"That would be a good theory were it true, but the fact is the US cell phone market has always been even further behind than just skipping the beta phase. Every time I'd visit and go into a shop selling mobiles I'd have to chuckle to myself at the stuff they were selling which was years behind what we had even in Europe, let alone Japan.

This is why the original iPhone was a flop everywhere but the US (yes it was even a flop in Europe), people were looking at it and thinking what's the big deal when it's camera, it's memory, it's lack of custom apps, lack of MMS, lack of 3G, lack of GPS and so on made it a laughably poor device, whilst in the US it was pretty state of the art.

Move forward to the iPhone 3G and Apple have realise their mistakes and have moved forward a bit, but as stated in the summary, the iPhone still lacks features that many in Europe and Japan have come to expect.

The US is a world leader on most things, but cell phones are one of the few products the US was simply years behind on, often never even getting some of the high end Nokia models we enjoyed in Europe For example, did the US ever even get the Nokia 7650 in the end? a phone that in 2001 had a camera, could play Doom, browse the web, run Java apps- in fact, everything the original iPhone had minus touch screen but plus a whole bunch of other features (MMS, custom apps).

Apple realised the mobile gap was in the US and took advantage of that, they couldn't compete immediately with the companies like Nokia that had been doing it years and the US gave them a place to get started without ever needing to do so. Once their foot was in the door they could fairly quickly move on with their technology to produce a phone that was a little more attractive in Europe/Japan, if they keep it up and keep going they'll do well.

At the end of the day though, the summary comes as no suprise as it really is quite similar to the story here in Europe. It's not to slag Apple off, because if the US was as uptodate on mobile technology as Europe it's questionable whether Apple could've got it's foot in the door as easily as it did and more fool Nokia et. al. for not taking the opportunity to exploit the rather backwards US cell phone market themselves. I think this is also why the iPhone has the following it does, not necessarily because it's any better than other phones outside North America- it still lacks a lot of features European and Japanese phones have, but because it's a decent mid-range phone in Europe/Japan and more importantly, because it is light years ahead of much of what the US ever really had before it."

The iPhone is a nice idea that wasn’t and still is not ready for the market place.

Posted By mugzy : May 15, 2009 2:45 pm

Is obviously not keeping up with the news and about the product. The iPhone was and still is a huge success. The gadget is revolutionizing the way phones work – prior to the iphone, competitors would not even spend more then 1/4 their resources to create touch screen type phones, now you have the black berry storm, and all the other phones that compete with the iphone.

No iphone = no innovation by competitors and we would still have standard screens with standard qwerty keyboards.

If the iPhone was to fail today, it still would hold a big spot in technology history as becoming the leader in what we know phones as today.

If rumors are true with an upcoming iphone, apple will be placing an even higher bar for cell phones and hand helds. Who knows – one day we may do all our mobile computing from hand helds like iphones vs having laptops…

For someone to say the idea is just nice and was not ready for the market place shows that we still have people out there with closed minds. Those are the people that hold technology back – I pitty the fool that said that.

http://onlinecharity.wordpress.com/rss-feed/