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March 29, 2007

rivals

iPhone will boost competitors’ sales. Huh?

Posted Mar. 29, ’07, 4:01 PM PT by Thomas Gagnon-van Leeuwen
Category | Apple » Rivals

thinkingaboutiphone.jpg

Partly thanks to the ongoing CTIA Wireless trade show, opinions about the iPhone are emerging from different COOs, CEOs, and all those other important people from the mobile phone industry.

First, iPhone World reports that Research In Motion thinks the iPhone will boost their own Blackberry sales:

“Hats off to Steve [Jobs],” said [RIM co-CEO] Lazaridis. “He made smartphones cool again. Now everyone wants one. He helped the entire industry.”

I’m not sure that the average person considers the iPhone a smartphone, and the people who do are likely not running out the door to buy a BlackBerry because of Apple.

Verizon’s COO Dennis Strigl is on the same frequency: he too thinks Apple’s phone, apart from being a flop, will improve Verizon cell phone sales, this time by creating awareness for music on mobile phones. Strigl says he feels “okay” with Verizon’s music efforts, pointing out they sold 12 million songs through their download service. Wait, who sold more than 2 billion? Not only that, but he also seems to think Apple is only focusing on the music aspect of their phone, while Verizon emphasizes “all the things you can do on your Verizon wireless phone”. I’m not an expert, but isn’t Verizon that very same company that locks down their phones so much you can barely flip them open?


5 Comments

James said:

I tend to agree with the statement that RIM made. The iPhone will help the industry overall. Take a look at online games as an example.

A highly usable game came out called WoW. This brought in many new players and a lot of visibility to the industry. Although the competitors did not grow at the same pace, they did find that some people felt WoW was too easy and they went on to play other games.

The same thing can happen for the cell market. Apple comes along with a highly usable product that dominates the market, but at the same time the market has expanded, still allowing competitors to fill in the corners that Apple cut (intentionally).

I just kind of laugh at the people who say it will be a flop though. There is already so much buzz and already so many people who want to have one. The only place Apple can fail is in product quality, and overall they have above industry standards for quality.

March 29, 2007 6:15 PM
Dave said:

Don't mock. You can't deny that buzz the iPhone has generated. This makes smart phones more prominent and people that don't want to switch providers or pay $500 (or buy a camera--Apple, please sell a camera-less configuration!) may decide to buy the next best thing.

March 30, 2007 5:52 AM
George said:

Being a Verizon customer and actually having attempted to use their phone as a music player, I can say I highly doubt the iPhone will help create POSITIVE awareness of music on Verizon's mobile phones.

Just to be able to use my phone for music I had to have the software upgraded (or downgraded since the update hid the mp3 player but gave me the WMA only VCast player), buy the music kit, and purchase a miniSD memory card if I wanted more than 10 songs on the phone.

Then on top of that the player is hidden in the menus under "Get it Now" -> "Get Tunes & Tones" -> "Manage Music". That's certainly some intuitive menu design and naming. Exactly which one of those menu names evokes the concept "Play music?" Oh, right, none of them. Apparently one of the external buttons also activates the music player...

Syncing it was about as easy. It required a Windows PC (which I still had at the time) and WMP. You plugged the phone into the USB data cable, then had to navigate through the phone menus to "Get it Now" -> "Get Tunes & Tones" -> "Sync Music" to get it to be recognized by the PC. You could then finally manually manage your music and wait patiently if you tried to sync mp3's while it converted them to WMA files.

I moved onto a 60GB iPod and haven't missed the "covenience" of only needing one device for music and calls.

I do actually use the phone's calendar for keeping track of appoinments but it is just as illogically placed under "Settings and Tools"->"Tools" because clearly looking for a calendar under an icon of a hammer and wrench is the most logical choice...

Maybe Verizon's COO should actually try using one of their phones. That will give him something to do until he can replace it with an iPhone.

March 30, 2007 5:54 AM
Adam said:

It'll raise awarness as to how sucky blackberrys are.

and lets not get started on verizon wireless.

Americas phones and services is complete crap compaired to just about everywhere else.

March 30, 2007 1:41 PM
Walt Basil said:

I have agree with Dave. It more than likely will boost other phones. Because there will undoubtedly be those individuals unwilling or incapable of forking over $500 for a phone, but because it's been called a smartphone, they'll check out the "others."

March 30, 2007 3:15 PM

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