Now that Macworld is over and everyone and his dog has blogged about the good, the bad, and the ugly, I’ve decided to post my reactions. I had a chance to watch the keynote yesterday (no time last week as I was working a booth) and the one thing that came to my mind was iSnooze. So Apple announced AppleTV and the iPhone. I have no interest in the AppleTV as we don’t watch many movies and any TV shows we watch, we just record on our TiVo. If I want to show pictures on my TV, I just turn on the TiVo desktop software and presto, I have it; I don’t want to stream music to my TV as I just use my Squeezebox. So, the AppleTV buys me nothing (at least nothing I can see right now).
The iPhone is interesting (at first I really didn’t like it). However, I don’t think it is for me for a number of reasons: no tactile feel, GSM only (for now), and no flip cover to protect the screen. When I was at QUALCOMM working on the pDQ phone (the first Palm OS based smartphone), we said it had to be a phone first, a PDA second and that’s why it had a keypad that flipped over the screen so you could dial. The Treo, to me, seems like a PDA first, a phone second as I’ve never been impressed with the phone quality. My Motorola RAZR is a very nice phone; voice quality is the best I’ve heard in a phone. That leads me to the iPhone. It looks to me like an iPod first, a phone second (or maybe third after the Internet stuff). Of course, it will probably sell well and I may change my mind later, but it just doesn’t appeal to me.
Why was the keynote iSnooze? It was a Macworld keynote and there wasn’t any discernible mention of the Macintosh. I didn’t expect Leopard to be ready, but I hoped to see another feature or two revealed. No new Macs were introduced and I really would have been quite happen with an iLife ’07. One small feature in that probably would have impressed me more than the iPhone.
As for the rest of the show, it takes a lot to impress me. Nothing stood out. I visited the Garmin booth and picked up a copy of the Training Center for the Mac (my impressions of that in another post) and liked the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners, so much so that their $150 off (rebate and coupon) got me to order one. It should work quite well with ReceiptWallet.
Maybe next year if I set my expectations real low, the slightest cool thing will get me excited.