You make a good point. Another classic example: senior television executives rarely watch television themselves. They think they’re far too important and have lives that are far too interesting to do that.

If the senior management of a consumer products company aren’t eating their own dog food, their company is screwed in the long-term.

The higher that decision makers climb, the further they are from the aspirations & requirements of users.

For mobile operators not understanding see also; record company execs & the [reluctance towards] MP3 adoption, from ‘95 to present DRM’d days.

“My, that sand looks tempting - I must stick something well & truly in it”

Steve

An obvious mistake the rest of the industry has made in trying to copy iPhone is that they forget, Apple was working on this project actively for at least 3-4 years prior to a polished product, and it didn’t stop with hardware research on release. It’s probably got several pro-type models for new form factors, ready to be selected when the market or strategy requires. iPhone nano and flip variants, it would be confusing at the moment, but once worldwide roll-out as happened then I’d expect to see the new forms, in time for MacWorld Jan 2009. These will be a compromise, just as iPod shuffle and nano are, but will sell, so it would be foolish for Apple to not take that cash from those very willing to part with it. All those women out there moaning about how they can’t use the iPhone with their nails, don’t think they’ll miss certain smart phone applications, but they do want a shiny shiny Apple things.

As I’ve said in the past, by the time the rest of the industry gets it’s act together, we’ll already be at iPhone 3/4, and Apple will be researching what comes next after the smartphone, 3D holographic interfaces, speech recognition, wearable computing.

If I was in charge of Nokia/SE right now, I’d be looking to spend large amounts of money on 3D holographic interfaces and wearable computing right now, not in a few years time.

Lot of the changes happening in Snow Leopard, aka Mac OS X 10.6, are a preparation for this future..

I guess one man’s “secure” is another’s “harder to use” There’s a balance between allowing UI customisation and providing an easy-to-learn-easy-to-use system. Actually, for end users in the scenario you suggest, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to let people personalise the unlock gesture if they want.

The problem is: I can imagine different handset makers and network operators will customise the *default* in really stupid ways, to make their phones “unique” and “differentiated”.

As for the competition. A year after Apple started selling their phones with an 480×320 resolution screens, the competition are *still* pushing their high-end phones with 320×240 resolution screens. And the phones the competition has in the pipeline are looking pretty much like poor-quality plasticky imitations of the iPhone.

The interesting thing is: the iPhone/iPod UI isn’t perfect by a long way. There’s plenty of room for improvement. And the hardware “features” of the iPhone aren’t particularly unique or differentiated (aside from multi-touch screen), and the camera is actually substandard. So, there’s room for improvement there too.

So, it’s not like it’s impossible to make a phone that’s “better” than the iPhone *today*. Just like it’s not impossible to make a “better” MP3 player than the iPod. But years after coming on the market, no company has been able to improve on the iPod; and I’m not seeing any handset maker that’s competing with Apple either.

You make an excellent point about possible future business models for phones. Lots of interesting possibilities there, given the value of ad-clicks on consumer purchases. You’d only have to click on a handful of ads per month, to have the cost of the average monthly contract completely covered.

Actually I liked the customisable gestures - by default it’s ’slide to unlock’ - so if you don’t want it you don’t have to worry.

But if you want to add some security you can while still using gestures - ie not looking at a virtual keypad on the phone, just a different sweep of the finger that a casual person picking up your phone won’t be able to quickly guess, but is still effortless for you to unlock. A rather good idea that looked well implemented - of course the devil is in the detail - ie getting the right balance between security and reasonable forgiving matching.

I’m not saying that Apple doesn’t have the leading product right now - it clearly does - but what will the landscape look like this time next year - will a proper competitor product have finally emerged - perhaps with a better graphics chip, double res screen and it’s own cool apps - perhaps better targeted at the younger market that doesn’t care about Exchange or Office compatibility.

Another thing that we haven’t discussed is the value Apple is getting with it’s exclusive deals with carriers - currently I think it’s working really well for Apple, enabling them to ensure a reasonable user experience and pushing carrier innovation - both things like visual voice mail and slowly getting carriers used to the idea of a data based device rather than a phone.

However, Google seem to have broken the mould in the US - opening up the airwaves - what this means in practice needs to play out - but it certainly could become a significant factor and create whole new business models - eg you could imagine free or heavily subsidized communication/internet devices working everywhere, paid for by location based targeted advertising for example.

Google might somehow mix it’s own fibre-backbone with ‘last mile’ mix of wifi and 3G to cut carrier costs.

It’s only just starting to get interesting.

I think there are several problems for Android.

1) I’m not sure that there’s any evidence that Google, as a company, understands user interface design (in fact, you could possibly argue the opposite is true). Good UI design is really important for phone software (more so than for PC software). In their most recent demos, all they managed to do was try to copy what Apple did with the iPhone user interface. When they did things differently (for example the new customisable “unlock gestures)”, the interface appeared to be harder to learn, and harder to use. Google’s people thought they were innovating. What they actually showed was they are not as good as Apple at device software.

2) Even if Android was an amazing software platform and Google really knew what they were doing with UI design, Google doesn’t control the software. Phone handset makers are free to do what they want with it: to use/omit different parts of the platform randomly; and to make random proprietary additions to the platform. You only have to look at any handset maker’s own horrible attempts at software to see how poor their software “innovation” is.

3) Android is designed to work with a wide range of form factors. That level of device fragmentation will make it harder for developers to write software. Sure, Google has tried to address this in the platform e.g. the use of layout managers for the UI. The truth is - they haven’t done enough to make it easy to wrtie once, run anywhere.

4) Google doesn’t control the hardware. You say that other handset manufacturers can do what Apple does with hardware design. I don’t think there’s any evidence to say that’s true. In fact, all the evidence suggests the opposite is true. You only have to hold devices from other handset makers in your hand for a minute, to realise that Apple “gets” hardware design better than their competitors. In other words, it’s not just the components (e.g. a good touch screen), it’s how you put them together in the case. Companies like Nokia, SE, Samsung, LG and HTC should be be light years ahead of Apple when it comes to mobile handset design. It should not have been possible for Apple to design the best mobile handset in the world at the very first attempt. That, more than anything, shows how clueless the handset makers are.

5) iPhone is a strong brand, and becoming stronger all the time. Today, almost everyone I talk to says that iPhone 3G is going to be their next phone; and they will switch networks to get it. Android will be invisible to consumers as a brand (even if it was something compelling technically). Very few consumers will be saying, “I really want an Android phone”.

Android may destroy Windows Mobile and Symbian. It’s not yet a strong competitor for iPhone IMHO. Apple has certainly done enough with iPhone 3G, technically and with the business model, to take somw big strides forward in market share.

@Asam

Yes - clearly Apple sees value in designing its own chips for iPods and iPhones. I think it must mean that Apple sees a big hole in the mobile processor roadmaps of the chip makers; or that they see something in the PA Semi technology that beats the competition in the short-term; or that there are fundamental long-term benefits in using custom “systems on chips” SoCs with mobile devices.

The question in my mind is - Can Apple really gain significant advantage from controlling the hardware? When the iPhone originally came out there were two obvious areas of hardware advantage - the well implemented touch screen and the rather good battery life for such a device - the other advantages were software.

Fast forward a year and we are seeing software of a similar level of sophistication from Google and reportedly good touch screens from a couple of hardware vendors, without more hardware innovation from Apple - which I’m sure they are working on, then it just becomes a software competition - and never has their been a time in history when you could find as many good programmers or such a public body of knowledge on how to build systems.

If Apple’s only advantage becomes software then they might struggle against a freely licensable competitor from a strong software company like Google or MS and only be sustainable in the high end of the market rather than become the majority player.

Don’t get me wrong - I think Apple are well positioned but I think long term success will depend on hardware innovation as well - they haven’t really delivered that with iPhone 2.0 - that’s why I say it’s only just enough - they need to do more in the next year.

They *really* don’t get it. Some of these guys at least know they’re in trouble; but because they don’t understand the issues, their attempts to compete have already failed before they even start.

Some of them, though, are so complacent that they don’t even know they’re in trouble. For example, the Windows Mobile division leader actually said the other day that he thinks that Microsoft has a better mobile strategy than Apple! And boasted about the number of Windows Mobile phone devices that will ship this year (a little under 20 million).

In principle, Microsoft should be Apple’s biggest threat in the mobile market. However, Microsoft’s lack of delivery in this area is almost unbelievable. You only have to look at Xbox to see they can do well when they try. Really - what the Windows Mobile team has been doing for the last five years, I have no idea… They have a losing strategy (they need to make their own hardware), and terrible execution.