January 15th, 2008
Six screenshots here of new: iPhone 1.13 features, and why I'm mostly unimpressed
This mornihg at Macworld in San Francisco, what’s-his-name announced a new iPhone software update.
After reviewing the new features of 1.13, I can understand why Apple has assigned incremental, decimal livery to this upgrade.
There’s nothing here that strikes me as compelling enough to convince anyone on the fence about buying an iPhone to take the plunge.
Not that the new features in 1.13 aren’t cool. You can, for example, use the updated iPhone maps interface to triangulate your position 
using Wi-Fi base stations or cell towers. Yet I can already triangulate via cell on my BlackBerry Pearl. And yes, I get an overlay map from Google Maps as well.
Web Clip home page icons that take you directly to your favorite websites? Why take the time 
to create these
icons when you can simply go to your sites via bookmarks in your iPhone’s built-in Safari browser?
And multiple SMS’s to multiple people? 
I wouldn’t want that degree of de-personalization. As for iPhone saving a history 
of your texts, my BlackBerry does that as well.
The only one of the 1.13 features that does anything for me is the new iTunes Movie Rentals.
Apple says:
With Apple’s new iTunes Movie Rentals, movie fans can rent movies on their computer, easily and quickly transfer them to their iPhone, and watch them anywhere on iPhone’s gorgeous 3.5 inch screen. Users can also now navigate forward or backward through their movies by chapters, select alternate language tracks and view subtitles, if available.
Now that’s quite OK, true. But I gotta tell ya, in and of itself, iTunes movie rentals isn’t a compelling feature enough to spur iPhone sales amongst the holdouts and skeptics.
Thinking you might be one of those iPhone skeptics, or fence-sitters. So it is poll time.
Loading ...Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
