I’ve been pretty busy with my new day job this week, that I haven’t had time to add my two cents to the explosion of iPhone news on the blogosphere and the rest of the media. However, I have to say that the iPhone has been on my mind quite often.

First, let’s recap about the iPhone.

The iPhone was called by Gizmodo as “the Jesus phone” because it was supposed to save the entire mobile phone world. Indeed, over the past few years iPhone speculation mounted rapidly so that every feature imaginable was attributed to the iPhone : the ultimate device that will do for phones what the iPod did for digital music players. Such was the demand for this mythical phone that many fake mockups have been made, and each time one was “discovered”, it would provoke a new round of speculations.

To be honest, even though I was hoping for the iPhone this Macworld, deep down inside I was prepared to be disappointed. I would not have minded continuing with the Treo a bit longer — after all, the Treo is still in my opinion the best smartphone in the market today. But what about six months, or a year from now, when the iPhone will be made available worldwide? Having seen the iPhone, it is worth the wait.

How cool is it, that while fans have been asking for the iPhone for many years, Apple has been working on it for just as long? Typical of Apple, they never released a half-baked product — they waited until they felt they could deliver the goods. And deliver they did. This is what we know about the iPhone today:

  • slim (at 11.6mm, just a hair thinner than the Motorola Q, and almost half as thick as the Treo 750)
  • Apple simplicity (just one button at the front)
  • stable legacy software (runs Mac OS X!)
  • a world phone (quad-band GSM/EDGE)
  • WiFi
  • large, 160dpi touchscreen with Minority Report-like gesture manipulation
  • looks stunning

The price, as is expected from Apple’s early product iteration, is quite steep : US$499 for a 4GB model, and $599 for the 8GB model.

What’s the bad news? For starters, we have to wait another six months while Apple goes through their standard FCC approval for release in the US. After that, we should see the iPhone arrive in Europe by the end of this year, and in Asia (and in my hands, hopefully) in 2008. That’s a long wait.

Another concern is that for a high-end phone, the iPhone doesn’t have support for the latest-and-greatest 3G UMTS/HSDPA networks.

The impact of the iPhone’s introduction on Palm (and its rival RIM) has been rather significant. Palm’s share price tumbled. Palm never had a big market share in the phone market to start with, but it did set plans to increase that share with the Treo 680 and a US$25million worldwide marketing campaign this year. That will pale in comparison to the buzz and the marketing clout that Apple has. Palm has, at most, another six to nine months to prepare itself for the competition. While no doubt the Treo 750 is in a good position today, it’s right in the price point that Apple is targeting. Don’t think the Treo 680 is safe either : with the iPod nano and iPod shuffle, Apple has proven that it could also compete in the “value” market. It may take another couple of years before Apple releases a lower-end iPhone, but for Palm, they need to crank out their products soon.

The next few months will be interesting indeed for Palm.

As for me, I still love my Treo 650. It works best for me today. I will continue to hold on to it, and to my iBook, for another year. Next year, it will be the year of the iPhone for me. Unless, Palm steps up, of course…
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Filed under: Mobile World

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