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July 10, 2007
Its not the iPhone, its Apple
Over the weekend I went to the Apple Store in my area, and looked at the iPhone Jeff had accused me of acquiring already. To be clear. I have not purchased one, but its not due to contempt. Its just that for my personal use I have a blackberry from att and I do not see the iPhone as a good alternative to the MS Exchange server integration.
However, if I did not have my blackberry already, I would be hard pressed to argue with the iPhone as a tool of communication. The Interface is fantastic. Having watched a coworkers phone, I want to give Apple kudos for the navigation and functionality. It may be weak in many areas but its generally awesome from the user interface perspective.
And that has been a weakness for our industry. You had to really want to be a user of some of these devices. My old blackberry with the two letter keys, my nokia with its bizarre spell checker --- all of them annoyed me. But the iPhone is a great small computer, and you can incidentally make phone calls.
If you were contemplating a Mac Mini, I would just move to this device.... And by the way this is the major point of this blog. Walk into Apple and about 25% of the store is dedicated to iPhone. Its an awesome marketing roll out and something that the phone industry just does not how to accomplish.
At the att store, the iPhone has a prominent window display but then is just another device. The coworker had problems with his first iPhones hard drive and Apple replaced it in no time. When I heard about the iPhone having problems getting the service established, I thought it made sense for people to go to att. But now I see that Apple has a commitment to this strategy that makes att a coat tail rider.
My sense is that att's marketshare is going to get a much bigger boost here than I expected, and if it keeps the relationship it could build it out into something even more spectacular.
This actually may be a sign of things to come for wifi devices / tablets with wireless broadband and dedicated services. If I were Sprint or Verizon, I would be looking for my device building friend.
Posted by carl at July 10, 2007 10:11 AM