The guys over at WSJ had a chance to sit down with the two biggest minds behind the Apple iPhone: Apple's Steve Jobs and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. They mostly talked about different aspects of the iPhone, (naturally) here are some of the highlights.
Steve compared the iPhone launch to that of the Mac back in 1984. “One of the things we feel is this is the biggest breakthrough in user interfaces in 23 years.” “There really hasn't been much except for the evolution of that in the last 23 years.”
When asked about the prospect of ringtones on the iPhone from iTunes, Steve did a great job of dodging it entirely. He simply mentioned that iTunes is the third largest distributer of music in the US and that “One might imagine a lot of things down the road.” He also said the same thing about music and video downloads direct to the iPhone.
The issue of the EDGE network speed was also a topic of conversation. Randall Stephenson talked about how great and large of a network that EDGE is, and that customers are buying tens of thousands of phones every month that work on EDGE. They have apparently dumped just shy of $19 billion into the network in the past two years.
Steve jumped in and talked about how well the EDGE network performs when checking email and downloading maps, but he also admits that it is lacking when viewing web pages. However, the WiFi connection should make up for that. He also cited that 3G technology just wasn't where they needed it to be. “We cared a lot about battery life and we cared a lot about physical size. Down the road, I'm sure some of those trade offs will become more favorable towards 3G but as of now we think we made a pretty good doggone decision.”
AT&T is apparently working on a technology similar to T-Mobile's HotSpot @Home program, though the iPhone is the first dual-mode handset with both WiFi and traditional wireless technology. Apparently Apple has been talking to AT&T for over two years now. At first they contemplated their own MVNO, but then decided that they wanted to stick to making the handset, and let AT&T do what they do best.
Finally, when asked if they would have enough iPhones to go around at launch, Steve assured them that they did their best months ago to determine just how many would be needed at launch and have worked hard to make that number available. Though he's not entirely sure it'll be enough. “We've taken our best guess but it wouldn't surprise me at all if it ain't enough.”
Q&A: Jobs, Stephenson Have Big Expectations for iPhone [via investorvillage]
