I have long dreamed of using the iPhone as a blogging device and I do, but only in the most trivial of ways. I post pictures and tweets and things like that, not thoughtful writing.
The reason is simple. I mostly like the little virtual keyboard on the iPhone, but not enough to type long form works on it. I still journal using my laptop and I even continue to carry my Palm Tungsten C with the folding keyboard for writing and editing longer pieces, but I rarely feel compelled to post those things that I write, maybe because I prefer the immediacy of typing and posting directly to the blog that I get from tweeting or posting a picture and both of those devices require a WIFI connection and extra steps to post a blog entry. How lazy I have become. I used to blog using a 1991 Apple Powerbook 170 with a SCSI->ethernet adaptor. That, my friends, was dedication. Now I can’t be bothered to use a device if it doesn’t have 3G, if I have to save then post. Sigh… Shoot me now.
The ultimate solution to all this would be for Apple to do one teeny tiny thing. They simply need to support the Bluetooth keyboard profile on the iPhone. It should be a simple matter of updating the driver on the device. Trivial. There is no technical obstacle that I can imagine. The obstacles are twofold, one philosophical and one all about the bottom line. First, philosophically, Apple doesn’t want to admit that their clever little keyboard on their device isn’t just as good as an honest to god full size folding keyboard. I agree that for thumb typing, their keyboard is superior to the physical keyboard on my Palm, but it can’t hold a candle to typing for real on a real keyboard like the folding keyboard I have for my Palm. Thumb typing sucks no matter how you look at it. As a writer and software developer I live at a keyboard. I’m a fast typist. At least ten times faster on a real keyboard compared to thumbing away on this thing. So, their philosophy sucks. The other reason, of course, is that they fear that a person with an iPhone and an external keyboard might feel that they don’t also need to buy a Mac. They may decide that the iPhone takes care of all their computing needs. This is also silly. The iPhone requires a computer to sync with and has lots of other things it can’t do that mean it’s no replacement for a laptop.
In short, Apple needs to just allow the peripheral makers to fill this niche. MacAlly has had a product waiting in the wings to do just this for a year or more and Apple won’t enable the functionality on the iPhone side despite the fact that they support sooo many other BT profiles. I am a fan of Apples products but I am not a fan of how they occasionally decide they know best what their customers should and should not do with those products. They can be real wankers…
– Post From My iPhone
