iPhone’s Biggest Flaw (Probably Too Late To Correct )
iPhone’s biggest flaw by far is hitching their wagon to Cingular’s EDGE network.
Let’s be serious. The market for this phone will be the Early Adopters (as it is for all new, seriously expensive technology). Hard cores, Apple Fan Boys, and techies make up this market. This market isn’t huge, but it is influential. This audience snapped up the Treo 700 with 3G service faster than any other group. Why? Network connectivity and the Speed of EVDO.
The ability to connect your laptop using 3G (e.g. EVDO) was the tipping point for this device, and should be the tipping point for any device over $300.00, nevermind $600.00.
We love 3G. Why on earth would the World’s Most Advanced Phone, Communicator, Entertainment, Gotta-Have-It Device come with the worst network capability on the market (i.e. 2G). Yes, I know it has WiFi. but I don’t work on top of a Starbucks! I need to connect to the Internet from lots of different places, including Work, and not just for sending email.
The iPhone is a phone without Parallel in every way, except for the network, and folks, “it is the Network”, or else we’d be happy with our iPod Nanos, and cheap phones.
I’ve blogged previously about the some of the issues we’ll face in June 2007 after the iPhone is released, this is the biggest flaw by far. Everything else is probably either fixable/upgradable via software (e.g. OS X apps, iTunes over WiFi), or something that you can live with (e.g. camera, screen scratches). Not This! For the target market, this was a huge oversight. Trust me!
Will it be fixed? Probably, but not until after September 2007. Then Apple will announce the iPhone Pro ( yeah, more rumors ). By then, all of those early adopters will be locked into 2-year Cingular deals… Doh!
What do you think?
Digg This Article!6 Responses to “iPhone’s Biggest Flaw (Probably Too Late To Correct )”
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Thomas
Said this at 7:20pm:If you watch the keynote again and go to the part where he is talking about the phone being quad-band gsm and edge he says that they are planning on making 3G phones in the future.
If you want to hear it your self go to the “Watch iPhone Introduction” video on the keynote page and scroll to 23:51.
jordan
Said this at 7:27pm:Wow, if that’s true, wouldn’t it require a hardware upgrade? And wouldn’t that mean a new phone? v2 perhaps? And wouldn’t that mean buying out the 2-year contract and replacing it with another 2-year contract?
I did miss the 3G in the keynote, but it does mean it’s not going to be available in June and for that matter this year.
jordan
Said this at 7:33pm:Wow, if that’s true, wouldn’t it require a hardware upgrade? And wouldn’t that mean a new phone? v2 perhaps? And wouldn’t that mean buying out the 2-year contract and replacing it with another 2-year contract?
I did miss the 3G in the keynote, but it does mean it’s not going to be available in June and for that matter this year.
Thomas
Said this at 8:00pm:He is talking about a second generation iPhone I just thought I would point out that they are aware of this issue and are already planning ahead.
Wirelessguy
Said this at 2:46pm:Well, not sure you are getting your network technologies right. For Cingular, or AT&T Wireless as of next week, 3G services would be UMTS and not EVDO, which is the 3G technology of choice for Verizon and Sprint.
The reason they wouldn’t want UMTS on this device is that not every market has UMTS yet, therefore you would be adding even more costs with little effective change. Sure, you get faster speeds, but with WiFi, you are still much faster than any 3G technology to date.
So the play for 2.5G, which EDGE technically is classified as with GPRS being 2G, allows up to 200Kbps of throughput on a device where most people will download at home over their WiFi. Can you picture yourself driving your car downloading music?
Let’s not worry about download speeds until you can see how the phone works, how it sync’s with your personal music collection using either wifi or bluetooth 2.0, and trust in that having EDGE was probably good enough for what people will do with this device. It works for about 600 Million people in the world, while UMTS only has a fraction of that amount.
Cheers!!!!
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