At $199 I wouldn’t call this product expensive. What the data plan rates are though … that’s expensive!

Work for Nokia ? Hmm, unless they have an Insurance division in the City of London I am unlikely to ever work for them

I don’t even have a Nokia phone, although I bought an N800 (£125 was a bargain) for a giggle. Mainly to annoy Linux people. I also have an Toshiba M400 tablet, a Q1U, an Apple Newton and am considering the HTC X7510 PDA and 3G iPhone combo – so am pretty much target audience foo JKOTR !

Only used Nokia as an example because they sell more Smartphones using the market leading (by miles) Smartphone OS, Symbian. The N95 outsold the iPhone quite easily, it isn’t really my cup of Vodka, but it IS easy to use.

The iPhone may well tempt people like me away from their HTC WinMo bricks. It is finally usable as a business device.

But will it crack the Symbian consumer market ? Will people pay SUCH a large amount (the cheaper O2 contract in the UK is pretty laughable in terms of the minutes/texts) for usabilty ?

What I see so far is it being bought as an iPod/Phone covergence device. Which it is perfect for, but the market is much smaller than for phones. Perhaps that is why it sold well, but not spectacularly.

About 50% of US adults (or about 70 million subscribers) have broadband in their homes, at a hefty cost of $40 or more. Of that 50%, maybe 5-10% are the geeks. The other 40-45% are the ones that JK is talking about.

The lowered entry price (whether real or not) and promise of more capability will entice a portion of this group to make the leap to mobile data in the next 3-6 months. And then more will come in when they finally see what the many App Store apps, or the Mobile me services will do for them.

Does Nigel work for Nokia? Is his livelihood somehow tied to Nokia?

Dust off that resume, pal.
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/the-end-of-finland/

No hidden agenda suggestions from me. I just think it is a case of “Acting Global, thinking Local” for a change !

As with most of the above comments, and the tone of the piece, this is a WinMo vs iPhone Smartphone discussion, not a global smartphone discussion. Perhaps an HTC vs iPhone discussion.

Yeah, MS dropped the ball. Well, they never really had the ball. But Apple don’t have the ball either. Symbian does. And has done so for quite some time. And a year of the iPhone hasn’t really changed that. People seem to think MS are the competition in the Smartphone market, which must make Symbian chuckle.

Will the new Nokia N96 be “better” than the iPhone, probably not. Will it outsell it globally ? Probably.

Aunt Sue might like the iPhone, but European Aunt Sue will look at the cost, and wonder why she has to pay for a phone for the first time in her life and probably pass. Perhaps reluctantly.

I do hope Nokia and HTC and the others take note of what Apple are doing. It is better for us all.

But I suspect they are also looking at their Sales figures and balance sheets and having Balmer-esque thoughts about being happy with what they are doing.

Declaring the winner (it was a more general comment rather that pointed at anyone in particular) when the competitors are not even on the course yet seems a little premature. It is an emerging market.

Nigel, who has declared anyone the winner of anything? The article clearly states that smartphone makers should be watching what Apple is doing. I firmly believe that and don’t even own an iPhone. There’s no hidden agenda here as some seem to think.

We have your wonderful Ambassador for all things one-eyed and home-spun in London at the moment.

Now I did think that perhaps Dubya, who despite being one of the most powerful people on earth probably couldn’t find any other country except the US of A on a map, was the exception, but now I am not so sure.

Because that is right, there ARE only two Smartphone OS makers in the world. Microsoft and Apple. Because they are US based, right. Forget RIM, forget Symbian, pinko liberal rubbish Who cares if the Nokia N95 sold 10 million units. All Ruskies anyway.

And because the iPhone is smarter as a phone than WinMo (which it clearly is, although WinMo perhaps makes a better PDA OS) we can ignore anything else ?

C’mon guys, you are read the world over. We DO have decent 3G coverage and have had it for years. Nokias sell by the tanker load here, why ? Because they give the ordinary Joes what they want. Buttons to text people as you walk along or one handed on a wobbly train – try that on a Touch Diamond or an iPhone.

The iPhone is fabulous niche product. A fabulously EXPENSIVE niche product. Be happy with that.

Declaring Apple the winner in the Smartphone race, when they haven’t even got into their silky running shorts yet … is just blinkered.

It is better race for Apple being in it to be sure. It provides such a fillip to the market sapce. But are Nokia et al really going to be worried ? Or should Apple be waking up and smelling the herring ?

Did my post:
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/06/16/a-gadget-too-far/

>>>It doesn’t matter if we geeks find the iPhone’s functions lacking because we are not Apple’s target market. Aunt Sue is.

Baloney.

Show me what NORMAL person looks at something and says, “You know, this is just too easy to use. Let’s eff it all up and make it frustrating!”

Maybe semi-autistic programmers do that, but well before computers came along, industrial designers designed for Ease Of Use.

Even Microsoft nearly caught on to that by having the Start button in Windows. But then they became all autistic and complexified everything up once again.

I was just thinking about all this, this morning. Now that you’ve reminded me, I’m going to make it a blog post.

James is absolutely right. Do you know how much work it takes the average geek to tweak out an HTC 6800 to do anything remotely cool? More time than a pedestrian smartphone newbie would care to spend. But wait the iPhone by itself blows away any smartphone out of the water. Now with the Apple developement kit millions of developers will write cool tweaks and addons to sell at the Applestore where all the Aunt Sue’s and idiot users of the world will have all the cool tweaks and adons putting them on par with the average smartphone geek. Why will people buy into it because installing the apps will be just as easy as it is on a Mac. No stinking registry or cab file to build a easy trip to the Applestore on the phone for the impulse buy that happens instantaneously with 3G! I take that back James got it partially right. Not only is it 3G but also the whole easy to impulse buy/install apps ecosystem that is built around the iPhone that will blow away the competition.

Indeed one big reason RIM has been doing so well in the corporate space is the push email.

Having a calendar on a phone is worse than useless unless that calendar is a connected one. If changes propagate both ways with no hands on required, the phone becomes an extension of your work calendar and highly useful right off the bat.

Same goes for Email – IMAP is great, but having a no muss, no fuss two way communication going 24/7 is a requirement in an Enterprise device.

Again, we’re discussing off topic here assuming the topic was that the iPhone user experience was game changing, but one can’t ignore that they added features that really gives the iPhone a chance to transform itself from a closed and standalone device to an open and connected one. New apps, that will be quality controlled, easily downloadable is a big deal. The syncing features is also.

Not so. I am specifically an example of someone who waited a year for the applications, GPS, exchange and 3G. Those were the things I said I would switch to the iphone for.

Yes you can do more with WinMo, but at the same time there’s some excellent stuff application wise that is coming down the pike for the iphone, I’m sure they will have VPN, slingbox, etc soon enough.

Also think about the graphics processor on the iphone. Besides being a better video player fromwhat I’ve heard it plays real games with real graphics.

It’s not that the iphone is necessarily better than WinMo, it’s that it’s polished, finished, updated. I wish I could have one day to meet with the WinMo team and slap them upside the head and ask them how they could possibly be so incredibly shortsighted and non reactionary to the market forces around them as they lose more market share to blackberry, iphone, etc etc.

James, the reason everyone acts like you are deluded on this topic, is because we already heard all of these arguments when the first iPhone came out. Here we are a year later, and from all the hype when the first one came out RIM, HTC, Palm and Nokia should have all been out of business, and Apple was going to have 90% of the smartphone market, because the iPhone was so much more advanced than any product mankind had ever produced. Instead, RIM has increased their share of the smartphone market, Nokia is doing better than ever, HTC is a more recognized mainstream brand than it was a year ago, and the iPhone utterly failed to grow the smartphone market a single unit, and in fact isn’t even selling as well as Apple had projected. If anything, all the hype for the iPhone has been HELPING the sales of the more established smartphone manufacturers, because their phones compare so favorably to the iPhone.

Given that situation, many of us feel that predictions that THIS time, the second launch of the iPhone, this time with some of the features any modern smartphone should have had a year ago, is somehow REALLY going to revolutionize the industry, and prove a huge challenge for all those companies it didn’t really prove that big a challenge for last time, can’t be seen as anything more than the wishful thinking of a fan who WANTS that be true, because he is rooting for his team.

Many of us have spent pretty much our entire adult lives hearing how if you just wait for the next version of this Apple product or that Apple product, they will put the competition out of business, because it is so much better, and in all those years, Apple has had exactly one mainstream success, the iPod. All the other “successes” involve moving the goalposts more often than the Clinton campaign. The proof isn’t in the prognostications of bloggers, it is in the marketplace, and in the marketplace, all the companies, like RIM, who said the iPhone posed absolutely no threat to their business, have been right, despite all the hype, and despite how many pop idols Apple gets to flash their phones on TV.

There is no rational reason to think it is going to be any different with the new version, especially since the very core of your argument is that the people the iPhone is supposed to appeal to, are exactly the kind of people who don’t care about features like 3G, app support, technical features and Exchange sync, so why would they have been holding off for a year already? To wait for features they don’t care about?

i should have done what i just did before sending of that comment.

basically i went to gsmarena.com, keyed in the gsm bands that is usable in USA, told it to find all the symbian based devices that supported those and got a interesting list…

1 sonyericsson, 2 motorola, and the rest nokia…

if i went umts, it was all nokia, and not many at that.

the US market for smartphones do indeed suck…

chippy made me wonder, are symbian based phones sold at all in USA?

i see a lot of talk about windows mobile based devices here, and comparing those to the iphone. but what about symbian ones?

hrmf, maybe i should be surprised. snyericsson have maybe a couple of models using symbian. and i dont recall engadget ever writing that one of them where coming to a US operator. and nokia, the single biggest supplier of symbian based devices is not seen much in the US from what i understand.

well i guess there is always the motorola Z8 and Z10. but again i dont know their availability in USA.

im guessing that leaves HTC and palm, and both of those use windows mobile (except when palm use garnet).

if this is true, then indeed does the US market for smartphones stink…

Like Adam, I have had a plethora of phones and PDAs, both Palm and WM. I think the fanboys of both persuasions are missing the point that James is making: THE TYPICAL SMARTPHONE IN THE US SUCKS!!! That is it in a nutshell. I don’t care how much technology there is beneath the hood, they are just a royal PITA to use. There is an indentation in my vehicle’s dashboard that looks just like the edge of my old Samsung i730. I HATED that phone. Now I have the VX6800 (HTC Titan) and it is better, but it still freezes up. The camera sucks. Syncing sucks. All of those little buttons around the phone suck. Verizon removed the GPS, so that sucks, too. About the only thing that is really good is Outlook with Active Sync. That is worth the price of admission for me. Everything else about this phone (or any WM phone) requires a good bit of love to even use it.

Question: Why does it always take Apple to figure this stuff out? No, I am NOT an Apple fanboy and I think Steve Jobs is an arogant @#$%! but he sure brings the best out in his products and his engineering.

I will get an iPhone this summer as soon as the ability to sync with MS Exchange works. I just don’t think that anyone else but Apple really gets it, or they are just too scared to try something revolutionary (and cool.)