In article <1182766023.944929.238320@j4g2000prf.googlegroups. com>,
zeez <UltimaUW@excite.com> wrote:

> On Jun 24, 6:09 pm, justincas...@gmail.com (Justin) wrote:
> > Rocky Mountain News
> >
> > Apple's iPhone top choice to buy, survey shows
> > By Bloomberg News
> > June 23, 2007
> >
> > Apple Inc.'s iPhone was a top choice in a survey of people who plan to buy
> > an advanced mobile phone in the next three months, a sign the new device
> > may take market share from rivals.
> >
>
> Lemme guess....the status seekers, right?

Have you watched the videos of the iPhone in use? It provides by far the
best user experience of any handset on the market. As a desktop
operating system developer, Apple brings far more to the table on this
front than companies which have previously only designed UI for
simplistic embedded devices.

I'm using a four year-old Nokia Series 60 phone simply because I don't
particularly consider anything I've seen recently to constitute much of
an upgrade. I'll probably be buying an iPhone.

The people who sit around counting the number of bullet points on spec
sheets are seriously missing the point, just as they did with the iPod.

Apple's major recent successes practically all revolve around taking
technologies that are out there, but that regular consumers don't quite
get, into mass market technologies. They played a fairly large role in
doing this with WiFi, and they did it with the iPod. Apple didn't do
anything in these instances that was *technically* much different from
what others were doing. What they did was package the technology to make
it palatable to regular people, and create a use case for it that
regular people understood.

They're now looking to do the same thing in the smart phone market.
Currently these phones appeal to business types and tech-heads. Apple is
going to make one that works for the iPod demographic.

It's really dangerous to underestimate Apple here. To lift from a post I
made to CSMA a couple of weeks back:

At first glance, in this market, it appears that Apple is going up
against well entrenched, serious competitors. Upon further examination,
however, one realizes that most of the players in this space are,
frankly, amateurs compared with Apple.

Yes, I'm completely serious. Apple's established competitors in the
cell phone market (or the vendors they license software from) mostly
have backgrounds building simple embedded software systems for very
limited devices. A company that has been developing operating systems
for desktop computers for a few decades is in a far better position to
tackle the challenges of building a real platform for today's mobile
devices, which are no longer all that limited.

Does anyone really see Nokia or Motorola or even Palm developing a
platform that can match OS X? Creating and maintaining a desktop-class
OS is not at all trivial. None of Apple's competitors really has any
serious experience with it except for Microsoft, and Microsoft has its
own problems.

[snip]

--
"That's George Washington, the first president, of course. The interesting thing
about him is that I read three--three or four books about him last year. Isn't
that interesting?"
- George W. Bush to reporter Kai Diekmann, May 5, 2006