Will Apple's iPhone revolutionize mobile computing?

No

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by Bill Stone

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Time Magazine named the iPhone the "Invention Of The Year." They did so because they, like many others, believe that the iPhone does things that have never been done before in a cellular phone, and they simply love it. I like it very much as well, but it's far from revolutionary. And one only needs to look at history to see how this happens, and it is indeed happening again with the iPhone.

More than ten years ago, Samsung created a portable music player called the Yepp YP-D40, which Creative Labs bought and re-branded the NOMAD. It had 64 MB of solid-state internal memory and is widely credited as being the first portable digital audio player. They (along with several other companies such as Archos) next released a portable audio "jukebox" containing a 6 GB laptop hard drive and a simple, LCD screen and few controls. These companies, along with others, were well on their way to refining their products into some of the best portable music players (PMPs) on the market today.

Enter Apple. Already having a cult-like following, when Apple makes a product announcement, people listen. They released the iPod, a PMP with a revolutionary interface (the touch-sensitive scroll wheel - the click wheel didn't come until later versions) and complete compatibility with its "iLife" series of software packages, such as iTunes. Needless to say, it was a big hit. They did do some things better than others, like making a proprietary dock connector and releasing the development kit for it so that third-parties could make compatible accessories, but underneath it all, it was just another PMP, and everything that it did had already been done before.

Was the iPod revolutionary? Hardly. Was it unique? In form and function, yes, but other than that, it was one in a crowd. What Apple did have was a captive audience of dedicated Apple users who were sure to buy an iPod to fit right into their iLife. And they had the marketing machine to make it all work. And today, Apple has claimed the lion's share of the PMP market, even though other players have outpaced Apple in terms of features, compatibility, formats, expandability, and form factors. Apple brought PMPs to the masses, made them less of "geek toys" and more mainstream, something that other manufacturers had a hard time doing. This was Apple's claim to fame, and their marketing department still outdoes the rest.

Jump to today. If you go back through this article and replace PMP with "smart phone" and replace iPod with iPhone, you'll see that exactly the same thing is happening again. Cell phones have been around for years. Current smart phones have ten times the computing capacity and capability of the iPhone. But as in the past, Apple has attempted to bring the convergence device to the masses. Prior to the iPhone, convergence devices were relegated to business users (Blackberry devices) and power users (Treo, Windows Mobile devices, etc). If you weren't a power user, you weren't really going to own one of those devices. Apple has taken existing technologies and repackaged them with a really pretty user interface and a sleek look. They made it dirt simple to operate. All you need is a finger, and you can easily navigate the entire OS. And again, it is completely compatible with the "iLife" software suite, like iTunes.

Is it unique? Yes, it has an amazing user interface, but underneath it all, it's the same functionality we've already had for years. But the big question: Will the iPhone do for convergence devices what the iPod did for personal music players?

I don't believe so. Apple made some significant errors when creating the iPhone. They overlooked some very key target audiences: the ones already using convergence devices, the geeks and the business users. Without push e-mail like a Blackberry, it's useless to the business user. Without extensibility (the ability to add third-parrty software), it's useless to the modders and geeks. It was restricted to AT&T's network, and only given a 2G EDGE radio (read: not too fast). It relegated the upload and download of music to iTunes, missing completely the synergistic opportunities of loading music through AT&T's over-the-air music distribution channels. Apple can fix some of these things in their next few releases, but I think that the few advances that they did come up with have already been trivialized (look at the LG VX10000 Voyager by Verizon: big, beautiful touch-screen with force feedback, flip-open full keyboard, live TV, V-CAST music service, wireless stereo Bluetooth capabilities), so for all the hype, the cellular phone industry will be a much harder nut to crack than the PMP industry was. In the PMP world, not many people had MP3 players before the iPod rolled around. In the cellular world, the market was already flooded: nearly everyone has a cell phone of some sort, and while some will dump their current service just to have an iPhone, the steep entrance fee doesn't offer the same value proposition for most. Additionally, most cheap or free phones today offer some sort of music capabilities, and it's over the air, without having to buy an iPhone.

The iPhone's got the glitz and the glam, but it doesn't have the bang where it counts - the technological innovations. The niceties have already been copied in the rest of the cell industry. At the end of the day, the iPhone is just another music phone with a nice UI. It hasn't made the impact that Apple hoped it would, regardless of what Time Magazine thinks.

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