The Apple iPhone was an announcement shrouded so much in secrecy that senior Apple executives weren’t even aware of more than rumors of its development until Stephen Jobs’ keynote at Macworld. It was also a concept with such high expectations that the board of directors of mobile partner Cingular signed off on the deal without even seeing a prototype. News of the announcement sent Apple’s stock up 7% and had the tech world in a frenzy. The initial feedback has been nothing short of glowing. A closer look at the iPhone presents the user with an odd scenario in today’s hype-driven world: The iPhone is even more revolutionary and worthy of hype than we’ve seen.The Apple iPhone was an announcement shrouded so much in secrecy that senior Apple executives weren’t even aware of more than rumors of its development until Stephen Jobs’ keynote at Macworld. It was also a concept with such high expectations that the board of directors of mobile partner Cingular signed off on the deal without even seeing a prototype. News of the announcement sent Apple’s stock up 7% and had the tech world in a frenzy. The initial feedback has been nothing short of glowing. A closer look at the iPhone presents the user with an odd scenario in today’s hype-driven world: The iPhone is even more revolutionary and worthy of hype than we’ve seen.
Digital Music
In strategic terms, the Apple iPhone is an important and groundbreaking move. Consumers have long struggled with lousy cell phone/music convergence. In fact, what has been a common theme in the discussion of this space with consumers has been the sentiment that what they really wanted was an “iPhone.” In the absence of the iPhone, a mini-industry of consumer hacks and workarounds has sprung up to make people able to stream music via their cell phone or expand the poor storage capacity of music-enabled phones. Now Apple is solving all those problems with device that makes the use of your phone for music as easy as using an iPod.
The “i” Stands For Internet
While the focus of the iPhone has been on its iPod integration, and that will certainly drive consumer usage, in the long run, the robust Internet offerings of the phone may end up having a more revolutionary impact. The iPhone runs on the Mac OS platform, and the widgets highlighted at Macworld seem to indicate that the phone has a fully compliant javascript engine running all the time. As stated on the 9Rules.com blog: “To be able to utilize the Javascript calls that we have already engineered for our web applications on a shiny new iPhone widget is monumental, and could open up a tremendous amount of possibilities for computerless content distribution. Moving the Web ‘off’ the Web is the future, and if I can upload my homegrown widgets to my iPhone (or provide them for users to download) the possibilities are nearly limitless.”
What makes this monumental is that current cellular phone offerings differ from palmtop and laptop computers in that they use stripped down operating systems and browsers. It is doubtlful that the iPhone uses a complete implementation of Mac OS X, but it is possible that the implementation is still complete enough to be a significant improvement for cell phone customers. If the iPhone provides a fully-fledged browser and OS experience, the implications for media outlets are significant. All of the existing issues in creating telecom partnerships to originate programming would be eased via the direct-to-consumer avenue provided by the Internet via the iPhone. In essence, the iPhone is not just the convergence of the the iPod and the cell phone, it is also the first mass-market example of the convergence of the computer and the cell phone. For content companies, if you can present it on the Internet, you can present it on the iPhone, with no partnerships between your company and Cingular or your company and Apple required.
iGaming
The power of the graphical capabilities and the core OS of the iPhone certainly indicate that the iPhone could handle significant mobile gaming in the ballpark of the PSP. While it is doubtful that the iPhone would kill the PSP, the fact that it could conceivably play PSP games adapted to the iPhone OS makes it a truly disruptive device in the gaming world. An additional element to consider is the revolutionary touchscreen interface. One can imagine the revolutionary gameplay that can come out of the screen as a game controller.
One cannot forget that the iPhone is also a wireless device connected to a network. A multi-player online game harnessing the iPhone platform is easy to imagine. Again, while the iPhone won’t necessarily kill the PSP, its gaming capability shows that it has the disruptive potential to have much more of an impact than simply being an integration of iPod and cell phone.
The iCamera
The iPhone includes a 2 megapixel camera, and a truly breathtaking array of photo possibilities. The touchscreen allows truly unique ways of handling photos, with two fingers sliding together and apart zooming in and out the photo on the screen. The iPhone isn’t presenting anything revolutionary in its camera integration, but the ease of browsing and manipulating the resulting photos makes for a much nicer experience for soccer moms and dads looking to use their camera as the originator of the visual memories.
Mobile Video
The real impact on video will be the iPhones iTunes integration. As Brian Fling noted in his Blue Flavor blog: “Mobile video has been a much hyping new arena for the mobile industry, with hopes to greatly boost mobile service provider revenues in download fees. Apple has in one step bypassed the extraordinary fees as well as increased the quality offered to consumers. The Apple iPhone/iTunes Music Store strategy could make mobile video finally a reality.
Issues
This is wireless?
While the iPhone has excellent iPod integration, it has some curious shortcomings. Users can’t purchase songs from the iTunes Music Store over the air. They need to purchase them on their computer and then move them to the phone. Contast this with the Microsoft Zune, which intregrates the wireless purchase and downloading of music into the device. Perhaps even more curious is the fact that the iPhone, despite having both wi-fi and bluetooth capabilities, will not allow users to wirelessly connect to their computer. To fill iPhone with music, you are required to connect it to your computer via a cable. That’s not very revolutionary.
Apple has been receiving significant criticism that the iPhone is not based on 3G technology, but the older less sophisticated 2G. 2G networks are more common and easy to find but are significantly slower than 3G systems. As several commentators have mentioned, Apple appears to be banking on widespread access to wi-fi rather than making the iPhone 3G capable. This would be a reasonable strategy if the iPhone’s wi-fi abilities were more robust. But, as mentioned, much of the phone’s wi-fi capabilities are crippled. This may change in the future, but until then, the “wire” is still a significant part of the wireless iPhone.
Gizmodo reports that there is a 3G version of the Apple iPhone in the works, and that the only reason that a 2G version was released was due to Cingular’s poor 3G coverage. Their assessment: With better 3G coverage from Cingular in the future, a 3G iPhone will be released.
Battery Life
The iPhone has a battery life of five hours for talk or video and 16 hours of audio. While looking good at first glance, with heavy Internet or multimedia use, the battery life may become a significant issue.
No MS Office Support
While containing some very nice office applications, they won’t work with Microsoft Exchange. This is a software issue and will most likely be handled in the future, but out of the box the iPhone is not going to play nice with offices running through a Microsoft infrastructure.
Not Currently Extensible
Currently, outside companies can’t create applications for the iPhone. Its system is locked by Apple. Several experts see this as a temporary thing, especially as companies like Electronic Arts are putting pressure on Apple to allow it to create an iPod game market.
The Battery Isn’t Replaceable
Ever need to replace your cell phone battery? You can simply buy a replacement. If your iPhone needs a new battery, you need to send in the whole phone. This is especially a major issue due to the battery life of the iPhone battery. Users wanting 15 hours of video from the iPhone can’t just carry two spare batteries. They need to recharge the iPhone twice.
It’s Not Social Network Friendly
We’re still scratching our heads over this one and trying to confirm if it is actually true, but early reports are that you can’t send MMS messages via the iPhone. For a phone as multimedia-rich as the iPhone and not being able to send the content to others seems monumentally non-sensical, but the early reviews indicate that this is the case.
When combined with the crippling of bluetooth and wi-fi in the iPhone for real interactive media uses, and it looks like the wireless and social networking aspects of the Zune will remain a legitimate competitive advantage for Microsoft. Let us not forget that the iPod is a very personal device. By all appearances, despite being a phone, the multimedia capabilities of the iPhone apear to be similarly personal in design.
Touchscreen Scratches
Apple received significant criticism for how scratch-prone the initial iPod nano was. The touchscreen of the iPhone would appear to be heavily susceptible to scratches. It is quite likely that Apple will ship the iPhone with a velvet or hard case cover to protect it, but with a phone that looks this cool, who would actually use them?
While we outline above the powerful capabilities of the OS within the iPhone, it has some curious shortcomings. One of the more obvious and one that limits the phone as a real communication tool while away from the office is its inability to include attachments with its email application.
In June This May Not Be The iPhone
The iPhone is scheduled for a June launch, but before that will happen Apple will have to fend off a trademark infringement suit from Cisco, which owns the iPhone trademark. The services that Cisco owns under the iPhone name are rather run-of-the-mill, so we may simply be looking at Cisco gamesmanship, as they look for more money from Apple for the rights to the name. Still, there is always the possibility that in June we may be looking at a phone from Apple and Cingular with a completely new name.
Not Big In Japan
Finally, nowhere can you gauge the impact of mobile technology better than in Japan, and the iPhone announcement registered with a collective yawn in Japan. The biggest issue appears to be the iPhone’s lack of 3G capability. In Japan, where 3G is ubiquitous, not having 3G is akin to not having the capability to stream rich media, which is one area that the iPhone most clearly cannot do thanks to its 2G bandwidth issues. So, while the iPhone is truly revolutionary, the one area where the world is leveraging a dynamic future is not part of the current Apple iPhone rollout: broadband.
