iPhone

[Bodhesatva]

Kwaad said:

Bodhesatva said:

Erik Aston said:
I think iPhone is going to perform poorly. You can get Razrs or Blackberrys cheap or free with some contracts, and get the "big enough" iPod for $250. People will choose the cheaper dedicated devices as always.

It could have succeeded if it arrived kinda quietly, and then had some time to drop the price and improve performance and features. Now the press and public expect the product to cure cancer, and when it doesn't, it will become a punchline on Leno. Apple needed to do the standard announce-just-before-launch, instead of trying to show off by overshadowing CES and then hyping for months.

Price drops, increased storage capacity and a faster network could eventually make it a huge product. But if that's the case, why the launch hype? Now they're in danger of having highly publicized short-term inadequecies killing the momentum.

I strongly agree. Machines that sell well out of the gate can do well long term, no question; but machines that sell extremely well out of the gate then plummet in sales shortly therafter tend to stay dead. "Momentum" is an abstract concept for which the causes are difficult to pinpoint, but it clearly exists and has serious consequences.

See, I think the iPhone is amazing. Great peice of hardware.

However it needs to be on a diffrent network. It can NOT be on the AT&T network. The iPhone is based around online multimedia services. AT&T is too slow to do that. With Sprint, I can download a 2meg file off the cell-towers faster than bluetooth can trasfer it. And Bluetooth is like 10x faster than the AT&T cell-tower data-network.

 

If the iPhone came out for sprint, it would be a major success.

(It is a media phone, based around high data-plan use. AT&T does not have a data-plan that can... accomadate the iPhone's thirst for bandwidth. It needs to be able to download at 50kbyte or more a second. Not 5-10kbyte.

I have seen my Sanyo M1 download at around 150KBYTE/second.

Oh, I totally agree it's a solid machine, Kwaad, I'm just saying that I doubt its will sell extremely well. There's a difference, as lots of good machines have flopped. If the iphone sells well out of the gate and then keeps selling well for maybe 4-5 more months, then I'd say it has a lock on a large market share. But 499 dollar phones leave me a little suspicious of the sales past technophiles. The hype surrounding the machine has, from my perspective, seemed to be created largely by huge gadget-heads that love this kind of thing, and not by a larger userbase. Maybe I'm wrong; we'll see.