This is an amazing mock up of one man’s dream iPhone.
What Mat Brady has wanted was to give the iPhone 60GB memory size, a slide-out keyboard, a 16:9 640×360 screen, a front-facing camera and a rear 5MP camera with 3x optical zoom. All in a pretty slick package.
I have my own reservations on the improvements he wanted. Firstly, I think he forgot one very, very important aspect: battery life! It is pretty depressing to read that in a CPU-GPU intensive game like SimCity, the battery can still be drained even though it is plugged in.
The upcoming Nokia N97 was stated to have 1.5 days of continuous music playback. Of course, the phone would have to be in airplane mode, no bluetooth and no other services running. But even with those services on, I would expect the phone to have about 15-20 hours of playback. Which is un-freaking-believeable. My iPhone, while listening to music and surfing google reader on 3G in the morning for about 2 hours, will drain its batt life by mid-afternoon. Sucks. Apple really needs to work on its battery. I don’t really mind adding a bit of thickness to accommodate a larger battery pack, which is why the Morphie Battery Extender for the iPhone 3G looks mighty appealing, but I just can’t bring myself to pay an additional US$100 to get the same battery life as other 3G phones.
I don’t agree with his need for 60GB worth of storage space. The only cost effective way to get such a high storage is for the iPhone to use HDDs instead of flash storage, and a HDD means moving parts. It’s ok for a media player to have moving parts, because half the time, it’s kept safely on my bag, not jiggling about in my pocket. Flash memory is of course, more expensive, but since it has no moving parts, I would think that it is more durable. And your music won’t skip no matter how violent your phone is vibrating. My previous Creative Zen Vision M used to skip if I were to run with it in my bag. Flash memory also has way better seek time, so there won’t be additional lag. “Additional” because I still have yet to encounter a smart phone that is NOT laggy. Yes, iPhone included.
The slide-out keyboard is very much welcome. A slide-out keyboard would also be easier to implement cut-and-paste, a feature that is highly touted for by users, but continuously ignored by Apple. I could certainly learn to say “Command-C/Command-V”, instead of “Control-C/Control-V”. Of course, the keyboard solves only half the problem; the other half being the common clipboard, but that’s another story. The drawback is that it will add to the thickness. It will be a looks-vs-awesomeness fight, so that’s why I don’t see Apple putting a physical keyboard in.
A bigger and better camera is also welcome, with some simple pre- and post-processing software. 5MPs seem to be the sweet spot. I do believe the hardware and OS is capable enough to provide simple processing, like adding gimmicky picture frames and modes such as night shot, macro and burst. However, the downside is that a bigger camera probably requires more space. Another looks-vs-awesomeness trade-off.
Of course, all of these features are highly dependent on battery life, which I’ve blabbed about, and the underlying OS itself. Mac OSX is already highly regarded as being super-stable with good performance. However, I find the mobile version to be highly lacking. The latest 2.2 update is great, but I am still getting crashes in Safari a few times. I still can’t believe the stock Notes app still takes very long to start, although it is just a simple text editing app. More performance fixes and enhancements will also be much appreciated.
I think my dream iPhone is one with a stable, performance-enhanced mobile OSX and extended battery life. Both of these are highly probable to be on Apple’s to-do list, unlike a bigger camera or physical keyboard.
Source: The new iPhone ELITE
