Apple’s mobile phone turns the world upside down
By Gareth Powell
Around the world, even as you read this, hundreds of mobile phone makers and vendors are sitting down at meetings at which the theme is, what do we do now?
Yes, it will be differently stated and, yes, we will soon have all sorts of press releases telling us why there is no problem. It will all be nonsense. An hour or so ago Apple redefined the mobile phone market and it will never be the same again.
Simple facts first: The new Apple iPhone has a 3.5-inch hi-res screen that covers the entire face of the device — and it’s a touchscreen, so there’s no standard keypad or keyboard.
It has GSM/EDGE support, two-megapixel camera, Bluetooth and WiFi and Steve Jobs says it runs OS X but, at a guess, that will be a special version.
With all of this going on there may be a problem with battery life although Apple says it will give 5 hours ‘of talk time, video, and browsing’ (which is pretty small) or 16 hours if you use it as a standard mobile phone for audio only in which case why bother. There may soon be ways around this.
The music, video and photo functionality looks fine and syncing the device with a computer should be pretty simple. It also runs the Safari web browser, and it’s integrated with different Google and Yahoo services in a way a mug punter can understand.
You could, perhaps, argue that the multi-touch user interface may look a bit too complex for some users but that will probably split on the age divide. Old codgers — that is people over the age of 30 — will have to work at learning it. Younger customers will just pick it up and use it.
If you were trying to be cool and stand back and look like a disinterested commentator you could say this is really an advanced iPod to which has been attached a mobile phone. And the price in the United States will be around $500 when it is launched this year and other countries probably will not see it until next year.
None of which matters a tinker’s cuss.
Steve Jobs thinks that this phone will take one percent of the mobile phone market and I am quite, quite sure he is correct although on the side of the angels because my guess is it will swamp the high-end market.
You can say that this phone is mundane and unexciting and you would be wrong.
With it Apple has redefined the mobile phone market and everyone else is now going to have to play catch-up.
This is the new standard, this is the way it is going to be. Either mobile phone companies step forward and produce something which has a lot MORE features — with the iPhone name going for it you need heavier artillery in a pitched battle — or they are going to lose an awful lot of market share.
That noise you can here is the knees of the mobile phone manufacturers knocking together. They have a tight time frame in which to totally transform their own product line. It will not be an easy task.
They do, indeed, live in interesting times.
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January 9th, 2007
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Just another o2 atom/pda. Nothing that special. All the makings of a regular pda phone with an ‘i’ infront of it. I agree that this will redefine the mobile phone market. But not because this phone is anything special. Simply because the money spent on the launch of this product and the subsequent media hype will ‘ibrainwash’ a large audience. As was done with the ipod, a device that can be beaten on quality and price if one were to shop around a little and not give a crap what name was printed on the player.