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FOREWORD - Two 'peas' in a POD
Is Apple really stealing a march on the mobile industry?
Lynd Morley takes a look
Apple's iPhone may be over-hyped, over-priced and (so far) not over here, but despite that it's been a bit of a cage-rattler for the mobile industry - both vendors and service providers. And so it should. Yes, we know all the nerdy objections to the thing are valid: most of the gadget's features are already available on existing phones from other vendors. And while the touch-sensitive screen is very clever and the ‘visual voicemail' feature breaks new ground (for the first time the device vendor seems to be dictating network-supported features to the service provider) these are hardly innovations to set the industry quaking in its boots. What the industry should really worry about with the iPhone only became blindingly obvious in early September when Apple launched its latest iPod (the music devices with the white earplugs that young persons tend to wear). It looked strangely familiar... In fact the new iPOD Touch is really the iPhone without the phone. It's a WiFi-enabled music player with the same case and has the same touch screen and, most important, the same icon-driven interface. What Apple has now delivered is two identical ‘p's in a pod - a phone and a player. Importantly, there is certainly more to come. This is the concrete expression of Apple's iLife framework for integrating the consumer's digital world. Functions such as satellite navigation, camera, storage can all be spun out as stand-alone products or spun in in various combinations to share functions on a convergence device. Using it, the Apple brand can be spread like a viral infection across multiple existing categories of electronic device and even a few we've yet to think of, most of all across mobile phones. In fact what Apple is selling with it's iLife is not the same old gadgetry but an electronic wardrobe of matching accessories. It may be brilliantly trendy and a marketing triumph but the approach is also brilliantly necessary. That's because the natural brake on the utility of digital media devices of all types has always been their complexity at the user interface - so the ‘fiddlingaboutness' generally required to do things with portable digital content meant most of us under-use the facilities already available. There's a much better chance of us all doing complicated things like synching up devices, transferring files and songs to a central library and so on and so forth, if the processes are easy to follow and execute (and aren't completely different on each device you come to). So that' why Apple's might just succeed - the nagging worry for the mobile phone incumbents is that maybe they, or perhaps a combination of players, should have grasped this nettle more deftly themselves and moved on from the ‘button-driven' gadget environment to a personal device systems market first.
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