Why iPhone is not ‘the next iPod’
Steve Safran June 29th, 2007
(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.
13 Comments Add your own
1. Chris Rooney | June 29th, 2007 at 7:51 am
Amen. 1) My compnay phone is with Verizon and I don’t see them changing that deal anytime soon. 2) They just want to be able to get messages to me. They probablly would prefer if I wasn’t watching “The Office” on the device. 3) They’re not going to shell out $500-600 per employee on a mobile device anyway.
2. Brock | June 29th, 2007 at 8:37 am
1) Carrier-independence sounds great on paper, but if you know the industry you know that the industry is full of dinosaurs. Carriers think they are king and device manufacturers serve them. It takes an unconventional carrier to be pushed around by a device manufacturer.
2) It’s a shallow analysis that considers the enterprise customer the most important customer. When has Apple ever focused substantial marketing and product development on the enterprise?
3) Much of the article focuses on product naming. Who cares? You like KRZR or RZR or LG 2000399 better? Who care? The a name allows you to instantly understand what it is and why you want it.
3. JoeMo | June 29th, 2007 at 9:42 am
The phone only working with AT&T is the deal breaker. If the phone had been on Sprint, I’d be standing in line too.
4. David Johnson | June 29th, 2007 at 10:15 am
no dobut, the cost of ownership is in the business class ballpark, and this product is clearly not built for business. Saf\’s post on the year one costs of the iphone hit the issue on the head long ago:
www.lostremote.com/2007/01/14/the-real-cost-of-an-iphone-1300-2000-in-year-one/
i pay for blackberries because our employees need to be there when we need them and the expense is well worth it. that same expense for entertainment and communications on a personal level is pushing it.
@Brock: i would argue that apple has stayed alive for years by focusing on one particular niche of the enterprise: designers. macs dominate the professional creative world.
5. Rocker | June 29th, 2007 at 10:37 am
I had an AT&T phone/plan a few years ago…when some issues cropped up that I needed to resolve. I can’t even begin to convey the incompetence, rudeness and sheer stupidity I encountered with their customer “service” people. Dropped them the minute the contract was up…would take more than the iPhone to make me go back.
6. Richard | June 29th, 2007 at 10:48 am
I, for one, will no longer call ‘em telephones.
tele - Latin for “far off” + phone - Latin for “sound”
That is so 1885.
I propose combining mundi, Latin for “world, or mankind,” with nectare, Latin for “to bind together, to connect.”
Mundinectare, as in…
“I really like your mundinectare ringtone!”
“Why thank you! I was leaning toward La Cucaracha but decided to go with Dixie as my mundinectare ringtone.”
“Can you read the Chron on your mundinectare?”
“My mundinectare will actually read the Chron outloud, using the Gilbert Gottfried voicebot!”
“If you hooked a lanyard to your mundinectare and hung it around your neck, would you call it a monkey necktie?”
“yes”
I’m sorry, back to work.
7. Steve Safran | June 29th, 2007 at 11:20 am
Sweet ‘tare you got there.
8. Mitch | June 29th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
AR&D needs to stick to news consulting. They clearly don’t understand the mobile market. FIrst, it’s wrong to say there’s no technical reason the phones can’t work on any given carrier. Yes there is: The networks are incompatible. There are three different networks out there with multiple data network standards. You have to build a phone for each flavor. Secondly, Apple needed a carrier to give up control. Verizon passed and AT&T said yes. In exhange they got exclusivity. Third, Apple wants to get this thing global as soon as possible and that necessitates GSM and if you’re doing GSM you have to go T-Mobile or AT&T in the U.S.
9. Steve Safran | June 29th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Never mind.
10. discreet_chaos | June 29th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
OK - I don’t have an iPod, so I may be wrong, but my understanding is that the iPod only plays things bought from iTunes and I think you’d be hard-pressed to call the formation of a monopoly, technologically-innovative.
11. David Johnson | June 29th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
@discreet_chaos: ipods play mp3s, and you can import into iTunes as mp3 so content can be platform agnostic. since i use linux, mac and windows interchangably, i got a cowon iaudio x5 (which did video before the ipod did) and use it with iTunes or anything else i want.
as for everyone else, i just remembered an article in the WSJ published on B1 june 19th: “Companies Hang Up on Apple’s iPhone” that is worth a read for those interested in this thread.
the deal is that if you can pull off a patch to get iPhones onto your blackberry, microsoft or motorola messaging systems, doing so will put another hole in the system that hackers can try to exploit. if you are a publicly traded company and your mail systems fall under the draconian sarbanes oxley controls, it is not worth the extreme angst to even try it. most exchange admins turned off automatic forwarding and open relays long ago to thwart spammers. iPhones can connect via IMAP protocol, which is just about as bad as POP.
12. discreet_chaos | June 29th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Thanks David - The iTunes software downloaded with a QuickTime update, but I bailed during the setup because it was asking me too many questions about my musical tastes, so I thought it sounded too much like spyware for me to have it for no reason.
Otherwise, I’ve bought some songs from Yahoo! and Walmart to burn for my kids and my wife has taken it upon herself to fill-out our physical CD collection. As for myself, I generally turn-on the local NPR affiliate or Clear Channel’s “Smooth Jazz” in the car and when I’m at home, I generally listen to theclassicalstation[dot]org, something from my “dial” which I’ve built from the site that I’ve recoded my name to link, or I used to keep Pipeline in a corner of the screen before they shutdown.
I guess when you get old and live in a place without good radio, your musical choices could easily become a source for derision.
13. Austin | July 2nd, 2007 at 9:18 pm
This analysis is based on technical ignorance of wireless carrier systems. Respondents #2 and #8 have it absolutely right: there are absolutely technical reasons why the phone could not work on any carrier whatsoever. Not portably, at any rate (especially since, at this point, there are carrier-side changes that have to be made to accommodate “visual voicemail”), at least in the U.S. In countries where users are expected to pay full price for a handset, you can typically take your handset from provider to provider as you get a better deal from providers. As long as North American users expect to pay $50 for a crackberry, there is no inherent handset portability even among compatible networks (phone locking). (I used to work for a US cellular carrier that was ultimately absorbed into AT&T Wireless.)
Mr Johnson is similarly ignorant of modern email systems, by suggesting that the undocumented, proprietary (ActiveSync) Exchange protocol is inherently more secure than standards-based IMAP email systems. This is certainly NOT the case. Modern IMAP and POP servers are configurable for use over SSL tunnels (GMail, for example, uses POP over SSL; this is more secure than Exchange by default.) SOX compliance does not prohibit IMAP access; SOX could be met simply by putting IMAP access behind the firewall (requiring a VPN tunnel) or making it IMAP+SSL. And yes, the iPhone speaks IMAP+SSL and POP+SSL (as well as SMTP+SSL so that your *outgoing* messages are secure, too).
I’m not planning on buying an iPhone (it doesn’t have a feature that I need in a phone, so this may be a temporary rejection) when it becomes available in Canada (where I now reside), but the reasons provided are, by and large, bogus and ill-informed.
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