waffle

It’s the talk of the town again. The rumors of an Apple-produced phone – an “iPhone”, as it were – have been circulating for years. The basic gist, the strength of the argument is that there’s no really good music phone. According to mostly everyone, Apple can more or less work out a phone, stick choice pieces of an iPod into it and it’ll go flying off the shelves. A done deal, right?

If that’s the way they’re going to go about it, they’ll certainly sell a few phones. But come on. They’ve already done that with the ROKR phone. Didn’t turn out great. The simple truth is that there’s more to making a genuinely good phone than making it work in just one area.

No, what I see Apple making – if they’re making one – is a phone that is easy to navigate and whose programs doesn’t suck. No phone that I’ve for years has had a thoroughly nice suite of basic functions – messaging, reasonable web browsing, address book, calculator, alarm, call history and calendar. There are bright spots and really dark spots on most models. I have a Sony Ericsson model that can nail a note to the standby menu screen, and the Nokia I used to have slapped the Sony Ericsson around the block when it came to the address book.

It’s important to know that I don’t live on my phone, but that it’s just not that hard to find bugs in phone software. That’s the sad state of it. No amount of “well, but can you call people with it?” crack-making will wish away the need that people have – created or not – to use the programs, so every phone has them, but they’re just not good.

Apple has the experience with desktop applications, the experience with creating usable handheld interfaces and the experience with these kinds of applications specifically (including integration and syncing and making a whole bundle) to pull this off if they want to. If they want real mainstream appeal and parlay, of course they’re going to stick music playing into it, but the road to real success with a cell phone is one that’s really good.