I don’t yet have an iPhone.
Unless I’m given one – and, given my current role, this is very inlikely – I likely won’t have one in the next few years.
I’ve had several years (late 2000 through early 2007) of experience with something physically similar – a Handspring Visor with a Visorphone GSM Phone Springboard module, which looks like this
in the handheld, this
out of it (minus the mike-less headphone, which never saw much use).
Handspring/Palm abandoned the whole Springboard concept – an ordinary PalmOS touchscreen PDA into which you can snap, GameBoy-fashion, various add-on modules for such things as ROM data and apps, GPS receivers, MP3 players, Cameras, modems, phones, PA controller, etc. - some years ago in order to concentrate the market on their Treo smartphones, which I regret, though not, I suspect, as much as bizzes that got onboard with the concept and put time and money into developing lines of Springboard modules.
The module concept worked well for my wife and I, as if one of us was going out, they could snap it in on the way out the door. The module had a separate battery from the handheld (which used removable AAAs, good for about a week using rechargables, a month for disposables), so could be kept charged (as the phone module didn’t have a separate charging jack, we used an old, broken visor for this). Since the handheld with the module inserted weighted about as much as a PDA and a cellphone, keeping them together all the time was to be avoided.
There’s a basic class of awkwardness issues for phones and handhelds in one unit – it they’re big enough to be good for reading and writing on, they’re too big to hold to your ear. If they’re small enough to easily hold to your ear, they’re to small to read well on (Treos suffer from this problem). Since you often need to read and write while on the phone, having your PDA pressed against your ear is not where you want it – the VisorPhone module tried to deal with this by oversize/powering the module’s speaker enough that you could hear it while reading/writing on it, while you sort of shouted at the microphone (which was built into the bottom of the handheld, but, oddly, not electrically connected to it, its 2 wires just passing through to 2 contact on the springboard slot’s connector). This worked OK as long as you were in a quiet enviroment. Because the handheld was so wide, it always felt a bit like it was going to squirt out of you hand when you put it to your ear. The module prevented the whole unit from fitting into many of the cases made for the handheld alone.
It seems to me the iPhone will suffer from this class of problems, much like the Visor+VisorPhone.
The best thing about the iPhone, IMHO, is its touchscreen technology, which, everyone has likely heard, is “multi-touch”, as opposed to ordinary PalmOS touchscreens like the Visor’s and the Treo’s, which can sense only a single touch (if you try touching it in multiple places, it “averages” the touches to come up with a single point between the actuall touchpoints). It’s not altogether an improvement on the old touchscreens, however, as it’s unable to sense small touches, such as with a stylus. As far as I can tell, this makes it largely worthless for precision input, like sketching, which the old PalmOS devices were pretty good for.
I doubt the iPhone will support any programming language interpreters, as PalmOS does, which is a killer drawback for me, as I’m the sort who absolute must be able to write a quick BASIC program while riding on a bus, sitting on the beach, etc. It also appears stuck on the idea of a virtual keyboard for input, which I like much less than stylus input (I’m familiar only with PalmOS’s “Grafitti”, and like the original Grafitti much better than the current Grafitti2).
What I’d really like to see is the touchscreen and basic form factor of an iPhone on a generic, openOS device, without any phone or other radioconnectivity other than Bluetooth. Separate phone and Wi-Fi receivers, and a Bluetooth headset offers, IMHO, better solutions for a phone and TCP/IP connections, and there are times when it’s nice just to have a computer, without any connection to anything but you
I’d really love a chance to play with input systems on an iPhone-type touchscreen, as it seems to me to have as much potential as the palm of the hand of a deaf-and-blind person. It seems to me that the current iPhone should be physically capable of reading ordinary
fingerspelling, or, for really high-speed input,
ASL a similar gestural language.
__________________
Moderator: Computers and Technology; Medical Science; Science Projects and Homework; Philosophy of Science; Physics and Mathematics; Environmental Studies
3D Championship Golf Champion!
Longish rant about something I don't have,something I have had,and what I wish I had 
