Nokia recently announced its new 5800 Xpress Music, or Tube, as an “iPhone Killer”. Reviewers, however, disagree, mainly on hardware spec grounds – no touchscreen, S60 software issues.

What most reviewers seem to ignore is that even if Nokia (or Google, Sony, LG etc.) do come up with a device that matches the iPhone’s technical abilities (and I’m sure they have the required resources to do so) they’re still going to have a tough time competing with it.

Why? They way they sell and support their devices is very different than Apple.

When you buy an iPhone you have one company that control’s your entire experience with the device. From purchasing to ongoing operations and services its all ran by Apple that controls the entire product experience etc.
Apple bundles its iPhone with a set of services (AppStore, iTunes, Music Store…) that are tightly integrated with the device allowing easy consumption by customers which eventually is what’s driving Apple’s business.

Nokia, Sony, LG etc., on the other hand, sell the device through partnerships with different communication companies such as Orange Partner, which in turn, works with local sub-diaries. They rely on these partners for supporting their device and providing services to customers which often results in poor (sometime broken) customer experience.

Speaking at an Israeli GarageGeeks meeting, Steve Glagow, VP of Marketing Operations at Orange Partner VP mentioned that due to the fact they have to work with many regional and local partners, it takes more than 3 clicks and several screens for a user to install an application. Although he said their application installation rate is high (percentage of users who reach the application marketplace and end up installing an application) its a misleading measurement as most users will give up and never even reach the marketplace – only users determined to install an application will go through that effort.

Bundling your device with services is a winning strategy, not just for cellphones. Microsoft’s Xbox Live! platform is another great example on how bundling a device with online services helps increasing its value and perception.

Killing the iPhone will require more than just cool new hardware…

Related readings:

• Six Reasons iPhone Delivers Where Android Won’t
• Nokia 5800 (Tube) – Not an iPhone Killer?
• Nokia 5800 on Engadget

Tags: 5800, Apple, Google, iPhone, Microsoft, Nokia, Sony, Steve Glagow, Xpress Music, XpressMusic

Here are my notes from the Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference:

• Apple is cutting the price of the iPhone to $199 for the 8GB version and $299 for the 16GB version.
  This price tags now puts the iPhone in direct competition with Nokia on the consumers market and with Blackberry on the enterprise market.
  The iPhone is now targeting mainstream consumers and not only the high-end market…
• 35% of Fortune 500 companies participated in  Apple’s enterprise iPhone experiment – including the US Army, Disney, etc. That’s quite an impressive market engagement.
  The new iPhone enterprise features, coupled with the new competitive price tag can make Apple a significant player in the enterprise market. Look out RIM…
• Seems like $9.99 is going to be the pricing standard for iPhone apps. Cheap…
• MobileMe was dubbed “Exchange for the rest of us” – a new service from Apple to synchronize personal data across devices and platforms.
  Basically it does what Plaxo does but its not free :S
  • Microsoft’s Live MeshSkyDriveFoldershare services now have a new serious competition…
  • In “Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You” Joel Spolsky claims that data portability is just a theoretical problem invented by architecture astronauts (Ray Ozzie in this case).
    Joel picked a bad example to prove his point as I guess having all the major players trying to data portability is a sign that its a real need.
    Personally, I don’t know what I would have done without Plaxo and Foldershare but that’s a topic for another post I guess…
• The seventh release of the iPhone SDK is out.
• The next version of Max OS X is called Snow Leopard and is set to be released within a year.
  • Apple plans to support new hardware architectures (like multiple CPUs) and fix Leopard issues as well as add native support for Microsoft Exchange.
  • Sounds more like a Leopard Service Pack than a new major version…
• The “Apple Push Notification Service” – finally a decent solution for notifications for background applications on a mobile platform.
  Instead of draining battery life and degrading performance by running a background process, applications can use the service to update remotely.
  Here’s how Dan Moran from MacWorld describes it:

  as you run an app like an IM client, it’s connected to the server. When the user quits the app, the iPhone will maintain a connection to the server, which will let them push notifications. It can push three types of notification: badges, custom alert sounds, and you can push custom textual alerts, appearing kind of like SMS messages and you can provide buttons that will automatically launch application. Great thing about this design: it scales, but only requires one persistent connection. This is sweet, sweet news for all developers and those who wants to use IM clients especially.

Any other thoughts regarding Apple’s announcements and plans?

Tags: AAPL, Apple, iPhone, iPhone 3G, MobileMe

TechCrunch and Macworld were live blogging from the Apple iPhone Software Roadmap event at the Apple campus at Cupertino.

Below are the main takes from today’s announcements (plus some commentary of course):

• Long list of features aimed at the Enterprise market:
  • Push email\calendar\contacts
  • Global address list
  • Cisco IPsec VPN
  • Two-factor authentication, certificates and identities.
  • Enterprise-class Wi-Fi with WPA2/802.1x.
  • Security tools to enforce security policies.
  • Deployment tools to allow an organization to configure and set thousands of devices easily.
  • Data Security – Ability to protect iPhone data and remotely wipe it.
• Apple licensed the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol and will feature full Exchange sync support on the next iPhone update.

“With ActiveSync, the iPhone talks directly to Exchange. So the iPhone will get push e-mail, push calendaring, push contacts, global access lists, and remote wipe, all while talking to Exchange. And it’s built into the existing applications — mail goes into the same Mail program, calendar into the same Calendar, and so on.”

• iPhone SDK

“Starting today we’re opening up the same APIs and tools that we use to develop our own applications today. Now, there are a lot of pieces that make up an SDK. But the most important are the APIs and the platform. And we have a great one, Mac OS X.” Layers: Core OS, Core Services, Media, and Cocoa. “To build the iPhone OS, we took the bottom three layers and moved them across. Now Cocoa is interesting… it’s the best application framework out there, but it’s based on a keyboard and mouse.” Instead, they build Cocoa Touch, based on touch interaction with the iPhone OS.”

According to Apple, its opening up all the APIs used by its own developers to develop the iPhone applications. They’re also building tools to support developers (on a Mac):

“Now a brand new development tool, the iPhone Simulator. Runs on a Mac, and simulates the entire API stack of the iPhone OS. So right here, on your Mac, you can run your application in the simulator, which gives you an incredible turnaround time on development.”

• iTunes as an Application Market

Apple is using iTunes to allow distributing and selling applications. Developers have a standard platform to be used for distributing their application.
The application store is going to be the exclusive way to distribute applications to the iPhone. It is going to be free of charge for free applications and will involve a 30% fee of revenues of commercial applications.

Reminds me of Nintendo tactics – in its early days, Nintendo kept all manufacturing rights for Nintendo hardware. Being the manufacturer of Nintendo cassettes media it made all its developer buy its media to be able to distributing games…

• Gaming platform

One of the aspects of the SDK is that it supports OpenGL for graphics and OpenAL for sound.
Apple had representative from EA testifying about the iPhone as a gaming platform and talking about games they’re working on.
Apple is selling the iPhone as a device with serious gaming capabilities. I bet we’ll also see more desktop oldies converted to iPhone now….
Combines with iTunes as a game distribution platform Apple can be on to something interesting here…  Kind of like what Microsoft is doing with Xbox Live! Arcade

• Business Applications Platform

The iPhone graphics capabilities can also be used for analytics in business applications, as demonstrated by a SalesForce.com application:

“Salesforce automation application comes on screen. There’s a needle showing how a sales guy is doing, on a spectrum from red to green. A full iPhone toolbar on the bottom, and a native iPhone list at the top.”

Other demos shown:

• Apple also had AOL talking about bringing AIM to the iPhone. I guess the other instant messaging platforms will follow…
• Epocrates – Software used by doctors. I guess Apple is joining Microsoft, Google, SAP and Oracle in attacking the health market

• iFund

Kleiner Perkins announced a $100 million iFund for investment in startups who create applications for the iPhone.
http://www.kpcb.com/initiatives/ifund/index.html

I wonder how corporate IT is going to treat these new features. Richard Koman at ZDnet seems skeptic…

In any case, an iPhone SDK plus tight integration with Exchange can bring up some interesting ideas for Enterprise Applications like the ones we’re doing at SAP…
An iPhone Duet (iDuet) anyone?

Tags: AAPL, ActiveSync, Apple, Duet, Exchange, iPhone, Microsoft, SAP

MacWorld 2008 will open this afternoon (Tuesday, 9 a.m. PST) with the much anticipated Steve Jobs keynotes.
I’m anxiously waiting to see what new stuff Apple announces today. Hoping for an AT&T-Free iPhone…

Anyway, a couple of useful links for the keynotes coverage:

• The Apple official broadcast at www.apple.com (obviously)
• Engadget’s Live from Macworld2008: Steve Jobs Keynotes
• The Macworld blog and twitter
• TechCrunch’s Coverage: Steve Jobs Keynote Live From Macworld
• Fortune: Big Tech
• Scoble’s shared items (I’m sure his Twitter will become highly active too)

Update:
There are rumors that Steve’s keynotes were leaked…

Got any other interesting links? Post them on the comments…
And while you’re on it, speculations regarding unlocked iPhone starts now! I’ve created a poll:

So what do you think?

Tags: AAPL, Apple, AT&T, iPhone, Macworld

Following a Nintendo DS port and various PDA ports, ScummVM now has an iPhone port too…

While it was announced on the ScummVM website, its still not an official port and currently still in beta.
Here’s what Gizmodo had to say about the interface:

After trying it I can tell you that if there’s a platform designed to play these kind of games,it’s the iPhone. In fact, these are the only games that truly feel at home on the iPhone, thanks to its great touchscreen support, even better than Apple’s native software:

ScummVM fully supports multi-touch to simulate the behavior of the mouse using gestures. With a single tap you left click, but for a right click you hold one finger and tap with another. To toggle click and drag, which is necessary in some games like Monkey Island 3, you “hold one finger on screen, swipe another up from bottom to top.” Then you can drag something, lift your finger to drop it and it will automatically switch back to normal. Quite ingenious and easy.

Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert, who is an iPhone user, also seems to be pleased with this new iPhone emulation.

And there’s clearly a market for such old games on new devices (iPhone, Nintendo DS, XBOX Arcade…) it really makes me wonder why the owner companies would let these games be pirated as abandonware rather than make use of them in the new gaming platforms we have today.

While such games do not have the graphics and sound to compete with games like Halo 3 on today’s leading gaming platforms. They can still take advantage of the computing power mobile devices have these days which is probably stronger than the PCs these games used to run on.

There’s a whole market of mobile casual games where such games can have success these days, if companies are not smart enough to commercialize on it, at least I’m hoping to see many more emulations like these supporting old games on new platforms.

Tags: iPhone, LucasArts

Apple’s public relations tendency to bully journalists and bloggers is nothing new but a recent post on Valleywag shows a rare view on things really work behind the scenes.

A British journalist is interviewing Apple Vice President Philip Schiller when Pr abruptly ends the interview when he attempts to ask a questions about the iTunes monopoly on downloads for the iPhone.

Tags: AAPL, Apple, iPhone, iTunes

Apple’s share fell as much as -7.53% on the past 5 days.
In fact, when looking at the share’s graph from the past month you can clearly see the price bump caused by the MacWorldiPhone hype:

* Note that Apple introduced iPhone on January 10th

I think this clearly demonstrates my point regarding the whole MacWorldiPhone distortion field.
After the big conference and all the hype, reality settles in…

Some other interesting question marks raised by investors and analysts:

1. Will Apple’s iPhone release on June cause people on purchasing an iPod to delay their plans? I think it will and this will have an effect on Apple’s Q1 and Q2 results. Some analysts already vut down Apple’s share rating based on this assumption.
2. Mac sales results miss analysts forecasts
3. Several iPhone doubts like the Europe release, non Singular version etc.

Some news links:

• Apple Shares Fall on Mac, iPhone Doubts
• Analysts: Apple luster still strong
• Apple shares fall on weak quarterly outlook

Technorati : Apple, Finance, Investing, Mac, Stock, iPhone, iPod

Tags: AAPL, Apple, iPhone

Quite expectedly, when the MacWorld distortion field fades away we find out the real facts that aren’t on Jobs’s keynotes.

According to Gizmondo-UK, Apple’s iPhone is going to £595-£660 in Europe (compared to £255 – £306 in the US which is still pretty expensive).
And if money is not your problem Apple’s still have a line of other stuff just for you:

• It’ll take another year for iPod to hit Europe (and anywhere else practically because thats the version not locked in to Singular) and its going to be 3G which consumes more battery.

• It will be a closed device and will only run software released by Apple. So much for having an OSX OS huh?

• It will use Apple’s ‘FairPlay’ DRM software which pretty much only plays music bought through iTunes.

On the good news is that while US consumers might have to settle for an alternative to the name iPhone due to Cisco’s lawsuit, european customers will probably be able to enjoy their iPhone because of some loophole:

“Trade mark specialist Lee Curtis of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM, has found a legal loophole, though, which could strip Cisco of its European rights. He told technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio that in Europe a person can lodge a revocation application against a trade mark registration if the trade mark has not been used for the past five years.”

Read more about that here….

And what about Israeli consumers?
Ah.. we’ll probably use our familycoworkers or business trips abroad to smuggle’em over here and hack the Singular lock somehow… We do that with everything else too
Personally, I’m keeping my Nokia6280 + iPod Video + new iPod shuffle combo for the foreseeable future…

Technorati : Apple, iPhone, iPod

Tags: AAPL, Apple, iPhone