Apple has just announced its long awaited iPhone and I have to admit it looks like a nice device. It is a little pricey,$500 for a 4gb model and $600 for an 8gb model. Also you should probably have to consider the price of cancelling your current provider's plan. However I do think it is an innovative product, maybe not in the way most people see it. I think that now the cell phone market is already crowded and most people own a cell phone and an mp3 player. So I dont think this is really going to crack into the average cell phone user market mainly because of price point. Also it doesnt look like a device suited for business because most business people already so used to their blackberries and what have you, sometimes IT departments have entire teams based around providing support for its blackberry users. So businesses are probably not going to switch over to a very flashy smart phone that isnt going to work as well for them as something that can access outlook or MS documents. I see the iPhone defining really a whole new market. For a long time now companies have been trying to incorporate media onto their cellphones, well Apple stepped in and did it very well. It is rather similar to the way the iPod defined the standard for the portable mp3 player, now the iPhone is establishing a standard for the media phone and everyone is going to have to play catch up there. I dont see it being an instant success becasue of price, switching carriers, and the fact that a lot of people already invested maybe 100 in a phone and 250+ (depending on when you bought it) in an iPod and they arent going to switch now.
Some things I think arent going to be that great. A lot of people are complaining that the iPhone doesnt utilize a 3G network and therefore isnt as fast as some other smart phones on the market. Also the screen although it looked beautiful on display is probably going to get scratched like all hell. I have a video iPod and the front of it is full of little scratches. However the good news about the screen is that it has widescreen video support so we should probably expect a widescreen video iPod soon. Oh one more thing I dont quite understand is how they were able to use the name iPhone when that name is already a registered trademark with linksys. They probably got around it somewhere in the copyright where they made a claim that the products could be differentiated, but I disagree especially since Apple comes after people for putting anything that soungs like iPod in their name. The ship date could also be a problem, I know there wasnt really anything out at CES quite like the iPhone, but some of these companies can pump out a copycat phone rather quickly. So if the option is available and possibly cheaper I can see Apple loosing out in that area.