Unless you popped off for a couple of days break to the moon, you can’t fail to have heard about Apple’s latest iPhone gadget. Unveiled by Steve Jobs – Apple’s CEO, chief publicity seeker and God-like genius to Apple aficionados – it is, admittedly, quite a nice looking piece of work. Which, undoubtedly counts for a lot, especially when some of your competitors’ products (Rim’s Blackberry and Palm’s Treo) are so ordinary looking.
But will it revolutionise mobile communications in the same way as the iPod has revolutionised personal music? My view for what it’s worth is probably not. Unlike the iPod, a product that was genuinely ground breaking when it launched, and which is still much better than the rest of the competition out there, there is nothing particularly remarkable about the iPhone gadget.
Sure it has a couple of nice if somewhat gimmicky features like a lovely touch screen and a proximity sensor which knows when you have the phone to your ear. But really is that worth spending $499/$599 (4Gb/8Gb) on – probably at least £300 when it launches in the UK. Well we’re not so sure.
There are already several smart phones out there which have both better technical specifications and will cost you a lot less. Nor is the iPhone the first device to feature a touch screen, others have tried and failed. Why? Probably because people like the idea of pressing buttons both for making calls and writing e-mails.
Of course it’s really nice to have a device with built in wi-fi and a web browser, but the problem for me is that it doesn’t have 3G built in (instead it plumps for a much slower GPRS connection) – something that’s surely essential for high speed internet access on the move.
By the time the product launches in the UK, probably in time for Christmas 2007, it’s going to look very tired indeed from a technical point of view – unless Apple takes the time to update the specification before it launches over here. Apple fans will of course buy it in huge numbers, but to win over the hearts and minds of the masses it will have to be significantly better than its competitors too. Just having a pretty face won’t be enough.
[...] After the initial hype around the launch of the Apple iPhone it’s interesting to pause and look at just how big the role of blogs was in distributing the news with Techcrunch reporting on Engadget’s record 10 million page views on the day they covered the announcement. [...]