Politics and Law

(Credit: CNET News)

Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign launched an iPhone application on Thursday that turns the vaunted device into a political recruiting tool.

The most notable feature "organizes and prioritizes your contacts by key battleground states, making it easy to reach out and make an impact quickly," according to the software.

On my phone, the application ranked contacts in Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico at the top; at the bottom was a friend whose cell phone has a Texas number, though she actually lives in California.

The application anonymously reports back the number of calls made this way: "Your privacy is important: no personal data or contacts will be uploaded or stored. Only the total number of calls you make is uploaded anonymously."

The software is the latest effort by politicians to capitalize on technology, joining other examples such as ads distributed through YouTube, Web-based fund-raising, Facebook pages and fan groups, and e-mail recruitment drives.

The Obama for America iPhone application is available for download through Apple's iTunes store, said Raven Zachary, an iPhone consultant who's directing the launch effort.

A "get involved" feature uses the phone's GPS-based location sensing to find the nearest Obama campaign headquarters, and "local events" likewise pulls up a list of activities sorted by proximity.

A "media" section provides links to video and photos, but beware: YouTube showed errors following some of the links. Perhaps the newer videos hadn't been prepared for iPhone display yet.

The application also shows Obama statements to the news media and a guide to Obama's positions on various issues.

Update 8:50 a.m. PDT: The application shows how many calls have been made nationwide and how many you made. Those statistics are the kind that can motivate people--they can feel like they're part of something bigger. That may sound a bit silly as a motivational tool, but consider that Smule's Sonic Lighter application for the iPhone is popular, despite the fact that it costs 99 cents more than its free competition, likely because people can see where else on the globe people are using it and because the longer you run the application, the bigger your own spot on the map becomes. It's a kind of competition.

Update 9:28 a.m. PDT: The campaign added an Obama iPhone app Web site, too.

My editors here at News.com have been poking fun at me for being the first reporter in the newsroom to buy an iPhone--and having no end of trouble getting AT&T to activate the blasted thing followed by paying one-third more than someone would if they went shopping today.

In fact, they thought it would be a hoot for me to write about the perils of early adoption. One editor gleefully told me a moment ago that he had bought a refurbished 8GB iPhone for $350 after today's price drop. Call it institutionalized schadenfreude, with a readbehind from the copy desk.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

So, sure, I'm not delighted about paying $600 for a phone that's being sold for $400 just over two months later. And, as much as I like my iPhone, I doubt that I got $200 worth over the value my old beater phone would have provided during that time.

I'm not alone. One iPhone-related blog said "it looks like Apple doesn't care about early adopters who just paid $600+ no more than 2 months ago." Another estimated, with depressing precision, that the iPhone Early Adopter Tax was $3 a day. Macenstein is "thoroughly pissed" and wants a $100 iTunes gift card (a perfectly reasonable thing for Apple to do, by the way, but more on this later).

Apple's forums are flooded with complaints and scattered reports that store credit or partial refunds are being granted. There's also talk of using a credit card company's price-protection guarantee to seek a refund of the difference, and price protection from Apple or AT&T if you bought it in the last few weeks.

But should people be all that peeved? Not really. It's no secret that computer prices tend to fall: The PlayStation 3 got $100 cheaper this summer, and the Motorola RAZR V3 was originally $500 with a service agreement. Now it's just $50. All of us iPhoniacs knew the price would fall by a third or so.

The only surprise was how soon. I had expected a revised iPhone in January (maybe with a video camera and 3G) to be accompanied by a price cut of around $200.

So am I truly harmed? Nope. I and my fellow early adopters obviously thought that the 8 GB iPhone was more valuable to us than $600 in the bank, or we wouldn't have coughed up the cash. I'd be facing that $200 loss if I wanted to sell my iPhone today, true, but I'm not planning on it. So it's more akin to an unrealized loss, and probably no harm at all if I sell it in a year; Apple merely made my iPhone worth a few hundred dollars less a few months earlier than I expected.

The real harm could be to Apple. Customer expectations are important. Apple adored the publicity that it received when announcing astonishingly high initial iPhone sales. If Apple customers come to expect price cuts after 60 days, early sales of the the Next Must Have Gadget will be anything but stellar.

If Apple needed to reduce the price because of market pressure or to meet its sales goals, that's perfectly understandable, of course. But the reason it should show flexibility in terms of rebates or gift certificates is not simply my unrealized, earlier-than-expected loss: it's to preserve Apple's own bottom line in the future.