Consumers and investors shouldn’t be too impressed by the Apple iPhone’s record-breaking sales last quarter, according to a leading Microsoft executive, who suggested that the device has yet to demonstrate long-term momentum.
“Apple had a big launch of a new product (the iPhone 3G), and they launched at scale in a lot of new countries with a lot of new operators,” commented Robbie Bach, head of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, which produces the popular Windows Mobile operating system. “This quarter, (Research In Motion) is having its big launch, and at some point we’ll have our big launch. We’ll have to see where things normalize.”
Bach also suggested that the iPhone will face a natural market limit as the hype wears off, and AT&T (exclusive U.S. carrier of the device) begins to promote other products more heavily.
“Does AT&T like having iPhone on its network? Sure. But they want to have balance in that ecosystem, where there’s three or four big partners,” Bach explained. “That’s why we’re so attractive to them — because we work with Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, HTC, Motorola. Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is a cool device. But it’s not about choice.”
At the Flash On The Beach (FOTB) conference in Brighton, Sr. Director of Engineering at Adobe Systems Paul Betlem, confirmed that Adobe is indeed developing a Flash Player for the iPhone. However, Apple calls the shots as to when it’ll be available. 
The Town Hall meeting sessions are usually a great source of Adobe information and the one at this years Flash On The Beach conference was no exception. The session was full of nuggets for Flash users, but the most relevant piece of information for others was about Flash Player for the iPhone. Upon a direct question from the audience, Paul Betlem for the first time publicly confirmed that Adobe is actively developing a Flash Player for Apple’s popular phone. He said (not direct quote) “My team is working on Flash on the iPhone, but it’s a closed platform.” He noted that Apple makes all the decisions, so in other words, the ball is in Apple’s yard at this time. If Apple says yes, Adobe will have the player available in a very short time.
After an interview with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan, the rumour mill got into high gear. Now we know that the Player exists within Adobe. Apple may have many reasons for not allowing Flash onto the iPhone, but if anyone has a good shot at getting their technology into the device, it would be Adobe. There were several other nuggets in this session, but we’ll get back to those in our FOTB conference reports.
A whole lot has been happening in iPhone-land lately. The 3G iPhone is now available unlocked…in China. If you want to write a nasty note about an iPhone Application, you’re going to have to pay for it first. Lastly, Apple has lowered the number of iPhones it will manufacture this year, but has raised the number it thinks it will sell.
3G Unlocked iPhone
If you want an unlocked iPhone, get ready to shell out some cold, hard cash. The Apple iPhone 3G is available unlocked in China for a sum of $700 for the 8-GB version and $800 for the 16-GB version. The Apple Web site says that the iPhone 3G purchased at the Apple Online Store can be activated with any wireless carrier. It doesn’t specify if that means any carrier in China or any carrier in the world.
Alternately, you can buy one here at the subsidized price of $200 or $300 and unlock it yourself for free. Of course, there’s that pesky two-year contract to consider…
App Reviews
Here’s a nice little PR move. One of the great things about the iPhone Apps Store are the user reviews. They give you the real deal, not marketing lingo, so you know what you’re in store for if you choose to buy an application. Well, before this weekend, you could write a review of an application even if you hadn’t downloaded it. That is no longer the case. In order to write a review of an application, you must have downloaded it and installed it on the iPhone.
This is a good move, if you ask me. Any reviewer who writes a review even if he/she hasn’t even used the application is wasting my time.
iPhone Output
According to analysts, Apple has cut the production of 3G iPhones from 18 million units to 14 or 15 million units during the third and fourth quarter of this year. The Register reports that, “[Pacific Crest Securities] reckons Apple will sell 11m iPhones during H2 2008, up from its previous forecast of 8m. Accounting for the apparent discrepancy — increased sales yet reduced production — PCS noted that cutting back on manufacturing costs gives Apple ’sustainable pricing power,’ implying the Mac maker could reduce the handset’s price over the period.”
Apple and analysts think the company will sell all of the iPhones that it makes.
I thought I’d stop after traveling from event to event, catch my breath and take a moment to review my experiences working with the iPhone for the last month or so. The following musings are in no particular order.
- The user interface is really fun to use. Beauty, however, is only skin deep.
- Apple often shows how Safari, the photo viewer and the iPod application change from portrait to landscape mode when the device is turned to one side. Why don’t other important applications, such as mail, do the same trick? While it is possible to expand the view of a portion of a message and scroll the image from side to side or up and down, it would seem more natural, to turn the device on its side and get a larger view that way. Another benefit to this approach is that the awful keyboard is presented with larger keys in landscape mode.
- Apple offers a creative dictionary that offers corrections as human-sized fingers try to touch the right Chiclet-size keys on the awful iPhone keyboard. It appears that Apple’s engineers knew that there was a problem, were told that the keyboard was done and they had to just “live with it”. So, they came up with solution - a dictionary that includes commonly misspelled words or words that were spelled correctly on adjacent keys on the keyboard. A portion of the time, the device figures out what I was trying to type and offers its discoveries to me as an option. If I touch the space bar (accidentally or on purpose) it replaces what I was typing with what was found it its little dictionary. This feature is really a joy when it substitutes the wrong word and I have to delete the bogus entry a character at a time and re-enter it on that awful keyboard. Users have no way to tell the device of commonly used words (such as Kusnetzky, of course) so that those words would be recognized after the first couple of keystrokes. Why didn’t they use the same creativeness to fix the awful keyboard? This is clearly the most irritating feature on the device.
- Where’s cut and paste????? I know that you’ve heard the cry for this simple function, a function that everyone else just included in their operating systems. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used unpleasant words when I’ve wanted to capture contact information that came in an Email message in my contact list. I’ve had to write the information down and manually enter it again using that awful keyboard.
- The on board calendar handles time zones in a really stupid way. The whole calendar can be set for a time zone. That’s it. There’s no way for a traveler to enter a flight that starts at a specific time in one time zone and ends at a specific time in another time zone on the device. A few more options are available if the events are created on a host device in Apple’s iCal, Entourage or Microsoft’s Outlook. My Treo 650 and my HTC Advantage had no problems with this. Please fix this Apple.
- I can see photos on the iPhone, but I can’t delete them or rename them. The same is true of music files. Those operations have to be done on the host computer. Why doesn’t Apple make it possible for the owner of the device to manage those files on the device?
- Although the device is able to display documents, presentation decks and the like, the only way to get these files onto the device is as an attachment to an Email message. Com’mon Apple, offer a file transfer utility to allow busy executives to take their documents along. (By the way, I know that there are several utilities that offer this capability in the iTunes app store. They are limited by the control Apple exerts on the device. Those applications can’t manage photos or songs except in their own little world. They’re not allowed to access those files in the main directories.)
- The device will fully synchronize with only one computer. What about those of us who keep our business and personal calendars on the device and synchronize with a machine at work and another one at home? Once again, I had no problems with this with other devices. Owners of these devices have come up with some interesting work-arounds, but nothing really works well. Third parties aren’t allowed sufficient access to the inner workings of this device to fix the problem either. Apple’s solution is to sell access to their online service. That service can synchronize data and/or automatically delete one’s calendar and contact info on multiple computers. I don’t want a service. I want the device to do at least what others can do.
- Apple touts their iTunes store’s portfolio of applications. Although many of these applications are appealing, other needed applications are no where to be found unless one jailbreaks the phone. If a person finally figures out how to synchronize the calendar and contact info with multiple host computers, the applications on the device get deleted and have to be re-installed because iTunes only allows purchased applications to reside on one host device. There is a way to add another device, however. It still is way to difficult.
What have your experiences been with this device? What suggestions would you offer Apple if you could corner one of their planners in a conference room somewhere?
