Apple iPhone will succeed despite late, defensive move

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 16 January 2007 08:11

Your IT - Mobility

Then there’s the second reason of “Network Opposition”. Well, of course there are going to be mobile network operators who are opposed to the iPhone. They’ll be the ones that Apple didn’t deal with in different countries. You can hardly imagine they’d be happy when their No.1 competitor has exclusive, multi-year access to the iPhone, if the Cingular deal is anything to go by.

Actually, I’d like to know some more specifics of the Cingular/Apple deal, if only either side would tell us. The main thing that seems to be the ‘visual voicemail’ feature. Already, I can access my voicemail on my computer through my phone provider’s webmail service. Unfortunately it’s a bit clunky looking, and I can’t re-route that mail directly into Outlook.

But I can access it from my phone if I want to, by logging into my webmail through the phone’s browser, and then listening to the voicemail that way. Unfortunately it’s a bit more involved that the iPhone’s much more elegant solution, but there’s nothing stopping other phone manufacturers and mobile network operators from providing that service on their next generation of phones.

Alternatively the network could simply record the voicemail as an mp3 an email a link to your phone. Connected to a 3G or 3.5G network, the tiny voicemail mp3 file could just be pushed to your phone as an email, or listened to live after clicking a link in a text message. As the message is from your network provider, there is no need for them to charge full data rates to access it. They’d only do that if they wanted to, which could well be the case for revenue purposes.

If visual voicemail becomes a standard feature of mobile network operators, I don’t see what’s stopping the iPhone from being sold as a network-free, unlocked device. Just buy it and use it with any provider you want. And if you had to put up with linear voicemail but get everything else the iPhone offers, so you could get an unlocked iPhone I can’t see too many people being terribly worried about that, as the visual voicemail feature is something that surely everyone will copy.

In any case you can be sure that Apple counted on network opposition from the moment they decided to go exclusively with Cingular in the US, so this reason doesn’t seem to make too much sense to me. There’ll certainly be networks in other countries chomping at the bit to do a deal with Apple, especially if it excludes their competitors, so while there’ll be network opposition, there will also be network support.

So what about reason number 3? This one is also silly, as my reasons clearly explain. Read onto the last page for the conclusion!