Announcing iPhone Matters
Gregory Ng will be heading up the newest site in the Matters family, iPhone Matters. It features a blog (updated throughout the day) and dedicated forum to all things iPhone.
Here is Greg introducing the site in his own words.
“What were you doing January 9th, after you heard or watched the 2007 Macworld Keynote Address by Steve Jobs? If you were like me, you were wiping the drool off your keyboard at the thought of holding the iPhone. Or you could have been like Charlie White who posted the Top Five Reasons Why the iPhone Sucks on Gizmodo. Regardless of your level of enthusiasm, you probably felt a little tingle in your body at the idea.
I am pleased to welcome you to iPhoneMatters.com. iPhone Matters is published by the company that publishes, AppleMatters.com (a CNET Blog 100 site, and widely quoted publication on all things Apple), SpinMatters.com, and macitt.com.
We will feature blog postings throughout the day covering everything to do with the iPhone, including tips, news stories, and reviews. In addition we have launched a full featured forum community allowing readers to discuss anything and everything iPhone.
We hope you will enjoy reading.”
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Comments
Isn’t this expansion a little bit premature?
We won’t have an actual product for 6 months. Do you think there will be enough news between now and June to support an all iPhone site?
(I would have gone with Leopard, or even Apple TV as there are many mysteries concerning the former that can only be resolved in the next few months, and the latter we know will actually be in shelves next month.)
I attempted to register for the new forum today and kept getting the following error:
“The following errors were encountered
You are not authorized to perform this action
Return to Previous Page”
So, I guess it’s not quite ready to go online anyway. That said, I think this would be a good time to begin pointing out the laundry list of things we think would make this a better product, at least by version 2.0.
I’m personally quite excited by the new iPhone concept, and would really like to see video iChat enabled for the new device when it’s upgraded to 3G. I think that would be the killer application, if the phone company doesn’t kill it as too bandwidth intensive. There are a lot of ordinary phone features that seem to be missing as well, or at least not yet addressed, such as voice dialing over bluetooth for car use, that would seriously cripple its initial rollout.
I think a forum that begins itemizing these consumer issues could be a good backdoor resource for Apple insiders working on finalizing the initial configuration. It would also help to let Apple know just how important several issues are to us.
For me, my iPod and Motorola E815 give me the minimum functionality I need today. That means, to me at least and beyond the cool looks, that the new iPhone has to at least cover those standard features to get mass user attention. The attention grabber for me is not being able to play battery-draining movies, but to take advantage of its connectivity to the Internet. That’s why I think enabling video iChat would be a biggy, in spite of the battery issue. To me, that’s useful functionality for a hand-held communicator.
Of course, the communicator functionality is useless without a high-speed Internet connection, which is why I switched to Verizon’s EVDO a year-and-a-half ago. I won’t go back to AT&T (Cingular) until their network is that robust, especially since a cursory check of their data plans shows that they’d charge me approximately the same today that I pay Verizon, for 1/3 the bandwidth, a non-starter for sure until they roll out 3G.
Sterling North,
Points very well-taken. And we struggled over that issue too, although we decided that getting an early start on covering all thing iPhone was to our advantage. We will see.
By the way, if you are registered on Apple Matters you can now post on iPhone Matters with the same username and password, the same goes for Macitt.
And we are currently looking at a revamping of Apple Matters content and design, more on that soon!