From: mike 


http://www.slate.com/id/2163510/

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What Apple's competitors get wrong about the next generation of cell phones.


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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Lots of good links in the original article.

 /m

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