I love my toys as much as the next guy. But lugging around my Palm, my iPod Video, my MacBook Pro and often my digital still cameras (one for snap shots, one for “art” photos) can be a bit much. Enter the iPhone. Here are a couple paragraphs about it from today’s New York Times:
As Mr. Jobs pointed out in his keynote presentation, the iPhone is at least three products merged into one: a phone, a wide-screen iPod and a wireless, touch-screen internet communicator. That helps to explain its price: $499 or $599 (with four or eight gigabytes of storage).
As you’d expect of Apple, the iPhone is gorgeous. Its face is shiny and black, rimmed by mirror-finish stainless steel. The black is textured aluminum, interrupted only by the lense of a two-megapixel camera and a mirrored Apple logo. the phone is slightly taller and wider than a Palm Treo, but much thinner (4.5 by 2.4 by 0.46 inches).
That said, you won’t see my name on the pre-order list. Here’s why:
- Mac’s last phone was a flop and while this one sounds great, inevitably there will be bugs that will need to be fixed.
- iPhone is only available with Cingular which just isn’t as good as Verizon, especially in New York City. I had Cingular and switched because of too many dropped calls (I once had 11 in a 2 mile stretch).
- iPhone is really expensive (see prices above).
- iPods are fragile. My family has 4 active iPod users and in the last year, we’ve had to replace three iPods for various reasons (hard drive died, battery failed, who knows?). I would be a little concerned about relying on an iPod product for my must-have phone.
Marketing for Good generally embraces product enhancements like the new iPhone as a means of gaining competitive advantage. Marketing a product like iPhone would be pure joy as there are at least 600,000 ealry adopters out there who will gladly cough up the extra dough to show off their “latest and greatest” gadget. That said, for the iPhone to become as popular as the iPod, the price will need to drop and Apple will need to address their reliability issues with a combination of better warranties and more durable manufacturing. When Apple does this, they will be making life a little better, at least for electronic toy lovers like me.