In a moment of weakness (also known as a visit to the Apple Store) last week, I found myself parting with more money than I can easily justify for a shiny new iPhone. What followed was somewhat painful; canceling T-Mobile this soon after I had come back to them hurt, just not as much as the early termination bill soon to arrive in my mailbox.

I’ll get the obvious cheers and jeers out out of the way (I don’t expect that you, dear reader, will have missed them in any of the other thousand iPhone reviews, so feel free to skip the following lists)

Cheers

• The User Interface is amazing - I can’t imagine going back to my once loved PEBL (loved until last Tuesday)
• Apple did some amazing bargaining with AT&T over cost of the plans - I can’t imagine how much this would have cost on any other carrier right now
• I actually seem to like the keyboard

Jeers

• EDGE can be slow - I mean, a couple of minutes to download a text email slow
• The battery life is a bit low - I’m not one of those guys who plays chicken with my cell phone, but at the tail end of a normal day, I look at the battery indicator and wonder how this thing is going to die. It hasn’t yet, but it generally gets a bit too close for my comfort.
• Text selection - I find it interesting that the company famous for bringing GUI concepts like cut and paste to the masses seemed to forget to add that functionality to the iPhone
• Including the YouTube app was a mistake - now I lose so much time just killing my battery whenever I have free moments. I could take some personal responsibility, but blaming Jobs is so much easier
• Ear buds - why couldn’t Apple released at least their in-ear headphones with the push button microphone?

Now that we have the major items out of the way, I would like to discuss how this device changes things for me.

I no longer carry around a creased and bled index card full of notes to myself (the exact title of the book you are looking for is x, it is also found by other name of y). Instead, I put a note into Ta Da Lists and if I need more information, search Google (or Amazon or IMDB). This is handy.

I now understand the usefulness of Twitter and its ilk. I couldn’t understand dealing with it via SMS or just a computer, but with the iPhone it helps keep me sane (like when I spend two hours to see if certain contact lens work (they didn’t and then did) with my poor eyes).

I’m no longer dependent on restaurants (take out or otherwise) that I am familiar and/or have a menu for. Instead, I select my apartment bookmark in Google Maps (or wherever I am) and type in the type of food I am looking for. Minor annoyance, sometimes the most obvious (and closest) place doesn’t seem to make the grade (a direct search does work in those cases). The benefit of being able to call directly from Google Maps has been wonderful.

All in all, there are a number of features that don’t always make sense (why you can only edit contacts from specific screens, why a missed call and a voicemail look the same on the home screen, etc.), but ultimately, the iPhone shows a different perspective in how a cell phone should work. For me, it has ultimately been an extremely positive experience, and I truly can’t imagine going back to any other phone. Nothing even approaches the iPhone with regards to the pleasant experience (even if I cannot stand ear buds - I am not using them, by the way) you simply cannot avoid.

Thank you, Apple. Now, go and finish 10.5 and make me some in-ear headphones so that I may lay even more capital upon your retail alter.

Steve Jobs today wrote a response to various European countries that have demanding an “opening up” of the FairPlay DRM scheme that iTunes uses (link).  He refers to a third option as the one that’s best for consumers, an option in which there is no DRM attached to songs purchased off of iTunes.  I would argue that it is best for labels as well as long as certain measures are also put in place.

There is room for a middle ground. We as consumers wish to be able to use content that we have purchased in any device. Regardless of the legal status of music as a “license,” when most people purchase a CD, they feel that they own the CD.  This means that if I want to “rip” a CD onto my computer and then transfer it to my iPod, I should be completely allowed, because I “own” that CD. When I purchase content from iTunes, I no longer seem to own my music. I am blessed in that I have an iPod, a computer, and the funds to make frivolous purchases of music online, but I have to be. There is no expectation that I own this music. Why is it that now, in this day and age of progress, I seem to have have less rights than I did three years ago?

I know that terrorism cannot be made the scapegoat of this foray into my personal life. So, as a consumer or music, my rights have been infringed at the expense of the rights of the content managers (note that I did not say the artists). My arguments place me well within the camp of users that are philosophically opposed to DRM (a camp that, with knowledge, I suspect would be a vast majority of people blessed enough to purchase music). So, what is the solution for the industry?

The content industries fear technological change more than anything else, despite the fact that it is these companies who have seen profits soar because of these very same technologies. Even with this fact, the content industries fear change.  The movie industries feared the video tape; the recording industry feared the audio tape.  These are industries in which every aspect of the performance must be controlled by the industry, from planning to creation to production to marketing and finally to experiencing.  The loss of any one of these arenas is threat to continued profits.  Amazingly, these companies have longer memories than our own governments, by using technology such as DRM to regain control lost to earlier forms of content ownership. They sweeten the medicine bay saying that it is to stop piracy, as if all customers are pirates of media.  I can think of no other arena in which the customer, consumer, or client is treated with such disdain, and I work in IT. These changes have happened slowly, so that the user is for the most part ignorant of it.

When I put a newly purchased DVD into my laptop, a number of things happen before I am allowed to view it. One such thing is a check to see if I am allowed to play this DVD, by way of a mechanism called a region code.  It is by this mechanism that i am unable to play DVDs legally purchased in the UK (I am a citizen of the United States) and am forced to find other methods to access content that I have purchased (in this case, either downloading an “illegal” copy of material I own or committing a felony in order to circumvent these controls).  FairPlay DRM is, as usual, “good enough” for most people. In fact, it is slightly more open than systems put in place by competitors.

That shouldn’t be an endorsement, however. The lock-downs that exist serve no purpose beyond controlling the experience of listening to music. The claim that it stems wholesale illegal piracy is laughable, as Mr. Jobs has stated. I challenge an executive of the recording industry to consider another path, one that will ultimately help your organization more than DRM both in gathering goodwill and by locating those who operate outside the bounds of law.

Add a digital fingerprint to every song purchased from any online store. Use this data to track a song through piracy sites, and if you find a song purchased from this future iTunes, go back to Apple and request the information of the person responsible for purchasing the song in the first place. In this future, unlike the current “well, we are pretty sure it was Mr. Smith,” you have irrefutable evidence as to who illegally distributed your copyrighted works and are able to charge him or her accordingly. This way, you stop charging elderly people who don’t even own computers with electronic copyright infringement and start charging the people actually responsible. In fact (as proven by the success of iTunes), I think you would find that this system would (slightly) help in stemming theft of music and ultimately help your bottom line.

You just need to let go of your control of my eardrums. I do actually own them, not you.