(This column originally appeared in the June 27 edition of the AR&D Media 2.0 Intel Report.)
Forget, right away, the many times you’ll read “Is the iPhone the next iPod?” It isn’t. It can’t be. It won’t be. The iPhone, even if it is a runaway hit that everyone wants, can’t be universal. That’s because Steve Jobs threw in his lot with AT&T. To use the iPhone, you need AT&T (the former Cingular, as you are no doubt sick of hearing from the ads) as the wireless provider. The deal is exclusive for three years. So right away, everyone who isn’t an AT&T customer – you’re out of the iPhone potential market pool.
The iPhone could have made a statement if Jobs had pulled off in telecom what he did for downloadable music. The genius if the iTunes store was that Apple managed to get the major record labels to unify on one platform under one virtual roof at one price. It was a mess before iTunes came along. Here, you had hardware (iPod) and software (iTunes) working hand in hand. Genius.
If only Apple could have done that with the iPhone. There’s no technical reason why your phone can’t work with any given carrier. It’s just that it’s always been that hardware manufacturers have cut deals with wireless providers for exclusivity. Had Apple been able to break down that wall, it would have achieved something major.
But even if it had unified the carriers, the iPhone would have faced another problem: businesses. Companies that provide mobile phones for their employees are, overwhelmingly, PC-based. They use their Exchange servers to push email to employee phones. Nobody needs a “professional iPod.” But we need enterprise-level phone and messaging solutions. Try convincing companies to switch their backroom operations to Apples so people can have cute phones.
The iPhone is, make no mistake, a wonder of design, functionality and capabilities. The biggest impact the iPhone is likely to have is on the marketplace of cell phones as a whole. It will force its competitors to make better phones. We’re already seeing articles about “alternatives to the iPhone,” and there are phones out there that do nearly everything the iPhone does. It’s just that Apple has always tied together everything so neatly and in such a neat package. Look for overall improvements in cell phone design and functionality in the next year.
When do we stop calling these things phones, anyway?
Here is a list of things I can do with a portable device. I want you to tell me what the device is:
1. Keep my contacts
2. Listen to my music
3. Watch my movies
4. Read my email
5. Look at my photos
6. Send text messages
7. Look up maps
8. Surf the web
9. Call my friends
Is it a phone? Is it a computer? What is it? In this case, it’s my laptop. It’s portable – albeit a little more cumbersome than a laptop, but I can do all of those tasks with my MacBook Pro. I regularly call friends on Skype or through iChat. We don’t call those conversations “phone calls,” but what’s the difference?
The iPhone is an ultra-portable computer. It runs on OS X, just like Macs. Blackberry users know that they check email on their device far more often than they use it to make phone calls. I use my Motorola Q more for email and data than I do for voice. The “phone” part of iPhone may well wind up being used third, behind email and music.
So when do we stop calling these portable thingies “phones,” anyway? Heck – on Star Trek, they call their devices “communicators,” and all those things do is let you talk back and forth! The new mobile phones can make a stronger case for being called “communicators” than the Star Trek walkie-talkie communicators ever could.
We have been creeping to this point since mobile phones started adding small features. But it has only been in the past couple of years that these have turned into multi-media devices where the user’s time is spread across different chores. The iPhone should hammer this home – the device is no longer defined by its use, its primary use or its legacy use. It’s a “you device.” Whatever you use it for most becomes its primary use.
The mobile web is different from the desktop and laptop web. There are already mobile-maximized sites out there. But these are mostly just lite versions of web pages. The mobile web is different – people using it have different needs. What successful local media companies will pay attention to is how people use the iPhone and its upcoming competitors in new ways. They will build pages and generate content that people using the mobile web will want.
And it won’t matter one bit to the user if the device they get than information on is called a “phone” or not.
