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The iPhone WannabesWhat Apple's competitors get wrong about the next generation of cell phones.

By Paul Boutin
Posted Wednesday, April 4, 2007, at 2:29 PM ET
Steve Jobs and iPhone. Click image to expand.

Whatever you think about Steve Jobs, you must admit the guy knows how to steal a show. Of the hundreds of gadgets on display at last week's CTIA Wireless trade show—the year's big cell-phone confab—the only one with real buzz was Apple's iPhone, a product that won't be available for months. The iPhone appeared only briefly at CTIA, but it incited a near tug of war between an AT&T exec and the chairman of the FCC. Other phone makers spent the show trying to explain away Apple's unstoppable momentum. "There's nothing like having someone come out and validate your vision," one Nokia representative gushed unconvincingly.

The truth is that Nokia's vision—and everyone else's—has been surpassed. None of the combo cell-phone/media/Internet devices at CTIA came close to what Apple has built: a pocket personal computer that runs a bona fide operating system. Rather than stretching a cell phone to accommodate a video player and browser, Apple squished a Mac into a smaller box with a touch screen, rather than a keyboard. All computer geeks need to know is that it runs Unix. For the less nerdy, iPhone runs Safari, a full-featured browser that's a whole lot less buggy than some "mobile" browser that can't parse most of the Web.

I don't expect anyone but the most overpaid of my Mac fanboy buddies to rush out and buy an iPhone. It'll cost $500, and owners must sign up with Cingular for service. But what the CTIA show proved is that even if you don't buy an iPhone this summer, it's a safe bet you'll buy something that wants desperately to be the iPhone.

To be fair to the other phone makers, there was some impressive stuff at CTIA. Samsung's Upstage combines a music player and a high-speed EV-DO data network in a shockingly slim package. The $150 price tag is even more shockingly slim. Nokia's N76 adds an FM radio and plays just about any music file format you might have on your computer, all in a phone the size of a Motorola RAZR.

What Samsung, Nokia, and Apple's other competitors fail to understand, however, is that in a do-everything age, there's a downside to trumpeting new features. By announcing that your phone does two or three cool new things, you're also implicitly admitting that there's a universe of things that this particular gadget can't do. And that's why the iPhone is such a breakthrough. When Jobs touts the iPhone as three devices in one, he's selling it short: It's a computer, not some limited, specialized gizmo. That means that rather than a fixed set of applications—music, video, Web browsing, chat—it can, in theory, run any program that works on a Mac. The iPhone's killer feature, then, is probably something that doesn't even exist yet. It has the potential to spawn a mobile application as mind-blowing as the Web browser or Napster.

There's just one big roadblock standing in the way of iPhone domination. Apple agreed to lock the phone so that third-party software applications can't be installed and run over Cingular's network. It's a reasonable safeguard against Cingular being knocked out technically or legally by a phone Napster. But most of the coolest applications for desktop computers—most obviously, the browser—weren't envisioned by the companies that sold the gear. Limit the iPhone to apps Apple approves of, and the thing will never take off like the Mac did.

iPhone fans worry that phone companies will fight change as obstinately as record companies. But look at what happened this week: One of the biggest music distributors reversed its policy and will now sell unprotected music downloads for your iPod. If EMI can change its collective mind on copyright protection, it seems probable that Cingular and other phone companies will eventually loosen up a bit to allow more iPhone apps. Just give it a few months to shake out. Once the third-party application restrictions start to loosen, the iPhone won't be just a phone. It'll be a platform.

The best analogy I can conjure is that the iPhone is what the Treo 600 was four years ago—a product that changes the definition of a phone. Think about how many people you knew who carried a cell phone and a Palm Pilot five years ago. Now think about how rarely you see a PDA now. The Treo made PDAs obsolete by packing their functionality into a phone with a miraculously small keyboard. The iPhone goes a step further. It's a phone whose interface looks and works more like the computer you use all day, blurring the distinction between the two. There's nothing else like it in the pipeline. Microsoft's Ultra Mobile PC platform comes the closest. It combines Web, e-mail, text messaging, games, and video on a portable touch-screen tablet. But watch the promo video that shows a day in the life of a UMPC-equipped household. No one makes or takes a phone call. Betcha next year's crop will be centered around phone capabilities.

Still, for all its potential, I don't think the iPhone will crush other phones. (At least not unless there's a $49-with-plan model in the works.) Instead, it will open the gates for more products that go beyond the last few years' parade of not-all-that-smartphones. Once they stop slapping two or three features together and calling it a superphone, cell-phone makers will be the ones to take our computers and networks to their next evolutionary stage. In the very near future, you won't think in terms of desktop versus laptop versus phone. You'll do whatever you want from wherever you are, by reaching into your pocket.

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Paul Boutin is a writer living in San Francisco.
Photograph of Steve Jobs with Apple's iPhone by Tony Avelar/AFP/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

What the iPhone truly needs to succeed, in view of its obvious disadvantages (high price, limitation to Cingular, small memory for music/video, lack of voice dialing, etc.) is a KILLER APP.

Such an app could well be DICTATION SOFTWARE (since a microphone is already present, and a stripped down OS X) . . . software that would let a user dictate an outgoing Email, or dictate text that could go into a rudimentary word processor (like TEXTEDIT), and thence to a memory file or, by any one of several means, to a printer if desired.

Then that device, trademark issues permiting, could be renamed the POCKET MAC !

And perhaps that software could also be incorporated into LEOPARD, which would give it the boost needed to stand out as more than a slight improvement over TIGER !

--Feldzmo

(To reply, click here.)

Yeah, what's the Mac market share after 23 years? The same thing will happen to the iPhone with a locked-in architecture, just exponentially worse by layering the anal wireless company restrictions on top of Apple's. Phones at that price point are for business people, who, other than posers, won't accept a device without a physical keyboard built in, and that won't use commonly accepted business software (i.e. Office and Exhange). So they'll continue to use blackberry or windows mobile based devices, iPhone will maybe eek into a double digit market share, and future BB and WM devices will incorporate iPhone-like advantages (i.e internal hard disk) as they go along. No one beats Jobs at PR, but with the exception of the iPod, its been a thirty year saga of lots of sizzle and no steak.

--ebbb

(To reply, click here.)

OK, the Pocket PC platform is buggy and can not go everywhere on the web, but it is a full feature platform and in not limited to wap sites. I have the US Startac phone from Verizon and I love the keyboard that slides out when I turn the phone in landscape mode. Compared to the tiny BB styles, this thing is full size.

What is the iPhone going to give me that I don't have now, for several hundred less, and on a better network? I don't want my phone to double as an iPod since the phone's battery life is short enough as is. I can already log on to myspace, I browse the web, access my email, look at maps, take photos, manage all my contacts and appointments, plus am able to look at and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint presntations. It would be neat if this thing could drive a projector, but I am sure there is some sort of hook-up I could find if it were important to me.

The only thing it does poorly is imitate a phone, and the iPhone will be no better. I don't like holding a brick against the side of my face, and my cheek rests agaisnt the screen, but that is the nature of these beasts. You beat it with Bluetooth.

So, someone who is ga ga over this thing, tell me why I should upgrade.

--Toast_in_the_OC

(To reply, click here.)

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