This was part of Steve Job’s famous “reality distortion field” and given the hype and hoopla they are able to generate, the hype was perhaps worth it. It has been just 3 days since the iPhone was lauched; there were hordes of morons who wanted to be the first in the line for the “iconic” phone that promised everything but sadly delivers not much in terms of value.
For the same reason, I have never favoured iPods. I’d agree that they are beautiful. They can be easily navigable. But they don’t deliver bang for the buck. It doesn’t always boil down to having the “best” and the “latest” and paying oodles extra for the “coolness” factor. Or that “I have it too”.
Apple iPhone generated a lot of “news” online. After all, it is one smart phone that has wowed the geek audiences. Most of the people were willing to ignore the crappy AT&T services that were bundled for over two years. And that the speeds of access negate everything that iPhone aims to sell.
It is a classic Apple approach to sell underpowered hardware and generate sales for incremental hardware upgrades for later versions. Perhaps they would upgrade the hard drive; change colours, have a better camera or make it work on “better neworks”. I cannot crystal gaze but Jobs needs loads of marketing crap to sell the future versions in the Mac Expos.
However, all this marketing hype has laid focus squarely on the “leaders” like Nokias and Erricsons of the world. With it’s crappy N series handsets, Nokia has not exactly been able to take the market by storm. Their marketing campaigns are squarely based on rolling everything into one which makes the handsets bulky and unweildy. I own a simple basic handset that helps me to stay connected; this is the future driver of the growth for developing countries and I believe that incremental improvements in the battery life or menus would help them to retain the market confidence. At best, the Taiwainese/Korean companies are gearing up to meet the challange from Apple onslaught. I doubt whether they would succeed in the competitive US market; however no one would deny them the chance to innovate. Nokia needs to update it’s Symbian OS which is clunky and slow.
I believe that the sole focus of iPhone is to test market the mobile media and means to access the same. As Internet becomes ubiquitous, the content (and the service providers) would chase you wherever you are.
I believe that the porn industry would squarely benefit from the introduction of iPhone. They have been at the forefront of the technological revolution and it would be interesting to see frustrated “jerkins” using the in thing to surf porn. AT&T is no stranger to this and they have been distributing porn earlier on.
It would be hard to do any justice to this post without linking on to what others are saying. Youth Curry raises a valid point about Apple loosing it’s sales in India because of it’s inept marketing and expensive overheads in form of duties and taxes. Unfortunately, Apple has been loosing sales to illegitimate channels which makes it worse from their perspective. Yet, noting is being done. I wouldn’t be seeing this phone till about next year. This means that only the black market would rule with it’s prices presently.
Opera Watch says that Opera Mini is a better bet anyday. iPhone’s zoom feature is nothing new; it was all there in Opera Mini since it’s launch. Another added advantage is the ability to use a virtual cursor by just using the keys on the keyboard. This makes is much more universal in appeal. Imagine using Opera Mini on the iPhone. I am not sure whether it would be possible to download and install Mini on your sexy brand new acquisition.
Early reviews on the same blog entry show that iPhone is slow. This is to be expected when a “new generation” phone is launched on ancient networks.
Emergic had a series of articles written from across the blogosphere about iPhone. (1,2,3,4,5) Much of it is the adulation of the “iconic iPhone” and makes no sense. However, Cringely hits the nail in the head squarely. He writes :
The iPhone absolutely needs AJAX applications for the phone to be a success on AT&T’s EDGE network. By pushing more functional logic into the browser, the bandwidth consumed per http round-trip is significantly reduced, making the phone apps faster and helping to justify that big price tag. The problem with this is that AJAX apps don’t always work the same (or at all) on every browser. The iPhone has real browser support, which is good, but remember AJAX is based on JavaScript, which in this case is not so good. JavaScript isn’t statically typed and each browser has its own version of JavaScript. Developers are typically forced to hand-code different versions of their AJAX apps for different browsers. With the AJAX economy dictating that browsers with big market share like IE and Firefox get most of the effort, that leaves Safari as a second-class browser and, potentially, a liability for the iPhone.
He feels that iPhones have been deliberately crippled for performance.
Remember that a key component of iPhone marketing is that the device will run a version of OS X, making it more computer than phone. When the iPhone finally ships and some techies have voided their warranties and torn the thing apart, they’ll probably find it uses a processor running at a gigahertz or more — by far the fastest processor ever put in a mobile phone — a processor more powerful than that in my Mom’s PC. With all that power locked inside, of course some users will want to imagine their iPhone AS their PC, which Apple — at least for now — would rather not enable because it might hurt Macintosh sales. So they’ve hobbled the iPhone with essentially the same crappy text entry capability as on any other phone.
Where does that leave Indian market in all that? Apple has been smart enough to realise that the growth story being talked off here is all hogwash. The number of the new handset sales does not justify the accrued numbers. However, there are no concrete statistics for the second hand handset sales. The number may be higher or lower than the professed numbers.
Further, the market is maturing in terms of people willing to try out the value added services. Yet, the billing hassles have not yet been resolved. Another problem is that we hardly get to see demand for “unlimited access”; I believe that some of the operators have such schemes. It truly defines “world wide wait” (www) as it is intended to be. The speed of access is pitiable as compared to dial up for a contrast.
Lets wait and watch for it’s debut in India.
Update: This has been crossposted on Desicritics.
