Against Apple and iPhone. Though why that might be I’ve no clue. There’s plenty of hints however, in his article published by The Guardian.
Look at how he begins the article:
The iPhone has never been “one among many,” whether 2 G or 3 G. It has captured a 20% market share in US in just one year. But more to the point, the touchscreen iPhone was launched LAST year, so why bring up this question now? Makes no sense to me. But let’s read on.
Still, what's definitely coming this summer is a battle of the touchscreen phones. Apple, through marketing if nothing Read More...
With Apple’s iPhone raising the bar for the entire industry, wireless phone makers have been scrambling to catch up over the past year. We’ve encountered numerous announcements of touch screen phones, and of handsets with built-in accelerometers, for instance.
Businessweek’s Stephen Wildsrom has a detailed analysis of what iPhone competitors are doing, and why it’s not enough. Imitating the iPhone’s hardware capabilities--something all the competitors are obsessed about--will not be enough to compete with the iPhone, he says.
Such efforts largely miss the point. Certainly, the beautiful hardware design adds tremendously to the emotional appeal of Apple products. But it's the software Read More...
From the time it was launched last year, numerous critics have panned the iPhone. Seizing on the lack of a “real keyboard” has been a favorite tactic among these critics. The most famous is perhaps the one where the CEO of RIM (of BlackBerry fame) dismissed the iPhone keyboard as a “piece of glass.” (If sent back in time to 1879, these skeptics would complain to Thomas Edison that the incandescent light bulb lacks a real flame, I’m sure.)
But guess who’s laughing now?
At the recent WWDC, Apple announced that the iPhone will now support many more languages, including French, German, Read More...
O2 offering a free 3G upgrade for existing iPhone users in UK made news recently. iPhone enthusiasts in Germany now have a great deal too: they can get a brand new 3G iPhone for free.
T-Mobile will sell the 8 GB 3G for 1 Euro. There is a contract to go with it of course: 69 Euros per month. You could choose to pay less than that per month, but in that case the iPhone costs more upfront.
Ok, so it’s not really free. Many people have analyzed the “reduced” iPhone 3G price, and pointed out that we’ll in fact be paying more. But Read More...
A bit of quick news that was left pending over the weekend, while we were covering other stuff.
AOL has announced a streaming radio application for the iPhone. This app will stream more than 300 radio stations, over both Wi-Fi and cellular connection.
But it isn’t just plain old radio--this app makes clever use of some of the features built into the iPhone. If you run it on your 3G iPhone, for example, this app will use the GPS feature to locate the nearest CBS station and tune into it automatically, ensuring excellent sound quality at all times.
Apple is so pleased with this Read More...
We all know that Apple has set new standards in the cell phone industry. It has raised the bar in terms of design, ease of use, style, features, disk space, and price. A sizable number of people now look at a new phone handset, and ask; “This looks fine, but is it an iPhone?”
Still, when the iPhone was launched last year, people dismissed the virtual keyboard as a “piece of glass”, insisted that being able to feel the keys as you typed was important, and in general were skeptical about something so new.
But just a year later, this skepticism has Read More...
Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray points out that the iPhone is now being sold with a new business model:
Now, the carriers are subsidizing the cost of the phone, making up for it in monthly charges, and they are no longer funneling a share of that monthly revenue to Apple. As Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster puts it: “Apple is basically playing by the rules that all other cell phone hardware manufacturers play by.”
Which basically means that for every device that AT&T activates, Apple collects a one time revenue, and gets no share of the monthly charges.
This is very Read More...
Just as the the dust started settling after the release of iPhone 3G, I happened to catch up with some of my old pals from Sprint and RIM. the iPhone release had to come up, of course. I wanted to know what they thought of iPhone 2.0, and to my surprise, they had a lot to say. I can’t quote from them directly, but I did put together a gist of what they said.
So here goes:
Trust Steve Jobs to go and do something stupid. Again.
When people were buying CDs without complaining, when they were happy with carrying 20 - 30 Read More...
Thanks to iPhone, its competitors are also doing better business. See here.
Competitors earnestly have reason to welcome Apple to the market. Sales show that what's been good for Apple has been verrrry good for smartphone makers. Retail sales of the BlackBerry, for example, are up 38 percent in the year since the iPhone's introduction.
Somehow, that’s not surprising at all. After the iPhone, other phone manufacturers started “innovating” with touch screens, fewer buttons, accelerometers, and the like. The article draws a valid parallel between how the iPod virtually created the portable music player industry, and how the iPhone is doing the Read More...
Everyone has a precise number when predicting how many iPhones Apple will sell. But I feel that one way or another, they’re all vastly underestimating the iPhone’s sales potential for one simple reason: an iPhone is an iPod, AND a phone.
Let’s take a quick look at the iPhone sales predictions so far:
Prediction
Reason
25 million by 2009
--
Wont sell 10 million in 2008
% of the entire mobile market is too high, Apple is competing only with other smartphones, and thats a much smaller number
45 million by 2009
“Apple has caught the big Read More...