Please, please let these screenshots be not fake. (via fscklog)

‘There’s no Nike+ app for it!’ has been one of the few remaining counter-arguments of me buying an iPhone. My late iPod nano has left me with a remaining, unusable (on its own) Nike+ set of pedometer and receiver, and I sure wouldn’t mind being able to use those again. At the same time, replacing my mediocre¹ Sony Ericsson T610 with a more powerful substitute might make sense, especially when that substitute can also serve as my new portable music player. Who doesn’t like convergence, when it’s done really well?

Each day, I spend close to an hour commuting in the train (25-ish minutes back and forth), during which I currently have no Internet connection. Now, if I could spend some of that time more usefully, other than reading unread tweets or solving Sudoku, that might be nice indeed.

Issues with the App Store aren’t the only kind of thing that scare me. It’s hard to believe, but this device would actually be a step back in Bluetooth support compared to my T610. Puzzling, because Apple arguably pioneered Bluetooth support on personal computers, offering a useful solution years before Windows XP finally did with Service Pack 2. Then, in 2007, it quietly dropped Address Book Bluetooth support (such as for sending text messages right to the currently open contact) with OS X 10.5², and shipped the iPhone with only supporting headsets. No A2DP, no file transfer, no modem tethering… I was hoping these were simply features they’d ship after higher priorities have been resolved, but even with the 2.1 previews, we have no improvement. No cabled tethering either, unless you count the unsupported, currently unavailable NetShare app, which is merely a SOCKS 5 proxy, thus hardly offering a full solution.

On the bright side, we have a user interface that doesn’t try to scale down the traditional personal computer desktop to a small screen variant. Many of the controls have clearly been conceived from scratch, which is in stark contrast to most other smartphone UIs.

And then, finally, we have T-Mobile’s rates. I have yet to see a single comparison where any other provider in Germany comes out cheaper (the ones I’ve seen need to go back to arithmetics 101, it seems), but there’s a difference between being competitive and being affordable. You see, before last summer, I didn’t have a cellphone for years. And I kind of liked it that way. Or, shall we say, I didn’t miss it — most of the time. There are those moments where you’re unexpectedly and randomly stuck someplace, sometime, and if you could make just this one phone call, it would fix it all. And with the job, of course, I get called quite a bit more. But overall, I’m not even sure I average one call a week.

So you can perhaps tell I’m not exactly the most likely target audience for this product. I’d use the iPod aspect daily. Same goes, probably, for e-mail and other lightweight Internet-bound apps. And the PIM aspects — calendar, contacts, notes. But as for all things cellular, whether audio or text, I’m just not much of a user.

And so I’m in this unusual situation where what I’d really like to have is unlimited (or a very high limit of) data, but very low limits of calls and messages. Shame I’m in such a minority.

Why not the iPod touch, you ask? Because I’d be back to square zero regarding Internet connectivity in the train. (A 3G ExpressCard plus an iPod nano would be a more feasible alternative to that.)

1. Yes, I know what they say: gift, horse, mouse, yaddayadda. Now that the battery and charging cable have been replaced, it does the basic job fine! ↩
2. Although, at the same time, they did add A2DP support. ↩