There will be no “iPhone killer”
All you ever hear from the mobile phone manufacturers and pundits these days is speculation about what phone will “kill” the iPhone. I think this is evidence that they are thinking in a way that will be guarantee that they will be also-rans for as long as Apple make a mobile telephony device (and I think they’ll be doing that for a *long* time).
It shows that they’re asking the wrong question. The flurry of new touchscreen devices – the BlackBerry Storm, the LG Incite (tagline: “Windows Mobile at its most intuitive”, which is kind of like saying “shit at its least smelly”) and so on – show that the boards of mobile phone companies have, in effect, told their R&D teams to create an iPhone clone.
And there’s the problem. You can’t clone the iPhone, because Apple have done such an amazing job on the design, usability and functionality that, if you’re in the market for a touchscreen phone, you’re probably going to automatically choose an iPhone. And that’s before you’ve had a play with your friend’s iPhone. I’ve never owned any other device that has made my friends *laugh* when they see how awesome it is.
There are still a few things that might hold you back: years of hearing that Macs aren’t as good as PCs (just pop into your local Apple Store if you want to find out how wrong-headed that is), the price of the monthly contract, and maybe not wanting to be on O2 due to coverage issues in your area (or AT&T or whoever the carrier is in your country). And you may just not want to be a sheep. But once the exclusive deals expire, surely the iPhone will be available on all networks and most of those concerns will go away.
But there are still a huge number of people who are not in the market for an iPhone at all. People who don’t want such a large phone, who don’t want email, or an iPod on their phone, or a mobile gaming device, who probably don’t even need a camera, and who will probably never download apps. Although the iPhone has been a massive success – when very few predicted it would be – it still only has a fraction of the market for handsets.
I boldly predict that the next big-selling phone will be designed by people who look at the iPhone and ask: “who isn’t going to want one of these?”, “why?”, and “how can we build them a phone they *do* want?” Until then, Apple will continue to eat the establish players’ lunch.
Update: fixed silly typo
NSConference
I’ve recently taken some actual concrete steps to learn the iPhone SDK and Objective-C. So far it’s been very enjoyable, with only a couple of WTF moments.
The biggest change from using Visual Studio and .NET has been that the visual tools actually seem to work without screwing with your work. I’m not pushing it very hard yet, so that will probably change. I’m still nervous that I don’t understand the underlying serialization format.
I’ve been using Bill Dudney’s Screenscasts on starting iPhone development, and his forthcoming iPhone development book, both from the Pragmatic Programmers, which have both been excellent. As a result I’ve got the basics of an iPhone app that I think could turn into something that people might actually want to install on their phones. There’s a lot of work to be done before I get to that stage, though.
In an attempt to give myself a hard deadline for learning, I also signed up for NSConference, a Mac developers conference to be held in April, organised by Scotty from the Mac Developer Network. If you’re at all interested in iPhone or Mac development it looks like the place to be. Hopefully I’ll see you there.
