You're losing them Steve; The Reason for the iPhone Hype |

Yesterday my boss' wife came into the office and was complaining about how she hated the iPhone and how it did not bring anything new to the table and how it was really not anything special. She complained about how her Blackberry did a better job at everything that she wants to do with a phone, which is, check email, organize contacts and have a dashboard with all her appointments, notices and latest emails / text messages. I got to play with her iPhone for a little bit to show her how to do things without really using that much effort, for instance, having the phone application be in contacts before closing it, that way she can press the home button twice and have it go there automatically (granted she is not playing music at the moment). Then she said she missed her Blackberry and she did not understand the iPhone hype. That's when it dawned on me. The iPhone itself is an extremely boring device. It has a nice style to it and it is certainly well made, but honestly applications make the iPhone. The fact that you don't have an instant messaging application, multimedia sms, direct access to the address book and that you still have to sync through iTunes... Its just painful for those who don't care about music and videos and just want a serious business device. Now, Apple has been working hard to solve this. They have included exchange support to the platform and will finally bring address book search to the production model (they've shown it off in presentations before, but never actually made it out). This will certainly appease a few people, but not all. Apple never set out to create a smart phone, they never set out to create a platform. This is best seen when you see how they divided their company, Mac (OS X based devices), iPhone (Moile OS X based devices), Music (FairPlay based services). What does this all mean? It means that Apple has been guiding everybody along. They changed the rules of the game last year when they introduced the iPhone. They then helped people update their websites to fit within wireless standards and just declared the iPhone resolution as the resolution to be. This helped many web developers get their websites up to date and running on mobile devices, which is something that Android users will benefit from later this year. That is all well and good, but everybody knew at one point the iPhone would have to be open to developers, even while Steve claimed they couldn't open it because it would be a risk to AT&T's network. Like clockwork, once they were convinced that websites would still create mobile optimized websites, they moved to the SDK. That day is now, when the application store opens it will be a completely different game. The iPhone will really shine and people will be able to see that the iPhone is all about the applications. You might just shrug and say that Blackberry has had applications for years, and you would be correct. This is not a new concept, creating applications for phones, the shift is in who has these phones and what the software will be focusing on. Let me put this into perspective, if you go to the Blackberry Application store right now these are the ten best selling applications for the Blackbery Pearl:

Are you bored yet? Oh, yeah, there's also games. and they all look like they were created years ago for the Palm and were ported by a monkey that didn't quite understand what he was doing. Those are $9.95~ on average. I think you understand how, apart from games, nobody will pay those prices for software outside of the corporate world. Specially if the software is just a one year subscription. There's even some software that I don't understand there. BBSmart Email Viewer allows your emails to be more readable? You mean Blackberry knows they have a problem where the emails are kind of hard to read, but they refuse to fix it?

Early reports about the Apple App Store place most software between free and 9.99. Which means more people will be willing to just buy an app because they like the idea, than because they need it. Considering the iPhone can already read PDFs, Excel and Word documents you will only be needing a chat application from that list, and perhaps the e-Mobile which gives you a dashboard view of everything that is happening. This is the true power of the iPhone, connecting normal people to their everyday lives. The eBay application is the first one I will download. Bloggers will now have TypePad on their phones to blog away at their hearts desire. TomTom already mentioned they were going to bring turn by turn navigation. This is all opt-in. You do not have to buy an application you do not want. You do not have to pay AT&T for their television service, but I am sure an application will come along that will let you access it. All in all, I believe that when the Application store opens you will see why all the tech geeks hyped the iPhone so much and why we are disappointed that in Apple's second incarnation of it, they decided to just refine their original, rather than push the envelope again.