So, who ISN’T lusting after an iPhone? (Except you Rue…)
We (the Alpharetta Fraternity Brothers Lunch group) were arguing yesterday about Apple. We were trying to devine what they were going to get into ‘next’.
To my mind, phones are an obvious extension of what they do great. They find a market where the current options suck, or at least are far under-realized. They reset all the assumptions about what said device can or can’t do, and then they design something that almost everyone would want, starting with themselves.
You can see this played out twice in recent times: mp3 players, and now cell phones.
With mp3 players, before the iPod, you had really bad mp3 players. You either had small ones, maybe with a one line display, with maybe 128mb of space. Or you had brick ones (archos?) which were huge, had hard drives, had a multi line (but still only text) display, and had AWFUL interfaces (make sure you put the songs in the right folder. Make sure you don’t use long filenames…)
Along comes the iPod. It’s a hard drive (5 or 10 gb if I recall), it’s got a nice monochrome screen, it has a solid program to do EVERYTHING for moving music around (Rip? sure. Write to harddrive? no problem. Sync to device? Great. Only want a playlist to come to the device? no worries). And never forget: It’s pretty. It’s got a cool/novel click wheel interface that’s elegant, simple, and easy for everyone.
No longer do you need a household nerd to take arbitrary music with you. Now it JUST WORKS.
The open question is ‘Can they repeat history with the iPhone?’.
Cellphones of this generation are awful. The vendor lockin sucks. The voicemail options are tollerable. We’re shocked when a phone has 1gb of storage (sprint). My ‘smart’phone has 64mb of space on it. I mean, what the heck? Granted it has a sd slot, but that’s ONLY up to 2gb of space, and it’s a pain to use. Blackberrys are interesting/cool, but only if you want access to your work email. For the rest of the phone/PDA market, they kinda suck.
They’re certainly starting out right… it’s got style, it’s got a cool interface, it’s got a beautiful screen. It looks like it takes care of a LOT of annoyances with cellphones. It’s got either 4 or 8 gb of storage. It accesses your mail, it integrates in neat ways with maps.google.com, and google local search (witness Steve looking for nearby starbucks, and ‘ordering’ 4000 lattes).
The challenges:
1) It’s locked to a single vendor at the moment (Cingular/ATT wireless). That makes sense since they’re the largest GSM provider here, and GSM gets them a LOT further into Europe/Asia than anything else does. But forcing a new contract on people might not be a great thing.
2) It’s expensive. $500 and $600 for the 4gb and 8gb models respectively. Thats a LOT for a phone + an iPod. There’s no discounts either. That’s the price with plan. But people have been proven time and again to spend money on ‘sexy’. (witness the iPod)
3) Typing without buttons for it isn’t optimal. First hand reports indicate that it’s kinda annoying. Apple does have some really nice spelling correction/word completion stuff to help with this though.
4) They didn’t pick Verizon. This makes sense since Verizon is CDMA, not GSM, and Verizon has a HUGE history of locking their users from doing ‘Cool Stuff’ with their phones, so that they can be charged for it ($20 per month to sync contacts? What?). But Verizon has a huge network also. I imagine that Verizon will have a CDMA version of this phone somewhere between 9 months and 1 year after launch.