are forgiven for imagining that you hear a modem dialing in a telephone number.
One iPhone reviewer said it took 100 seconds for Amazon's home page to appear. It took only seven to show up on my device, but that's the stripped-down, BlackBerry-optimized Amazon home page.
The iPhone does some very cool things with the Net. Instead of streamlined pages, it offers the real deal for better (information) and worse (speed). Tap on the screen to zoom in. Open your thumb and forefinger on the screen to expand the view. There's fingertip scrolling and a screen that recognizes whether you?re holding the phone vertically or horizontally. And it gets good reviews for its e-mail handling, although not for its touch pad-based text-entry function to respond to e-mails.
But it's hard to imagine the iPhone fundamentally changing the mobile Internet game when the Internet, except for the most utilitarian of functions, does not want to be mobile.
