iPhone: talk about media frenzy
The iPhone is just a cool toy. There’s no 3G in this version. It costs £269 (and that’s just for starters) and the 2MP camera is hardly high-tech.
The phone is a second generation mobile phone in a third generation market… Many of the iPhone features are wants not needs. It whets consumers’ appetites, rather than satisfies their hunger.”
All good points. But let’s not overstate the 3G issue. Nokia packs 3G plus Wi-Fi into its N95 and, should you use either on a regular basis, you’ll typically not get much more than a day’s usage out of the phone. Many users have found that they need to charge their N95s up every night. This is hardly ideal for a so-called smartphone.
She’s dead right about the camera though.
The very fact that the iPhone is a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ phone means (if we adhere to the old saying) that’s going to be ‘master of none’. As we’ve written before, you can think of the iPhone as a phone with a built-in iPod. Or you can view it as a sexy, connected PDA (or Internet Tablet), that you can also make calls with.
The iPhone could be part of an Apple strategy that embraces the ‘connected home’ or ‘digital home’.
And while Carphone Warehouse expects to sell 10,000 iPhones on Friday, there might not be the mad rush to buy one that we witnessed in the US.
Apple will be reaching out to mainstream, picky mobile users who want full content portability rather than a partial service.
