Whether you like iPhone or not, I don’t and I’m not the only one, and whether or not you consider it the invention of the year, there is no denying the fact that it has had a tremendous impact on the cell phone industry. Just think of how many keyless touch-screen phones were there about a year ago?
Of course, while its interface is undoubtedly quite slick, I don’t consider that its biggest contribution the industry. In fact, there are several things about it I find very annoying.. No, the most important thing that iPhone did was to show the hilariously backward US cell phone market what a good smartphone can do. That’s my opinion anyway.
Not that its the best smartphone around, not by a stretch. Even my beloved N73, despite its old-fashioned method of input, is significantly better in many aspects. But now that so many more Americans know what smartphones are and what they can do, perhaps we can hope for more and better phones in the near future. And some of that is already happening!
But wait.. this post was meant to be about GPhone. About a year ago, the US smartphone market (in terms of OSes) was dominated by Microsoft, RIM and Palm (roughly in that order), the trio accounting for around 90%, while the overall world leader Symbian had a measly 10% share. Now we have Apple in the mix and in another year we’ll also have Google. Things are about to get pretty crowded!
Can Google create the same level of impact and disruption as Apple did? We’ll find out soon enough. But one thing I know is that they are going to find the going very tough without a device of their own.. As Microsoft learned with XBox and Zune, and Apple has shown over and over and over again, there are certain advantages to owning the end to end experience. And you just can’t do that with a “platform”.
