Tuesday, September 18, 2012

This Ain't Steve Jobs' iPhone 5

I'll be the first to admit that I was not an early adopter of the iPhone. I didn't adopt a device until 2009 when I bought a second hand 3G handset. After a couple of weeks of a learning curve (I'd been using a Samsung Blackjack which had buttons--as I'm typing, I'm thinking how old that reads.), I really began to like my device. Okay, I'll admit it, I loved it. It was everything I wanted and needed in a smart phone, but didn't know. Since then, I've obtained and still have a 3GS and an iPad 2. I'm fond of my Mac devices, but am no fangirl.
The release of the iPhone 5 has left me not only underwhelmed, but dismayed by Apple's departure from the legacy of its late leader, Steve Jobs. This brings me back to the genesis of this entry. There is an adage, "You can't miss what you never had", well some where, some how, Steve Jobs discovered the weakness in this adage and exploited it in every iteration of the iPhone he oversaw. He proved to the world, particularly late adopters like me, that you can miss what you never had. Now we have the latest version of the iPhone--the first to be released postmortem and it is as clear as the touchscreen glass of the device and yet so simple a concept that its subtlety is indeed too complex for everyone other than the most attuned visionary to grasp--the iPhone became the iPhone, because it delivered what we needed, not what we wanted. It has been intuitive by capitalizing on the best jailbreak features and integrating those into an interface that reacts like involuntary muscles.  The iPhone 5 still does all of this, but nothing more; and that's the problem. Without the notoriously harsh leadership of Jobs, Apple didn't push the limits, didn't reset the boundaries. Instead, Apple did what HTC has done, given consumers what they wanted--a larger screen and a faster processor. Meh. With Tom Tom, Apple has rid its devices of Google Maps, and that's good, but it isn't great.

Perhaps my expectations were too high, but if that is so, Apple set them there. I just wanted, after two years, to be wowed. I hoped for that new thing that I had a feeling I needed in a smartphone, but couldn't articulate. The ability to lock particular folders or applications (a jailbreak feature I love), the ability to text without entering the application, perhaps the ability to take a quicker photo from a locked device. I don't know--something I hadn't thought of because my mind isn't yet that free. I'll keep jailbreaking because this ain't Steve Jobs' iPhone.