Trustedplaces, the online review and reputation community site has just launched an iPhone-optimized version of their site at trustedplaces/iphone. Those of you that spent Friday afternoon standing outside O2 or Apple shops waiting for your own 135g slab of joy can reward your perseverance with a trip to the pub, and what’s more a pub that others have recommended.
No doubt there will be many more of these optimized iPhone services to come, but I wonder how sustainable this approach is given that the
iPhone represents such a tiny proportion even of smartphone sales? My wife, who is not a techie, quizzed me about the iPhone mania the other day, and said “but the iPhone is not the first one that can connect to the Internet!”. Of course she is correct, but I guess the genius of Apple marketing is that many people have never thought before about connecting their phone to the Internet, even though many £50 handsets can.
On a recent trip to the US, a lot of my companions had an iPhone or two on their shopping list. In some cases for themselves, to unlock with the help of the Internet, in some cases for unlocking and selling on, given the weak dollar and the ease of selling items like this on Ebay.co.uk. Looking at Ebay today, unlocked iPhones were attracting bids above £350, which compares to the £190 or so you pay in the US Apple Store, or £269 in the O2 shops, both for locked units.
Apple are concerned about this grey-market since they have limited US Apple store purchases to two per person, and the AT&T Wireless store will only sell you one if you sign the AT&T contract on the spot. The Apple business model relies on kick-backs from the cellcos in return for exclusivity in the supply chain. The grey marketers are attacking the potential profits of the cellcos, and at the same time causing support problems as the ‘bricked’ iPhones roll back-in.
In the long term it will be interesting to see if the iPhone experiment allows the mobile operators to pass more of the handset cost on to the end user. Can you imagine volunteering to pay more money for your SIM-locked Nokia or SonyEricsson? Or will Apple have to knuckle under and do it the same as everyone else, with one price for prepay and another price for contract.
November 14th, 2007 at 10:03 am
>> many people have never thought before about connecting their phone to the Internet, even though many £50 handsets can.
Isn’t the high cost of connectivity likely to be a prime reason? Combined with the difficulty in understanding mobile operators’ pricing plans, it’s no wonder few people routinely use their mobiles for net access.
Of course, it could just be me
Btw, re sites optimized for iPhone, any WordPress site can do that with a very nifty Plugin. I installed it and it does work well. Details here: http://tinyurl.com/33exfm
Blognation runs WordPress. Try it!
November 14th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
High cost of web surfing has always put me off using my previous phones. I used an old Nokia 7100 extensively on WAP when it was on Genie (ironically a predecessor of O2).
On O2, data is free, so I tend to use my iPhone for the web more than the ‘traditional’ mobile functions.
November 14th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
I think some confusion lies in people not knowing say how much 10mb of data means in real terms.
I don’t think the iPhone will cause prices to rise for other manufactures. At the moment the iPhone is brand new. As it becomes part of the mobile of landscape I would imagine it will placed along side all the other mobile suppliers. It’s more likely to come down to their level as opposed to the other way round.
November 15th, 2007 at 8:53 am
@Andy and Neville: you’re right, it is expensive and costs are unpredictable (especially when you are roaming), but data use has doubled among users shifting from GSM technology (EDGE,GPRS) to 3G data, so people are becoming more releaxed about using the mobile web.
@Ryan, actually I’m sure that I don’t have any feel for what 10Mb of data is in terms of my surfing & email use either. Clocking by volume is just a bad way to expect humans to work…