The carrier isn't really the big deal -- it's what form the phone itself might take, and on that subject I think many of you are shooting too low with talk of an Apple smartphone resembling the Treo or Blackberry. The MDA IV seems to me a more likely candidate because it will be a multimedia device.
I hate to cross-post, but I put this up earlier today on AppleInsider:
I'm dying to see Apple put out something like the
MDA IV, which is now available here in Germany. This all-in-one approach is, I think, where portable devices are headed and with, say, 4GB+ of flash memory it would be able to hold not only plenty of songs and videos but a scaled-down version of OS X too.
I never saw the need for any type of handheld before last year when a friend told me about the Sharp
Zaurus. A personal organizer, a moble phone, a camera, an MP3/video player... yeah, all these things are cool or useful, sure, but I don't want to lug them around individually. Nor do I want to have anything to do with Windows -- and now that the Palm OS is Windows-based, it's getting harder to enforce that criteria. The Zaurus, which is Linux-based (on an
Intel Xscale processor), does all these things in one way or another, and the community of developers has turned it into a laptop that happens to fit in your pocket. Now
that is both cool
and useful. That's why these all-in-ones are greater than the sum of their parts. What continues to bug me about the Zaurus is that it lacks the intercompatibility of Macs, and so every sync or file transfer process takes sixty steps instead of one.
Incidentally, I stopped into the local T-Punkt and had a look at the
MDA IV. It's one hell of a smartphone. If it didn't run Windows, I'd be shilling my Zaurus on eBay right now. But just imagine it in white. With a silver metallic backing. And OS X-lite on the screen.