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The runaway success of iPhone across the world has indeed revolutionalised the next generation of phones. Before the debut of iPhone, touch phones were at best a good to have feature. For example, resisitive screens have always been available on Windows Mobile phones, but it was not THE thing. We would always prefer a physical keyboard and a stylus. Apple changed the game when it launched its first generation of iPhone 2G/Edge . We are awed by the convenience of touch and the ease of zooming in and out of internet pages by panning and pinching with our fingers. The capacitive screen brought the touch phones to a new level. (see here for more details on how capactitive screen works: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/iphone2.htm )

Since then, we have seen a slew of phones that aim to provide the similar touch and accelerometer capabilities as the iPhone. I said similar and not same because to date, I have yet to test a phone that offers the same level of finess in its touch and accelerometer capabilities (see my other posts on the recent phone models). Storm and G1 are close competitors to iPhone in this aspect – they make it up with many other features that are missing in iPhone today – such as expandable slot, MMS, copy and paste function, just to mention a few). If you may remember, Samsung Omnia had some good success, particularly in countries where iPhone 3G was / would be launched later than Omnia. Now almost all major phone manufacturers from Nokia to Sony Ericsson to HTC have their touch phones series. I won’t belabour too much on each of these phones since this is not the intent of this post. I thought this is healthy for the market. Now, we have more choices. Apple has indeed caused a disruptive change in the competitive landscape in just 2 short years. It has even overtaken RIM’s second position in smartphone sales. Of course, now with Verizon launching Storm, we have yet to see how this will pan out.

iPhone is not simply about the Phone itself. In fact, iPhone brings with it an ecosystem – the iTunes. If you are a Blackberry user especially if you are a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) corporate user, you have very applications that you would buy and load into your Blackberry. Reasons are two-fold. Firstly, the range of applications is limited and certain corporate policies may prohibit installation of third party apps. Secondly, the applications are relatively expensive, say about $10 or $20 or more. Thirdly, traditional Blackberry phone is really meant for one core functionality – messaging. The same goes for Windows Mobile phone or Symbian Phones. To be fair, I must say that there are many third party Windows Mobile applications that are availabie. There is no lack of applications. Then one might wonder, why didn’t the “appstore” concept take the central stage in the past so many years since the availability of Windows Mobile phones. Let’s look back in history. Windows Mobile was an attempt by Microsoft to take away market share from RIM by extending its dominant reach in the PC market and desktop Windows / Microsoft Outlook base to the mobile world. The whole “wow” factor of having a Windows Mobile phone was that you were able to finally synchronise your emails, calendar appointments and contacts over the air. The big “PUSH EMAIL” capabilitiy was why people wanted to buy a Windows Mobile phone. Plus, the early Blackberry gadgets limited phone functions as its primary purpose was for messaging. Even then, it was a real pain to read attachments on Blackberry. Windows Mobile made up for the shortcomings in Blackberry. Not only do I not need an activation pin/password that is required for my Blackberry (which is different from your Outlook user name / password and domain), I can easily set up my email outlook account on my Windows Mobile phone anytime. Reading attachments was much better on Windows Mobile phone. I could also buy third party applications like Documents To Go. In the case of Blackberry, while similar third party apps for reading attachments are available, they are usually on a subscription model (if you are recall, you could not download and save attachments from a Blackberry back then. You could only open them).

Fast forward to today. What has Apple done? When Apple launched iPhone 2G, Apple was not targeting at enterprise users. It avoided direct head-on competition with either Windows Mobile or RIM. Instead, it aim straight at consumers. Apple leveraged on its core competence – designed a phone that had the form factor which would wow people as an iMAC or MACBOOK did and positioned the phone as a all-in-one for voice, videos, photos, and music. This is what a Apple is good at. By then iTunes was already widely used by both Mac and Windows users and people were used to buying music and synchronising it into iPod. No doubt there would be some cannibalisation on the iPods, but the upside was far bigger. iPhone would allow Apple to make inroads into the mobile world and take a slice of the mobile market which would tip 1.8 billion by end 2007 (estimate from Yankee Group report).