"Ron" <ronclifford@peoplepc.com> wrote in message
news:0eiv045ij5v7314gdqrc63por2cj7q9hmn@4ax.com...

> With the IR of the Palm Pilot one could print things out on a LaserJet
> IV, ah those were the days.

But that in itself is telling- why do we put up with new things that have
less features than our old things? I'm not picking on the iPhone
specifically here, but it's certainly part of it- why doesn't the lion's
share of modern day devices have the capability of doing something so
simple- beaming (via IR or BT) a file to another device, be it a printer, or
a PC, when any old PDA could?

I still have my first digital camera- now relegated to status as a kid's
toy- an old "bottom of the line" Casio digital camera, circa 2001 or so,
(with a whopping 0.3 megapixels!) that had an IR port, allowing wireless
picture transfer to PCs, PDAs, etc. I used to e-mail digital pictures from
it by beaming them to my PDA and e-mailing them by tethering through my
IR-equipped cellphone, long before cellphones or PDAs had cameras. You'd
think by now most of not all digicams would support wireless transfer, but
precious few today support BT or WiFi (I don't expect IR in this day and
age!) This was a standard feature on ALL Casio digicams at that time nearly
a decade ago!

For all the neat things the iPhone can do, there are a similar bunch of
perfectly useful and obvious things it CAN'T, and worse, most of these are
self-inflicted- the hardware is all there, but the software isn't (A2DP, BT
sync/transfer, phone-as-modem, etc.) And the iPhone certainly isn't alone
in this! (Yes, Zune, we're talking about you too and your crippled to the
point of being worthless WiFi!)