Apple's iPhone Announced - Cutting Edge or Old News?

info@santry.com — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 06:00:00 GMT

The news today out of the Mac world is the iPhone will become available sometime in the future. This was anticipated in the Apple fanboy community for a while now. According to the story on MSNBC.com, the phone will support touch screen, wireless Internet browsing, and music and video playing. All of this is supposed to be cutting edge and new. According to Steve Jobs:

“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he said during his keynote address at the annual Macworld Conference and Expo. “It’s very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. ... Apple’s been very fortunate in that it’s introduced a few of these.”

Revolutionary? Let me pull out my Samsung i730 SmartPhone running Windows Mobile 5.0 and see what revolutionary features I may be missing. Synch with Media Player and my music library, ok check. Hmm... ...touchscreen, uh no, I got that as well. Wireless Internet browsing, let's see... ...oh, yeah, got that, either WiFi, or EVDO access. Music and video playing, let's see.. WMV, DivX, Xvid, MP4, even that ugly Apple format I have, hmm... ...guess that isn't too revolutionary either. So what is? And I can pick from many different styles and vendors. So wake me up when Steve is done, ok?

Really, there is nothing revolutionary about it. The one thing that is, is Apple Inc.'s ability to dumb down the features and interface to something that the general consumer will be attracted to. If Microsoft were to position themselves in this market, they already have the applications and resources to compete here. Create two separate products one aimed at the corporate users which contains all the features they want and another aimed at consumers giving them the media management capabilities they want. Microsoft has done it with Vista, they can do it with Windows Mobile (which the Zune already runs). I'm sure this isn't an original idea, and someone in Redmond is already working on it. We'll just have to wait and see what 2007 or 2008 brings.

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Apple's iPhone Announced - Cutting Edge or Old News?