Well, what is there to say that hasn’t been said already, both by Carlo here and everywhere else on the web?
Great product, great showmanship, can’t wait to try it.
I do have a couple of thoughts though.
On the downside, outside the US, as Tomi points out, the killer app on mobiles is still dear old sms. Despite being dominant, it’s still growing like crazy. So just how easy will the iPhone be to send sms? If it’s not at least as easy to use as the mobile we know today, this is simply not going to get traction in the all important youth market outside America.
Now, you could argue that at those prices that youth groups outside the US are not very high on the priority list. But to conquer any kind of mass market eventually, this constituency will have to be addressed.
Which kind of leads me to another point. I’d be intrigued to know who Apple’s marketing department are targeting with this phone/MP3 player - actually, it’s more of an MP3 player that makes phone calls, I’d suggest. It’s clearly revolutionary in many ways. But outside gadget fanboys, who’s going to want one? Sure, I realise that most of MobHappians will want one, but is that enough? It’s a genuine question and maybe there are enough gadget freaks out there.
Mr Jobs’ “All we need is a 1% share” approach to this is also a little strange - if he’d come up with that kind of remark pitching to VCs or in a grad school business plan, he’d have been thrown out 
And there doesn’t seem to be a 3G version, which is strange, given the stress placed on the importance of accessing the web.
My gut feel verdict on the iPhone though, is that it’s be like the Sex Pistols of the music industry. Hugely disruptive, headline stealing and immensely influential, but ultimately, others will come along who’ll take the good bits, dominate the market and make most of the money. I hope it’s not true, as I’d love to see Apple take nice slice of the market on a long term basis. Their design flair alone would make that a fine thing for us all.
Finally, I was intrigued to hear that they’d been planning this for 2 1/2 years, which is precisely when I started suggesting it might make sense. Apart from them buying the iPhone.org url back then(!) my thinking at that time was that convergence would kill the iPod and since Apple makes its profits from the hardware (and no real money from the software -iTunes), they simply had to go into phones or ultimately give up on this golden goose. Seems like they came to the same conclusion at the same time, but I bet it’s taken them a lot longer than they wanted to get this baby to market.
Anyway, a fine job, Apple and put me down for one please.
Hi Russell
You’re so funny. The Sex Pistols analogy is priceless. Lets hope it won’t come to that, but in a way, isn’t that what happened with the Newton… The danger is there….
Very funny and excellent points as your posts always are. I’m here almost daily and am always disappointed if I don’t have something new to read from you guys…
Tomi Ahonen
“actually, it’s more of an MP3 player”
I’d say it’s more of a PMP, like e.g. Cowon A2, as a music-only player doesn’t need such a big display. Hence Apple is going after the video viewers as well, and maybe primarily.
Hi Russell,
SMS works in spite of the user experience - in the same way that people use voicemail eventhough it is not at all optimal in the way it works. I would hope and imagine that the lack of focus on sms was simply because it was a US audience and the same clear user thinking will be applied to sms as to the standard voice functions which Apple has revisited.
My only worry from yesterday is that the existing voice functionality certainly seemed to be the main thrust of the presentation - I hope that Apple in this instance allows an open set of developer tools to allow third parties to deliver a compelling data/online experience rather than assume it can do it all itself.
Scott
Scott - I agree that sms originally worked in spite of the interface, but many many people have got that skill and won’t be happy to junk it. As an analogy, as we all know, the qwerty keyboard is arranged that way to stop the keys sticking together on old manual typewriters. But despite evidence that there’s better layouts, they’ve never taken off as people with the skill can’t be persuaded to abandon it.
It could be the same with sms, no?
Russell
interesting analogy with the sex pistols!
As I said, in my blog
The iPhone is extraordinary not because of it’s UI but because it’s the tail wagging the dog .. But the real question is: How many dogs can it wag?
So .. What I am saying is
The iPhone is cool, sexy etc because it works closely with the one Operator where its launched(namely Cingular in the US). In that deployment, Apple seems to be the dominant partner rather than Cingular if you consider features like Visual voicemail (which is unlike the norm i.e. Usually, the Carrier is the more dominant partner in such relationships). The caveat is, as more Operators deploy the iPhone, either it becomes too complex or it becomes least common denominator. Thus, the jury is out still IMHO.
see http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2007/01/the_iphone_is_e.html
kind rgds Ajit
Theres no point in asking us youll get no reply…
We’re so pretty oh so pretty… vacant…
Priceless
[…] After Apple’s announcement of the iPhone yesterday at Macworld Expo, a plethora of news sites have had abundant reporting and commentary on the topic. Mobileindustry.biz, Mobilegamefaqs.com and Wireless Gaming World covered the basic story in their daily news roundups, but other sites like Maccentral lent an editorial slant with their editorial, Analysis: iPhone a ‘wake-up call’ for the industry. Mobhappy.com gave us a two-part look, called Finally, the iPhone (here’s part 2) in which they discuss the phone’s interface, questions about the phone’s performance, and market share:My gut feel verdict on the iPhone though, is that it’s be like the Sex Pistols of the music industry. Hugely disruptive, headline stealing and immensely influential, but ultimately, others will come along who’ll take the good bits, dominate the market and make most of the money. I hope it’s not true, as I’d love to see Apple take nice slice of the market on a long term basis. Their design flair alone would make that a fine thing for us all.Not everyone’s singing the iPhone’s praises, however: Engadget reports how Nokia’s vice president of Nseries Computers Pekka Pohjakallio comments on the “meh” factor of the iPhone, citing how it lacks 3G and comparing it poorly to Nokia products. Yeah, okay.The world is still just learning about what the iPhone can do, and most mere mortals haven’t even held one yet. The inevitable gaming options have not yet become clear, but it is clear that if the iPhone doesn’t inspire a major leap forward for gaming on mobile devices, little else can. Don’t forget that we took a look at the iPhone’s promise for gamers the day before the announcement. […]
They’ve done some cool stuff with reading SMS — grouping by sender instead of chronologically and displaying the message in speech bubbles as part of an on-going conversation. There’s probably been something similar in Asia for a while…while it looks good it’s nothing more than eye candy. People don’t need to sort messages that way. I am a little annoyed by the way everyone from Jobs to the press talks about writing SMS as if they still used multi-tap technology. The keyboard doesn’t help much, you’re not going to get faster than a numberpad with predictive text. Unless you’re some middle-aged ex-hippie.
I’m a middle aged ex-hippie
This is round 1. Apple wins by KO, without ever shipping anything.
Palm, as witnessed by their CEO’s stupid comments a week or so prior, had no clue this was coming. No one did.
Who can do that? Apple.
Microsoft? Again, no clue, apparently.
The point is not that apple can keep secrets. The point is that they are innovating. This is round 1, folks. In a few years there will be a suite of iPhone models, some for people tethered to carriers for service, some for people willing to go VOIP/WIMAX.
Nobody else can realistically compete with that. Put Nokia and Microsoft’s best next to the iPhone. They do not even remotely compare.
Who else will spend 30 months in total secrecy to ship one model? Only Apple can do that and succeed.
Convergence just happened.
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This is a great discussion. The iPhone reactions have shown the differences between US and non-US mobile behaviors in a poignant, illustrative way. Cool, no keyboard! vs. Are you kidding? No keyboard?
Russell, I admit to bristling when you said it’s just a music phone. But, after reading Tomi’s well articulated open letter and follow up piece, I understood even better how that could be a prevailing European/Asian reaction.
So, rather than post a giant comment here, it spurred me to post my reaction to these sentiments. In a nutshell, my take is that yes, it’s the next progression in the iPod line, but it’s so much more than a music phone. And though purists won’t call it a smartphone, it’s the prosumer version that is totally appropriate in this phase of mobile development in the US (as we catch up the the rest of the world in adopting advanced features).
Cheers.
Am I the only one that is seeing the apple/iphone/osx as a threat to the pursuit of open standards based mobile telephony and computing.
Take the ‘Visual Voicemail’. It looks to me like a handset client which is sent audio files (voice messages), and presents them to the user in an inbox fashion. Nothing remarkable about that, but carriers have not let that happen to-date because they make a packet from people dialling into voicemail.
Apple are clearly the only ones big enough to convince Cingular to throw this revenue stream away, in favour of a happy customer (who will probably make more return calls).
Great thinking, but it’s operator dependent, handset dependent, and I’m presuming its a proprietary service (although it might be IMAP or MMS based).
If anyone knows better, I’d love to be proved wrong, and see ‘Visual Voicemail’ adopted by other carriers and handsets. I’m guessing Apple have the patent though???:-(
[…] « iPhone Thoughts Part 2 […]
For those of you who don’t want a Cingular (or shall we start calling it AT&T wireless) plan but likes what you see in the iPhone why not just get an LG KE850 (back posted)? A solution to iPhone envy for the rest of us!
I certainly hope steve jobs doesn’t take the walled garden approach to third-party mobile applications developers as he has stated in making the iPhone a closed system for mobile application developers. I also hope his team at least consider a developer program and SDK so that applications can at least be certified…..this to me is the biggest strategic flaw in the iPhone as they would be the only major handset manufacturer not to have developer support (e.g Brew, Java ME, Symbian, Palm, et al.). This would be a shame with a handset that supports OS X Lite.
Had they done the MVNO route, aka Apple Mobile, they would not be at the mercy of the carrier.
Lastly, at $600, I would have included a SiRF GPS chip as this would make the device truely more powerful at a very marginal cost.
We’ll see what they do in the next few months……..
Steve can say 1% is enough now, because he doesn’t have to pitch to VCs. He is very careful with his words. Back at business school he wouldn’t have said anything like that!
“Video ipod? Don’t be silly”
“Here’s the ipod video!”
1% is only his milestone TODAY, not particularly tomorrow.