Is the 'iPhone' a Phone?
January 7, 2007, 12:12 AM
Scott Fulton, BetaNews: So what is this thing called - or not called - 'iPhone?' We asked our senior CES analyst, Sharon Fisher, to look into it.
Sharon Fisher, BetaNews Senior CES Analyst: One thing you will not see announced at CES is the Apple iPhone. That's for two reasons: One is that Apple's big Macworld conference starts next week, with Steve Jobs' keynote on Tuesday, and if Apple is going to announce something, it'll be there. Second is that Cisco, through its Linksys division, already sells an IP-based phone called the iPhone. (But type in www.iphone.org and see what you get...)
On the other hand, due to the simultaneous nature of the events, if Apple does announce some sort of combination music player/cell phone at Macworld, it's going to be big news at CES. Solutions Research Group said last week that 16% of users surveyed (12 years and older) thought an iPod phone would be a great idea, and that adding such a phone could increase Apple's penetration into the consumer market from its current 20% to 30%.
Gene Munster, a senior analyst at financial analyst firm Piper Jaffrey, predicted yesterday that Apple would ship up to 12 million units of an iPod phone within the next year, based on published reports in Chinese media. He expects it to be a candy-bar form factor rather than a flip, with a possible second model using an integrated keyboard.
Part of the remaining question is, which carriers would such a phone support? Gartner analyst Michael McGuire noted that Apple made an agreement with Motorola about a year and a half ago to develop the ROKR, a phone that supported iTunes – which Apple stopped supporting in September. Cingular was the only carrier to sell the Motorola phones. Also, unlike other carriers such as Sprint and Verizon, who have announced their own music service, Cingular has not announced such a service, saying instead it will work with existing music services, he said. So it's certainly a good bet that Cingular would be involved, especially with its momentum behind AT&T's acquisition of BellSouth.
On the other hand, even though other providers have their own music services, they don't compare with iTunes; Sprint users downloaded 8 million tunes in the past year, while iTunes users download 2.5 to 3 million tunes per day. So it's not impossible that other providers might discard their own systems to get a piece of the Apple pie.
The other question is whether an iPod phone would support WiFi. That would not only let users take advantage of lower-cost voice-over-IP services, but would also let users connect laptops to the Internet over their iPod phones, as Bluetooth users can now.
But what people are most interested in is seeing what Apple – which revolutionized the music industry with its easy to use, elegant iPod – could do with the existing clunky, inconsistent user interfaces and design of cell phones. Gartner's McGuire said, "Can they come out with a 'me-too' phone that happens to be white and have an iPod logo on it? No, because they have too much of a history and brand promise based on making very innovative, easy-to-use things than to simply come out with another phone."
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