Ampers & Dot

First off: yes, this is yet another iPhone post and YES, I’m sorry.  But this one has a fun twist, I promise.  And after this post I’ll be back on track with more social media-ish posts for a while… or at least until I can think of another iPhone post!

Anyway, last night I hosted the monthly Gadgetry MeetUp here in Boston and sure enough, someone brought a new iPhone 3G to play with.  This was unavoidable really, I mean, it’s a gadget club… gimme a break.

But what I found most interesting was the conversation shift from the cool things the iPhone can do, to the bigger scale impact the device has on the market.  The bulk of discussion (lead by my Windows Mobile optimistic enthusiasm) stemmed around the iPhone changing the game for everyone else.

The iPhone has already played a large role in changing the way we look at gadgets, what we expect from gadgets, how we shop for gadgets, and what we pay for gadgets.  And all of these changes will improve the gadget market.

Gadget Design
Believe it or not, there were very, very few buttonless PDA Phones before the iPhone.  HTC (the largest Windows Mobile device manufacturer) had a few contenders without keyboards, but even those had a handful of hardware buttons.  A year ago everyone mocked the original iPhone’s lack of hard buttons.  And now every PDA Phone manufacturer makes one or has one in the pipeline (even the “all business” Blackberry is working on a buttonless device).

When the first iPhone came out, HTC was still pushing almost 75% of its devices as “smartphones” (non touchscreen).  Now, only a year later it sounds ridiculous to have a PDA Phone without a touchscreen.

And there’s no denying the beauty of the iPhone.  I’ve tried.  And failed.  The thing is just slick.  And you know what?  It’s forcing the competition to think slick too.  No one is coming close yet, (no, not even you, Diamond, but good effort!) but we’ll start seeing some viably pretty contenders soon.

Mobile Browsing
One thing I keep hearing is that “Mobile browsing is going to be dominant by 2012″.  Well you know what?  Mobile browsing is dead.  The iPhone killed it.  As faster and more capable devices continue to pop up, the mobile web won’t exist.  There will be no need for miniaturized webpages when we can scale full sized ones onto smaller screens.  In theory Windows Mobile and Palm have done this for years.  In practice the iPhone made it work.

Since the release of the iPhone there have been a number of viable competitors in the mobile browsing space (Opera, Skyfire, Netfront), and they all work pretty well.  Yes, it will be a long time before this technology makes it into the bulk of devices, but it’s only a matter of time.  If I were a mobile advertiser I’d stop worrying about how to get my ad to work on a little screen, and instead start thinking about how to optimize regular ads to be viewed on slicker devices.

Gadget Spending
The new iPhone is $200 with a plan.  That’s awesome and new and I like it.  As I’ve argued before, the iPhone 3G’s low price forced the market to drop down to compete.  I’m completely fine with that.  What this decreased spending does on a larger scale is allows for greater and broader adoption into the market.

PDA Phones are no longer reserved for business execs with a thousand bucks sitting around to throw at a new phone.  PDA Phones are now for everyone and this is going to blow the market wide open for more devices, better competition, and a broader array of toys (plus, I think there will have to be some super devices built to satisfy that top end gadget spender, and I can only imagine how cool those will be!).

Further, the iPhone has tricked everyone into paying for data plans.  AT&T is making a killing right now because any iPhone it sells also comes with a data package.  Not many people had this before, but now it’s a necessity!  I do not remotely support the extortionesque pricing of additional text messages… but the iPhone data package makes it “normal” to have a data plan.  Again, this opens up the market making mobile gadgets mainstream.

Gadget Usability
Perhaps the most important fact of all, the iPhone makes gadgets cool and easy to use.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a die hard Windows Mobile nerd and I pride myself on the ability to flash custom roms, but sometimes I just want the damn thing to work… and you know what: the iPhone works.  I can say without a doubt that with enough tweaks, third-party apps, and custom registry edits, Windows Mobile can do more than the iPhone can.  But out of the box? Sadly, no.

In all fairness, this is why I love Windows Mobile: its insane customization ability.  I can tweak, edit, hack, alter, mess up, anything in the Operating System.  I’m the type of person who always wants more from my device and Windows Mobile always gives me that option.  I’m a constant tinkerer.  The first thing I’ve done with every new Windows Mobile device is take it out of the box- and reflash it to a custom build.  And that’s awesome.  But the problem is that there are very few people like me.

Most people want a device that works right out of the box.  The iPhone does that.  And it makes it very, very simple for anyone to pickup and feel smart.  The user interface is intuitive and simple.  Its simplicity is going to inspire a new generation of PDA Phone users who demand ease of use.  This is a good thing, as long as I can still tinker.

In the end of all this I have two conclusions: 1) the iPhone is a revolutionary device that will open up the market and make PDA Phone sales growth shoot through the roof in the next few years.  2) I’m a little jealous and have written an entire post rationalizing why I’m still an avid Windows Mobile person.

So Microsoft- get on your horse and start working.  If you want some advice send me an email- I have a few hundred bullet points of how to fix the OS.  And it would probably be more useful to your developers than it would be to the readers here in an upcoming blog post…