In a recent interview Avi Greengrat, mobile telephone specialist for Current Analysis had some interesting thoughts on the upcoming iPhone. The video of the interview is rather long, so I’ve decided to sum it up for those of you that don’t have time to watch.
Avi made three major points regarding the iPhone. The first was that Steve Jobs wants to sell 10 million units in 2008. He believes that this is definitely something that they can achieve, citing that the Motorola RAZR managed to sell 5 million in the first 9 months, and it was in the $500 price range.
The next point that he made was that there are plenty of other smartphones on the market. However, with all of the extra features that phones have these days, people hate their phones. They’re too complicated for the average person to use all of the functionality. Apple is trying to change all of that by offering the most user-friendly interface that we’ve seen in a phone.
His final point was that there are some negatives to the iPhone, ones that I think we’ve all recognized. The first of these being the non-replaceable battery. Some users will want the ability to switch batteries on the fly if their phone dies. Honestly, I have never even considered purchasing a second battery for my phone, if it’s dead, it’s dead. Not to mention that people have been buying iPods with non-replaceable batteries for some time now.
Another downfall is the lack of 3G. I think we’re all still scratching our heads on why they wouldn’t add that in. The final question is the durability of the iPhone itself. I think this is a very good point. Although I stand by Apple, it is their first time entering the phone market. Although they have had plenty of experience with portable devices such as the iPod, a phone is a whole different story. I’m sure that other people have raised this same question as well. Only time will give us the answer to that.
Altogether, I think he hit the mark on all of these points, and we will definitely be following these closely. He makes a lot of good points throughout the course of the interview, too many to list here. I definitely recommend watching it if you have about 30 minutes of spare time.
Current Analysis reviews Apple’s iPhone [via podtech]
The absence of “3G” is pretty easy to explain.
The 3G chipsets that were available when Apple started were larger in size, consumed more power, and cost more. None of these were acceptable.
During the course of development, you really can’t switch to the latest and greatest each time it comes along; otherwise, you’d never ship. So you bring the base model to market. Then you move up to supply chain to the latest and greatest chipsets.
But the biggest problem with bringing 3G to market is this. Which 3G solution do you support? W-CMDA, UMTS, UMTS-TDD, FOMA, 1xEV-DO, TD-CDMA, TD-SCDMA, GAN/UMA, HSDPA, HSUPA, or HSOPA? [I'm probably forgetting some...]
EDGE/GPRS covers 80% of the world market. But no single 3G technology would serve even 20% of the world market. No 3G technology is widely available in the US (almost all installations are limited to core urban areas). Europe is served by four or five different 3G technologies. Japan and Korea by yet another 3G technology.
By shipping EDGE/GPRS now, Apple has another six months to a year to prepare 3G enabled products for Europe and Asia. That enables the chipsets to shrink in size and cost and power consumption. And it enables Apple more time to debug the core functionality before having to deal with supporting different 3G hardware layers.
What Apple ships for Europe will probably be 3G enabled. What they ship for Asia will almost certainly be or they won’t ship. And Japan and Korea don’t even use GSM-derived 3G technologies, so it won’t even be a GSM phone for those markets.
Heck, I’m surprised people aren’t whining about the absence of 4G or WiMax support seeing as how Sprint has actually started building their WiMax network. ;-)
reinharden
reinharden you clueless moron. “Europe is served by four or five different 3G technologies” WTF are you talking about, it’s 2100/1900 W-CDMA. I can roaming in Japan on Vodafone as well.