Meeting Steve Jobs and rubbishing the iPhone to his face

Ok, so it was a dream.

I am not entirely sure how the dream came about, but here I was, sat in front of Steve Jobs, Mr Apple, talking about the iPhone with him. I think it is perhaps related to the amount of flying I’ve been doing recently and being overtired, yet feeling fully functional.

I found myself sat in front of Steve with an iPhone in my hand.

First the good stuff. Yes I would use it. Yes I will certainly get one, whatever the cost (it’s a geek thing) and yes, I really did see the strategy. I remember commenting that I was delighted he’d chosen to enter the handset market and that I hoped he’d continue to shake-up the industry.

He asked me what features I liked and I clearly recall flying straight to the music integration on the device as my number one favourite feature. I liked the web browsing, I liked the calling experience… and in particular, I liked the fact that you activated the device from standby by dragging the little arrow to the right.

‘The flaws?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ I said, thinking whether the guy wanted to hear my real opinions or whether I should dress them up a little, ‘Well OK, the text entry. Shocking.’

I remember he then began to explain in technical detail why it was so smart.

‘Ah right,’ I hesitated… ‘But, well, I want to enter text really quickly. I just don’t think this interface works that well, but I’m willing to give it a go across this week to find out.’

Now the difficult stuff: ‘I really thought you were going to open up the device — I believed your ‘it runs OSX’ slide during your introduction presentation,’

‘It does run OSX,’ he replied, ‘Just a rather cut down version.’

I wasn’t letting him away with it, ‘Right, but you implied that since the device was running OSX you could, theoretically, knock up an application that would run on your MacBook which would also run, more or less, on the iPhone,’

‘We have support for that,’ he replied. I then remember thinking it was a bit of a wriggly answer. Not quite accurate.

‘So I could easily design an application and implement it on to iPhone?’ I asked, wondering how far I could go with my prodding.

‘Yes, well you’d need to talk to us about that. We’re keen to control the user experience.’

Ahhh 😉

This sort of questionning carried on. Then — I didn’t immediately wake up. I think I went back to sleep.