Apple's two new iPhones to change the way we buy mobiles, or iPods?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 23 November 2006 07:53

Your IT - Entertainment

If Apple’s iPhone is as seductively good as the iPod is itself, consumers will want to buy them at full price by the squillions. They’ve done it with the iPod, why wouldn’t they do it with an iPod phone, especially if the phone bit is as good as the iPod bit? It’d be a major worldwide success.

Already the idea has struck fear into the hearts and minds of companies such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

Both offer music capable phones, with Sony Ericsson heavily pushing their Walkman branded phones, with a massive TV, print and online campaign touting their Walkman music cred in their very nice smartphones. Nokia has also gone into overdrive with their N-series phones, with their latest N91 model offering 8Gb of storage space and Bluetooth A2DP stereo streaming capabilities.

There are doubters, however. At an article from Brighthand, we learn that Palm’s CEO, Ed Colligan, is not too worried about Apple entering the mobile phone market. He told Brighthand that "We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in."

That said, it seems that Apple just ‘walked in’ to the mp3 player market, after keenly observing the dismal success of mp3 players up until the introduction of the iPod. Of course even the iPod itself didn’t take off until a PC version of iTunes was released, but aside from a colour screen, more storage and the ability to play photos and video, the iPod’s basic design has effectively stayed the same. With Apple have keenly looked at music mobile phones and have publicly stated so. If there’s anyone that can ‘just walk in’ to the market... it’s Apple.

The big question is... can they do it without mobile operator support and subsidies, with customers walking into Apple stores and authorized resellers and just popping their existing SIM card into the iPhone?

That’s the $64 million dollar question. One thing’s for sure: the Apple iPhone will not be music to everyone’s ears, and that’s just the way Apple likes it.