Apple iPhone handset Apple iPhone has been a big phone innovation on the mobile market. It’s now more than a year since the iPhone has entered the market. The iPhone has spoken to a new crowd of people, a crowd that wants style, a crowd that also wants great browsing – but a crowd, that when the cool things lay off, moving icons becomes boring, and the tapping and finding contacts becomes harder and harder with the amount of them, gets disappointed. 

iPhone sales – very good, but not as good as expected to be…

iPhone sales have been doing well. Apple has sold over 14 million units of both the iPhone and iPhone 3G by 4th quarter of 2008, which is quite decent for a single phone brand, on the other hand it has been 2 years since iPhone started selling the iPhone, and other phone manufacturers (Nokia for instance), sells about 100 million mobile phones each year, so in the same time, it sold 200 million mobile phones, which can be up to a 20 – 25% of penetration of Symbian phones in these numbers, which means Nokia sold say around 50 million Symbian phones only in the same time. 

If you read this article by VentureBeat, you get to think that there might be 36 million iPhone sold next year. But how are they planning to achieve that? 

Let’s take for example Russia, where mobile operators bought together millions of iPhone devices, and sold hundreds of thousands, reported by a UFT representative at the latest Nordic Mobile Media conference. Now this is a fiasco, what are Russian operators going to do with a couple million iPhones?? Well there will not be much time to sell them, but I know they are not buying anything from Apple ever again. 

iPhone and iPhone 3G – Where are more?

Apple has so far come up with 2 models – iPhone, and iPhone 3G. That’s great, but the issue is – where is the next one? The speed of mobile companies such as Nokia of new handsets entering the market is several per month (3 – 5 handsets announced every month), which compared by Apple – 1 handset every year, isn’t that shiny. Also people that would really want the keyboard, or would like a communicator, or would like something like a Blackberry keyboard, iPhone is useless for them, and unless Apple comes up with 5 new devices, iPhone is likely to be a rare species soon. 

iPhone positives and negatives

The iPhone has many negative and positive sides. Yes, it is a cool browser, yes, it has a great keyboard, and I love the many games you can play on it. On the other hand, it is a closed platform, authorization only – operators don’t really like that too much, as it cuts their revenue. Next, iPhone doesn’t support basic mobile features – like MMS, Bluetooth file transfer, and not even the newer technologies – like HSDPA or HSUPA. The iPhone connectivity is not very set-upable or installable. You have to download specific applications for more features. But the worst thing about the iPhone, something that is worse then it’s calling – is the battery life. My lady has one, and the worst thing that happens VERY often, is I can’t reach her. Well what is a mobile phone for, if it is unreachable – well it stops being a mobile phone, it’s more like a little iPod with sometimes phone-like features, and a great browser. That’s how I see the iPhone, and don’t get me wrong, I love the screen. But otherwise, it’s just a bad phone, and a great browser. 

This is why I think the iShine is over, and if iPhone doesn’t roll out new devices - and doesn’t roll out quickly, then it might as well be the end of it. I guess we will see it all throughout next year – what is going to happen, and also who will be the winner during next year in handsets. My guess would be Nokia, and looking at the Android platform, that looks promising too – although so far Android has not been implemented in many handsets, which is a key thing to do, and they need to do that soon.

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