Frankly Speaking: The iPhone idea

16.01.2007
And now, the iPhone. Smack in the middle of gadget season -- when users are figuring out their high-tech holiday gifts and hot new items are coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show -- here comes Apple's entry: a US$500 cell-phone-cum-iPod-cum-wireless-Web-browser that has stolen the limelight from everything else.

Is it really as stuffed with innovative features as Steve Jobs made it sound from the stage at Macworld Expo last week? Nah. Most of those features have been around in one form or another for years. Apple just put them all together.

Which is part of what makes the iPhone such a brilliant idea -- and such a terrible example for corporate IT.

Widescreen pocket media player? Been done. Handheld Web browser? Been done. Quad-band GSM phone? Been done, in almost every way imaginable. Camera? Wi-Fi? Bluetooth? Old news. Even the all-touch-screen phone interface Jobs gushed over ("We're going to use the best pointing device in our world -- we're born with 10 of them, our fingers") has been around since 2001.

Yes, Apple tweaked those features, polished them up and added some small enhancements like "the pinch" for zooming in on Web content. Mostly, though, Apple took a big pile of things that already work and then stitched them together into something new.

But does Apple know what users will actually do with the iPhone? Nope. Jobs all but admitted that last week when he claimed he was introducing three new products before unveiling the one real thing.