The Jury's Out on the iPhone and Mobile Video

[MacBytes]

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Category: Opinion/Interviews
Link: The Jury's Out on the iPhone and Mobile Video (http://www.macbytes.com/link.php?sid=20070712003332)
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Posted on MacBytes.com (http://www.macbytes.com)
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[DMann]

With the iPhone's resolution, a new standard has indeed been set.

[photobiker]

When the jury is made of "three terrific speakers" from Verizon (Verizon! For Christ-phone sakes!), Gemstar and Qualcomm, no wonder the jury's out on the iPhone... Ha ha! They should invite Nokia and Motorola to the deliberations, just to make sure they don't end up with a hung jury.

[DropDeadGorgias]

The jury may not be exactly impartial, and they don't state any reasons for their proclamation, at least in that post. However, I personally agree that the iPhone is not a great delivery mechanism for video, either via stored media or streaming.

1) Stored media is probably the best way to access video content on your iPhone, but the 8GB hard drive really limits this functionality. By choosing to put a few movies on your iPhone, you're severely limiting the number of songs and photos you can put on the device. Until this hard drive capacity is addressed, it will be a difficult balance for iPhone owners to maintain.
2) Even though the device can stream YouTube videos, the slow EDGE connection makes this very painful. Even worse, while your phone is downloading the video over edge, your calls may be sent to voicemail:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305711
This is not a tradeoff that most phone owners can live with- a cell phone is meant above all else to receive phone calls.

I think the iPhone makes some great steps in the right direction for usable video, but even with the bigger screen, I still would rather use a regular video iPod and a separate cell phone at this point.