iPhone "critical" to home comms strategy says AT&T boss

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 12 June 2007 12:43

Your IT - Mobility

One of the main challenges for AT&T in deliver services to "the three screens that matter most" will be the different ways in which these screens are used in the home. The TV, or TVs, are often communal. PCs are sometimes communal and sometimes personal but are generally connected over a communal broadband service.

{loadposition stuart) The mobile phone is the one device and service that is uniquely associated with each individual in the household. So it stands to reason that if AT&T wants to integrate services across the three screens, mobile devices and services and their integration with the other two 'screens' will indeed be critical.

I might add that AT&T's vision will find a receptive ear at Apple. Years ago, long before the present degree of convergence became fashionable, Apple was promoting the iMac as the centre of its customers' "digital lifestyle" and demonstrating how all is 'i' products - iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, the iPod - worked seamlessly with the iMac and, through the Internet to access tunes and store and share images etc via .Mac.

It's been rumoured for months that several of Leopard's applications will share information and sync with the iPhone, including Address Book, iTunes Mobile, Mail, iPhoto, iCal, iChat, and others. Steve Jobs did not say much about this in its preview of Leopard this week, but then he did only mention 10 of some supposed 300 new features in Leopard.

Nevertheless the home computer world is still largely Windows. Now Safari runs on Windows. Now, I ask you why would Apple want to produce a product that will be free to download just to compete with Internet Explorer and every other free browser in the Windows World. There must be more to this than meets the eye...