In article <5ed5rkF35huihU1@mid.individual.net>,
"Rod Speed" <rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com> wrote:

> ZnU <znu@fake.invalid> wrote
> > Rod Speed <rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com> wrote
> >> zeez <UltimaUW@excite.com> wrote
>
> >>> The iPhone looks like a nice peice of equipment, but the biggest
> >>> beef I have with it is a lack of an SDK for 3rd party companies,
> >>> freeware developers, etc. to write software on it that runs on
> >>> the "bare metal" of the phone. This hardware has a hell of a lot
> >>> of potential, but if Apple decides "no SDK", then it's little
> >>> more than a pretty device, and at the price it's being sold at, I
> >>> expect more than a souped up V-cast style "teenybopper" phone.
> >>> Personaly, I wouldn't buy it until an SDK is released for it.
>
> >> Me neither, but I realise I'm nothing like who its aimed at.
>
> >> Bet it will do as well as the ipod did, just because it integrates
> >> a decent phone with a media player.
>
> >> Tho plenty will already have one of those, so it remains to be
> >> seen how much effect being very late to market will have.
>
> > I wouldn't consider Apple to be "very late" to this market.
>
> More fool you. High end phones with all sorts of extra capability
> have been around for a hell of a long time now, years, literally.
>
> > True, some other devices that combine these capabilities have
> > existed for some years. But the market for them has never really
> > taken off and gone mainstream.
>
> Yes, and it wont now, you watch.
>
> Most want a much cheaper phone that combines phone, media player,
> camera etc capability.

It might take a couple of years and a couple of price cuts. It did for
the iPod. But it will happen. The iPhone probably won't end up quite as
dominant as the iPod, because its attachment to a single network (at
least in the US) will cause some people to look elsewhere, but it's
going to be a major factor.

> And those who want to be able to do email etc mostly want a real
> keyboard, not a touchscreen one too.

Doubt it. Remember, this is a smart phone primarily for the iPod
demographic, not for business types who mostly use the device for
e-mail.

And it's not clear to me that the on-screen keyboard doesn't work just
as well as a physical keyboard. If you mash a couple of adjacent keys on
a physical keyboard, it has no idea which one you were trying to hit. If
you do the same on touch-screen keyboard, it can probably figure out
where the center of your finger was and recover. Plus there's the auto
correction feature.

Plus, with an on-screen input device, you can customize things for every
app. For instance, the on-screen keyboard that comes up when you type in
the URL field of Safari actually has a single key you get hit to insert
".com".

> > Apple introduced the iPod into a market that was in a similar
> > state.
>
> Nope, nothing like it. You dont need much controls wise for a media
> player and the ipod design is rather elegant and well done in that
> regard.

And the iPhone has just about the best designed UI I've ever seen on an
actual product that's actually available to the public. Even most
unlikely concept product UI demos one sees don't look as good.

> And virtually everyone didnt already have a media player at
> the time that the ipod showed up. Virtually everyone already has a
> cellphone now and most of those already have a media player now too
> if they use one much. Hordes of them have a media player/phone/camera
> combined already.

However, most of those people don't use the media player functions of
their phones, because they use iPods instead. The market has shown that
it greatly values iPods over other media players. I would expect it
would greatly value an iPod phone over other media player phones, for
all the same reasons.

Plus, people replace their phone and media player every couple of years
anyway. And the iPhone isn't all that expensive compared with the cost
of an iPod + a phone. (If you restrict your choice of phone to one of
the few others with a decent web browser, anyway.)

--
"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