iPhone 4 + Froyo = End of the Phone Wars
- June 8, 2010 9:56 pm
You read it here first. Phones are dead…
With the announcement of the latest iPhone and the near weekly announcements of new Android devices, skins, OS updates, etc. I think it would be prudent to take a walk back in time. Back when the iPod was a new kid on the block and Palm, MS, and Blackberry were playing king of the hill in the smartphone market.
Back in those heady days of cheap plastic casings and poor resistive touch screens we had simple products from Palm that initially ran a simple OS. We had complicated products from MS that ran a complicated (and unstable, and ugly) OS. And we had the Blackberry guys sneaking in under the covers of enterprise sales. Whether it be an MDA-like touch screen, or Palm’s Treo with a keyboard, even Blackberry’s utilitarian (read ‘fugly’) design all of the devices had one thing in common. They all sucked. Sure the geeks among us thought they were the bee’s knees back when all you could gobble cellular data (12kb/s if you were lucky) would run a sharp $15 a month. The average consumer however was uninterested, unaware, absent from that market.
Enter the iPhone. It was good looking. It was easy enough for mom and dad to use. The data plan was ridiculous at the time but it made the phone worth having and having the phone made things easier. Just being able to check email and surf the web without the thing crashing, crawling, or sandboxed to a ‘mobile’ site was enough to make the iPhone THE device to have. The first year, nothing could compete. I struggled through with my MDA for most of the first iPhones run… stupid.
Then the 3G and iPhone OS 3 came out. That brought us really usable GPS, decent data speeds, and the App store. Ahh, the App store. Gone were the days of the anything-goes-but-try-to-find-and-install it WinMo days. Here was an organized, sanitized, and frankly massive outlet for anything you wanted your phone to do. Browse from the phone, install OTA. For my money, the app store is the most important contribution Apple made to the smartphone market. And thus ended innovation…
What came next? Windows mobile look-alikes like the HTC touch… they never even took off; too slow and still crashed too much. Android? A great OS and worthy competitor, no doubt, but evolutionary if anything in the smartphone market. Even the iPhone 3GS; What did it bring? A CPU speed boost? A compass? Barely even evolutionary.
Now here we sit. The Evo 4G and HTC incredible are the ‘it’ Android phones. They look almost exactly like iPhones. The OS, while evolutionary certainly wasn’t a ‘game changer’. Windows 7 mobile is nearly absent (minus the Kin disaster). As far as I can tell Blackberry is torn between trying to make something just like the iPhone or trying to make the same old device that noone wants going on 5 years now. Palm? They’ve been sold. Even the iPhone 4 is a baby step ahead of anything on the market and will likely be outshined within 6 months. Any by what? Another phone that looks a lot like an iPhone with an extra feature very few care about here or some OS polish there.
The phone debate will soon only be for us geeks. Much like noone really cares what standalone mp3 player you’re using or what CPU you have in your desktop any more, noone will really care if you have an iPhone, an Android phone, or some other device that likely looks and acts the same. Sure, some people will buy one or the other because of name recognition. Some will buy one or the other because of an already established investment in apps or music (*raises hand*) but with one more iPhone generation, by iPhone 5, I predict noone will be whipping out their phone and say ‘look at this…’ any more than I whip out my iPod classic.
And frankly, good riddance. It’s a tired debate when we’re touting 325 ppi vs 280ppi pixel densities and bickering over who’s crappy miniature camera is better.
Honestly, though, market jumping has been one of Apple’s strengths over the last decade. They jump into the market with a defining product, sell the piss out of it until everyone catches up, and the moves on. They sold a bazillion iPods before they had real competition… now noone cares what mp3 player you have. The sold a bazillion iPhones before Android showed up. Now we’re reaching feature-parity and small incremental upgrades so Apple moves on to tablets. They’ll sell 10 million iPads before Google and MS get a reasonable competitor through the pipeline and once they do, Apple will know it’s time to move on.
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