Great, just lost a post I had spent the day writing.. in a computer crash. Fun.. 

So what the hell, why not regress to talking about Apple’s new 3G iPhone that Steve Jobs announced in his Key Note at this here WWDC 08.  I figure I can do apple analysis just as good as the next guy anyway.. so why not?

So, what’s new and exciting in the land of the Apples iPhone platform? For those of us inclined to follow such things, including the surrounding rumor mill.. not much really… Thing’s are more or less going as expected, though perhaps not as exciting as expected, and perhaps that might have something to do with Apple’s less then amazing stock price around the event? Aww, but what the speculator’s missed.. which is the most important thing for Apple’s iPhone business would be the price cut of the new iPhones… price cut in half!

Why is this exciting to Apple’s business? Well the old iPhone price forced it to compete with other “smart phones.” Smart phones being a kind of ultra portable / mobile computing platform.. In this market.. smart phones do a lot that the iPhone doesn’t.. where the iPhone kicks the but on conventional smart phones is in the user interface / design / experience department.. which is literally revolutionizing the cell phone business today. The trouble is, I think it’s safe to say, if you’re serious about your smart phone, you probably won’t give it up for an iPhone because there’s a smart phone feature or two you live by.. Of course Apple will have a robust ecosystem of apps running on the iPhone shortly.. and when that happens the balance of power will shift, to one degree or another, in Apple’s favor.. but lets face it boys and girls, the smart phone is probably not the largest area of the cell phone market.

Cutting the iPhone’s price in half means it’s now competing against phones that are, to put it a certain sorta way, “much less smart,” and when you now consider what you get for $200 or $300… things have gone a little crazy. So, what do you get?

1.  A mobile gaming platform: I don’t know how good or bad the iPhone, is in practice, as a gaming platform.. Apple doesn’t exactly have a great reputation among gamers.. but the novelty of being able to play games that rely on a touch screen interface / the iPhone’s ability to sense how it’s being moved through space.. you at least have something interesting going on.. It would seem to be the wii of portable gaming. Getting this for $200.. if it turns out to indeed be a killer game platform.. well that would be reason enough to buy it, wouldn’t it?
2. You get an iPod.. Boys and girls, do you realize that the iPod Nano costs $200 for the 8 GB version, and the 8GB iPhone costs $200? The iPhone, if you just thought of it as an iPod.. is a MUCH better iPod.. I mean you get a big old wide screen on that there iPhone.. a very very nice one at that! Not to mention that the user interface of the iPhone is a good deal better!
3. You get a kind of mobile internet platform.. and in my view, this is probably where the iPhone outshines everything out there the most.. The mobile internet, as anyone who’s interested in the mobile web will tell you, is a world with amazing possibilities.. and realities that truly suck. Developing websites for the mobile web sucks because there’s a zillion web browsers on a zillion different phones.. and for you’re site to work well on any of them.. well you’re going to have to specially develop for each particular browser.. which is expensive!  Consequently.. nothing too amazing is happening on the mobile web today.. but on the iPhone we have safari which, as it happens, is a pretty good web standards compliant browser.. which means it can view all current well designed websites… and it really doesn’t take that much to optimize a site for the iPhone.. I mean we are mainly just talking css here, right?
4. Yes boys and girls, we finally got our GPS? GPS, if you don’t know, is a groovy little technology that.. via the magic of global positioning.. can tell you where you are at any given moment. Now why would you want something like that? Well the obvious application is if you’re lost, as I often am, it can give you directions.. another sorta obvious advantage is location based search “show me the closes gas station, I’m on E” But wait, the fun doesn’t stop here.. there’s mobile social networking.. “hey look, my friend is just down the street!  Hey friend, wanna do lunch?” Aww.. stalkers have never had it so good! But wait, there’s more.. there’s games like Geo Cashing.. which I wont go into here.. and.. my favorite.. it probably wouldn’t take too much work to develop a program where by you.. press a button every time you take a picture with your camera [in my case I’m not talking about the iPhone camera] and your iphone generates an XML file with those times, and a “Geo Tag” which contains your GPS coordinates with the time you pressed that button with where u was.. and you have another little program that looks at the time code in you’re comera’s picture’s meta tags, matches the two.. and automatically puts geo tags in your pictures.. how cool is that? Of course I won’t go into that here ether, and thought it might sound like a whole other language from the one you know.. you’re just going to have to trust me, its cool.
5. Organizational apps stuff: You got you’re calendar, you’re address book.. your etc.. synching with your computer.. I’m not real big on this sorta thing.. but if I ever get my act together and get organized.. I’m sure this’ll be uber groovy.
6. Did I mention it’s a kind of mobile computing platform? Time will tell what this looks like.. but its exciting.. 
7. Did I mention it’s 3G? Well the deal here is you have a MUCH faster internet experience.. but at the cost of battery life. My understanding is you might be able to turn the 3G on and off.. which will help.

Latter that day:

So, will Matt buy one?

The big thing I wanted was a video camera.. I real want the ability to stream live from anywhere.. and for the moment, to do that, you need one of them “really smart smart phones.” [which costs around 4 or 5 hundred dollars] An this is the big thing causing me to want to kind of hold off on an iPhone.. 

On the other hand.. though I’d probably want the $300 16GB model.. the part about what you get for $200.. has me getting ready to make the jump.

Top reasons why I’ll probably get one: 

1. I would have had a lot easier of a time getting to last nights tweet up.. where I spent a lot of time walking around because I couldn’t remember the name of the place the meet up was at.. and went to the wrong places.. if I had an iPhone.. I could have found it pretty quick… 
2. I go to lots of meet ups as a part of the local social media scene.. these often involve going to places I’ve never been before, and thus often involve getting lost.
3. Being able to have email on the go is huge. I’m just not a phone person.. the idea that I can still be connected to the world via email, while on the go..  solves a lot of issues.
4. Being connected….  being able to tweet on the go.. hell, being able to blog on the go.. being connected to my social networks on the go.. that has huge value to me.
5. Just the idea of having a cell phone, that I actually use, actually own.. has great value to me.

Is There anything else to be considered? 

Surely different people will have different things to consider differently.. but I think the only real thing I’ve left out in all this is the topic of calling plans. I don’t know what the the story is here.. I read, on friendfeed, a friends twitter..  which talked about the 3G data plan as being $10 a month more then it was for the previous iPhone.. perhaps this has something to do with how cheap the new iPhone is? Well, that friendfeed twitter seemed a little suspect for reasons I won’t go into here.. but yeah, I think it’s reasonable that we might see calling plans, including unlimited data.. starting somewhere around.. I want to say $60 or $70 a month? It doesn’t strike me as too unreasonable a price.. but it’s surely something you need to figure into all of this.

Yeah.. so I don’t know, what do yo think of this iPhone business? Did I mention that I don’t really know anything about smart phones, or any of this stuff I’m talking about? [editors note, always beware the unreliable narrator!]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 5:26 am and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.