The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
According to market research company, Frost & Sullivan the iPhone will revolution the user interface on cellphones just as the Mac did for personal computers over 20 years ago.
According to F&S analyst, Gerry Purdy, the iPhone will actually prove more important to the future of the cellphone than Mac was to the PC. "We're now sitting at the end of the 'dull OS age' in cell phones," he writes in and F&S Asia Pacific Market Insights paper.
"The problem with phones up to now is that they were designed around being a phone like all the rest before, then with some new features to help users get things done. But, even though all phones today have a colour screen, can play games and ring with snippets from Elton John or Celine Dion, they seem to be stuck in the dark ages in ease of use."
For those of you too young to remember, when the Apple Mac was launched in 1984 it had a graphical user interface with pull down menus not dissimilar to those you see on Macs and Windows machines today. But at that time just every other PC had a command line interface - you had to type a (non-intuitive) string of text to get it to do anything. Microsoft followed with Windows a year or so later, and the rest is history.
Purdy claims that "On, January 9 Apple reset the bar for the entire phone industry by introducing the iPhone ... What's so important about the iPhone is the nature of the user experience. It's fundamentally different from any phone that has been developed and released up to now. It has a great VGA display, a great natural user interface with easy 'velocity scrolling' that allows you to push the images on the display as if they were floating on Teflon ... Realize that this is just the very first model of the iPhone. There will be an entire product line in future years spanning a number of user segments with different features."
Purdy makes several predictions on future iPhone developments:
• It will be more tightly integrated to the AppleTV;
• Apple will build a model with a slide out keyboard for those who are email centric or do a lot of messaging;
• Instant messaging will be expanded. "Using the inter-operator agreements, Apple can build a great IM network that hopefully will allow Yahoo, AIM, MSN Messenger and Google users to carry out IM with iPhone users."
• Apple will expand the iPhone's Widget capabilities. "This could be huge on the iPhone so that users have easy access to all the snippets of information that are important to them such as news, weather, sports, financial and personal media."
• Apple will leverage the relationship with Disney and other content resource centres like XM, ESPN and others to provide up-to-date personal information delivering into the Widgets or separate channels.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
Latest Headlines from IT INDUSTRY
