Kanellos On The Apple Phone Flop

Michael Kanellos at CNet has given a nice contrarian view about any potential iTunes enabled phone which may be in the works… He raises a lot of the points that some other people have been talking about for years but which seems to have died down recently — the portable MP3 market was pretty crap, leaving a gap for a good design to come in and take it, whereas “problems like that don’t exist in the handset business. Cell phones aren’t clunky, inadequate devices. Instead, they are pretty good. Really good. Why do you think they call it a Crackberry?”
There’s also technology issues — even if Apple decides to focus on a mobile phone that plays music (or an iPod with mobile connectivity) and ignore all the other things mobile phones can do now, “who, really, doesn’t expect a new company to conquer all the static and connection issues with their phones?”
He even spends a bit of time on my personal bugbear, the business model. Apple makes money selling hardware, operators subsidise hardware to get people to use the service, but operators are unlikely to subsidise the iPhone because it will bypass all their own content stores. Then there’s the question of which market Apple will target… will it stick with the old-gen networks that have the biggest user base or the newer networks that have the better service? What about HSPDA and EV-DO Rev 1? Apple puts out a new iPod every six months or so, which is impressive in the MP3 player world, but handset manufacturers put out new models every week.
The Apple phone should do well when it first comes out, and it will probably hang around for a while because there will always be a core audience of people that will buy it. But it will be niche, not mass market…

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