Since its launch eight months ago, the iPhone has cornered 28 per cent of the US smartphone market that up to now has been dominated by RIM, makers of the BlackBerry phone, which has 41 per cent of the market. The second, however, offers high margins and virtually limitless expansion and is an enticing proposition.
The first of these segments is well on its way to being commoditised as a low-margin, fiercely-competitive, zero-sum retailing game.
One mobile market apple tv#
They also set out a technology strategy which might, one day, give Apple the kind of dominance over the mobile market that Google currently enjoys in search and online advertising.Īt the core of the strategy is a plan to segment the market into two categories: common-or-garden mobile phones of the kind we have now - which do voice, text, MP3s and perhaps radio and TV and the iPhone platform which provides access to web browsing, email, sophisticated multi-media applications (including gaming) and virtually anything else that can run on a computer. In their intriguing 6 March presentation (available on the Web at /2j8m6u), Jobs & Co articulated a persuasive vision of the iPhone as a 'platform' - ie a general-purpose computing and communication device. Of these properties, the last is the least interesting.
The key feature of the Apple device is that it is a powerful handheld computer which runs Unix and has a nice user interface - and which also happens to make voice calls. If this wasn't obvious before, it became crystal clear on 6 March, when Steve Jobs and some of his colleagues unveiled their plans for what they called 'iPhone 2.0'.
As the mobile phone industry struggles to come to grips with Apple's iPhone, the biggest mistake it could make is to see the device purely as a phone.
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