The Difference Between The iPhone And The iTunes Phone

from the one-of-them-actually-exists dept

Fri, Sep 9th 2005 2:08am — Mike Masnick

It seems like a lot of the disappointment over the launch of the iTunes phone (AKA the Motorola ROKR) was because of the simple misunderstanding of what that phone was about. From the very beginning this deal was very clearly about putting a slimmed down version of iTunes on a Motorola phone. It was never about creating the "iPhone" or the "iPod Phone." However, so many people (including the press) conflated the two ideas so that many people seemed to be expecting some miraculous iPhone designed by Apple. Now that the dust is finally settling around the announcement and people are realizing what it really is, people are coming back to the question of whether or not Apple should build a real iPhone. Of course, given Steve Jobs' past statements about the very mobile operators he'd have to sell it to, it might be a tricky sell for some. Combined with the fact that the mobile operators would want too much control, and Apple probably knows better than to wade into that mess any time soon.

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Ivan Sick, 9 Sep 2005 @ 9:38am

No Subject Given
Apple has always been a hardware manufacturer. There OS wouldn't be any more dependable or "simple" than Windows if it had to deal with a million third-party hardware components. So why wouldn't they make their own phone?
∙Too much competition in the service market
They don't need to provide the service too, they could just make the hardware and the firmware to run it.
∙Too much competition in the hardware market
What a copout. Yes Motorola and Nokia make great phones, but Apple's focus has been on fancy, flashy, aerodynamic industrial design since 1998, if not earlier. Their stupid iMac made insanely popular a design methodology previously seen only in IKEA. They would have no trouble at all designing a phone that people would want physically, and writing a phone OS...well, I'm sure they could do it. It's not like there's much variation in phone UI, and they've done Unix, so they could write or outsource something nice, fast, and small. What the hell is their problem?
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Brothe2000, 9 Sep 2005 @ 9:40am

iPhone
If Apple could do it, they should make an iChat wi-fi phone. Skip the carriers all together. Their Airport stuff works well, their systems are tight... you can't tell me that they couldn't make their own IM/iChat/Skype WiFi/80211.x device with music storage or whatever similar to an ipod or something?

Just a thought...
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Simon, 9 Sep 2005 @ 10:45am

Re: iPhone
Skype is actually working on a wifi phone right now. I don't think it'll have mp3 capabilities, but being able to make 2cpm(cents per minute)phone calls anywhere there's a wifi hotspot is a definite incentive for me to buy one. Hell if they market it right, I can see a distictive drop in landline and cell phones in areas heavily saturated with wifi. Unfortunately Ma Bell and her kids don't like competition, so instead of the cheaper rates we'd like to see. All we're going to get from them is more lobbying and legislation like this e911 crap we're already seeing.
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