When a black-jumpered Steve Jobs bounded on to a San Francisco stage just over two years ago to give the keynote speech at the annual gathering of the Apple faithful known as Macworld, he made his intentions very plain. “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he said, to whoops and cheers. “Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.”
Jobs is given to hyperbole, but when, later this month, the first wave of British users are freed from the contracts they had to sign to grab one of the early iPhones and start contemplating a replacement, they will be faced with a range of remarkably similar devices.
That ever-expanding array of touchscreen handsets is just the physical evidence of the monumental change the iPhone has wrought. It has sent some of the largest technology companies in the world back to the drawing board and proved that, given the opportunity, people will do far more with a phone than make calls and send texts. For Apple, the iPhone may also be one of the most important products it has produced since its first personal computers in the late 1970s.
Before the iPhone there were already touchscreen devices; there were mobile phones that could play music and videos; there were mobile phones that could access the Internet and send e-mails; and it was already possible to download applications on to some devices in order to personalize them. But hardly anyone took advantage of these features. Finding them was hard enough; getting them to work was a nightmare and most consumers gave up.
“It is not as though Apple invented a totally new technology,” says Adam Leach, principal analyst at consultancy Ovum. “What they did was re-think the whole mobile experience and produce a very polished experience compared with what people were used to.”
The iPhone was also aimed at a segment of the market that the giants of the handset industry had been ignoring — the “high end.” Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson were chasing the middle of the market where the high volumes and high subsidies from the mobile phone operators were. Their launch strategies involved upgrading their phones bit by bit so as to make the “new” device just a little more attractive. Making a phone a different color boosted sales, but did nothing to persuade anyone to do more than make calls, send texts or download the occasional ringtone.
The iPhone, in stark contrast, is sexy and very, very easy to use. Since its appearance there has been a stampede back into making top-tier phones, not least because the recession has decimated the mid-market. Cash-strapped consumers are demanding a much better phone in return for signing an expensive monthly contract; if they don’t get one, they are opting for cheaper SIM card-only deals and holding on to their old handset.
BlackBerry rushed out its first touchscreen device — the BlackBerry Storm — to be followed by the first from Nokia, the 5800; Samsung and LG have been churning out touchscreen devices from the Tocco and the Omnia to the Renoir and the Arena. Waiting in the wings are new touchscreen devices from Palm (the Pre) and Sony Ericsson (the Idou).
The iPhone’s ease of use, meanwhile, has turned the spotlight back on an often-neglected aspect of mobile phones: the software. A month after the iPhone appeared in the UK, Google brought together some of the biggest names in mobile to develop a new operating system. Called Android, it has already appeared on two touchscreen devices, made by HTC, and many more are planned. A year after the iPhone appeared, Nokia bought out its partners in Symbian, which produces operating systems for smartphones. Then Microsoft rewrote Windows Mobile and its new guise, Windows Mobile 6.5, has borrowed a lot from the iPhone.
Already more than 1 billion iPhone applications have been downloaded from the iTunes store. The Android marketplace is operating, while RIM — maker of the BlackBerry — is also pushing applications at its users. Nokia’s Ovi Market and Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace are both set to go live this month.
In the 12 months before the handset launched, Apple raked in US$22 billion in revenues. That has rocketed to almost US$34 billion in the past year, largely boosted by the iPhone and iPod Touch. The success of the iPod made Apple’s Cupertino headquarters one of the coolest places to work in Silicon Valley and the iPhone has made it one of the most powerful.
With so much now at stake, some experts suggest the iPhone will soon become the most important technology Apple’s empire has produced, even, potentially, eclipsing the computer business that revolutionized our lives in the 1980s. There are an estimated 1 billion personal computers in use worldwide, but that many mobile phones are sold every year and for many people their first experience of computing will be through a mobile phone.
But while Apple caused a revolution, it is unlikely to become dominant in the market. It has sold just over 20 million iPhones since the first device appeared in 2007; in that time over 1.5 billion phones have been shipped by everyone else. A similar thing happened with the personal computer market. The concept was championed by Apple when it launched Apple II, the world’s first personal computer, in 1977, and the first Macintosh in 1984, but other players now lead the market.
Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Jobs, reckons the Apple II remains their most important innovation: “That started the company and brought it the great wealth to develop so many things from then on. It also began a revolution of computers at home, at school, etc. The Macintosh has been around for over 20 years. Sure, it’s more the name that stuck than any technology, but wait 20 years before comparing the importance of the iPhone in terms of historical importance to the Macintosh platform.”
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