CTIA attendees ponder the iPhone
Influence is tough to measure, but it's one of those things where you know it when you see it.
Apple's influence on the mobile phone industry after just over 90 days as a player was evident at the CTIA show Tuesday. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer didn't mention the iPhone specifically in his keynote address, but noted that Apple "has done some nice work." After Ballmer's keynote, a friend of some staffers in Microsoft's booth enthusiastically demonstrated his iPhone for an audience checking out the latest Windows Mobile phones. And a panel of five mobile executives spent 90 minutes discussing the impact of the iPhone on their businesses and the future of the industry.
Surrounded by Windows Mobile phones, a friend of the blue-shirted staffers at Microsoft's booth shows off his iPhone.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)That's not because they're scared Apple is eating into their piece of the pie, observed Motorola's David Ulmer, senior director of entertainment products. Apple may have sold over a million iPhones last quarter, but "some of us sold that many before breakfast," he quipped: The entire mobile phone industry ships well over a billion handsets a year these days.
Instead, panelists recognized the iPhone as bringing two major changes to their industry. First, the iPhone is the "first mass-market non-carrier controlled event," said Adam Guy, general manager of the telecom and media practice at Compete, a market research firm. Apple owns the experience and the relationship with iPhone users, not the carrier, and that's a feat the other hardware companies have yet to pull off.
The iPhone also is a new way of looking at smartphones: Is it a computer? A phone? An iPod? Lee Ott, director of product management for Yahoo Mobile, said, "The iPhone is the first phone that puts the Internet and data right up on a par with calling," explaining that while there are plenty of phones out there capable of browsing the Internet, few of those products emphasize data as much as they do voice calls. In fact, the iPhone is already one of the top five devices in the world that accesses Yahoo Mobile on a daily basis, he said.
Well then, why didn't the established players figure out that formula? Given the lack of a carrier representative on stage, panelists spent a fair amount of time discussing the sins of the carriers. Ulmer said that Motorola sells tons of touch-screen capable phones in China, but when they approached U.S. carriers with similar designs two years ago, they were rebuffed by executives who said, "Come back when you've got a keypad."
He also noted that in the past, it was more profitable for carriers to emphasize voice and text messaging on bandwidth-constrained networks over interesting video or data applications, so that's what they did. That's changing as 3G networks become more widespread, but helps explain why the iPhone caught the industry flat-footed.
But these are companies with deep pockets and enough experience to know which way the wind blows. All major U.S. carriers and most major phone manufacturers will have an answer to the iPhone available by the end of this year that emphasizes a better user experience, said Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt, a start-up that lets friends track each other's whereabouts through their mobile phones. "Even for people that don't have iPhones, they expect their phone to behave like that."
Sometimes, it takes an outsider to remind an industry where it needs to be, said Cyriac Roeding, executive vice president for CBS Mobile. "For the first time, you have a Silicon Valley company disrupting the entire (mobile) market. The fact that we are sitting here talking about the iPhone, and that Motorola is joining us to talk about the iPhone, shows the power of the iPhone. It's an awesome version 1.0."
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
iPhone is not merely a "touch screen", it's MULTI-touch, and it's
beginning.
overpriced Sony Ericsson turd I was using before. It's really a great
experience that gets better each time I use it.
Nobody figured it out until now because the TelCo's aren't
interested in making customers happy, they're interested in the
biggest profit for the least amount of effort. Cingular was a good
company and I'm sad AT&T bought them. They (Cingular) deserve
better.
iPhones sold in France through Orange would have to comply with
consumer's rights laws of France by suppling in addition to the
"locked" Orange version an "unlocked" version which would allow
cell phone subscribers to use the cell phone provider of their
choice. This "Naked iPhone" comes at a price though as it's
expected to cost over $1,200.
Where's the alleged "impact"?
not speaking from a loyalty perspective. The impact is not to
you personally or really any individual. The impact comes from
bringing new ideas into a stale market, forcing other
manufacturers to take a new look at their own offerings while
also determining what factors are the most successful for the
iPhone. This is healthy competition that will drive the cell phone
industry beyond its' current business model and into a more
user-focused framework. The iPhone, love it or hate it, is proof
that consumers want device convergence and mobile
computing.
Don't look at this as platform wars (Os X vs. Symbian vs. Linux
vs. WM) but rather look to the whole picture of where cell phone
technology can and will go every time someone comes in and
shakes things up a bit. The iPhone may not be the right choice
for many people for vastly different reasons, but the fact
remains it is having a huge impact on the field and things can
only get better because of this.
- It's the USER INTERFACE!
- by jbelkin October 24, 2007 5:18 PM PDT
- Once again (as with iPods), they left the controls to engineers or marketers. Just look at the latest SAmsung phone they are touting as an iphone competitor ... the icons are 1D, 2D & 3D along with another rows of icons that don't tell you what they are - what is an icon without meaning? A tiny phone handle is universally understood as a phone but a phone with two arrows? Is that talk or some sync thing?
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(10 Comments)Like the iPod, they just don't get it.
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