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Will The iPhone Kill The iPod?
Edward Sinovian writes "According to Cnet.co.uk, the days of MP3 players, digital cameras and satellite navigation systems are numbered with cell phones about to take center stage. "PDAs have already been crushed by smart phones and the same thing looks to be happening with standalone MP3 players, particularly the smaller flash ones — a theory supported by Apple's recent entry into the world of music phones. If you then take into consideration the convergence of camera, GPS, TV and laptop-like functionality into mobile phones, it raises the question of how long it's going to take before all you need is a mobile phone." With that in mind, do you think that the iPhone will kill the iPod?"
forgot that the original iPod came down in price too - what was it originally? $4-500?
In several iterations, if the iPhone is sucessful enough, I see a diversification of the product line just like the iPod, with the price coming down.
Uh, the high end Video iPods have an 80GB capacity (as of today), whereas the iPhone goes up to 8GB. The iPhone will eventually replace the high-end Video iPod, but not until flash memory gets cheaper and increases to that sort of capacity. That won't happen any time soon (where "soon" is defined to be in technology terms).
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Costing more money and having less storage space are technical disadvantages that will disappear over the next few years. As for cell phone contracts, the vast majority of people already have those, so sticking all this other stuff in their cellphone doesn't add much complexity to their existing cellphone contract.
There will be a market for stand-alone MP3 players for a long time, just like you can still buy a Walkman at Walmart. But the combined devices will soon dominate the market. The only thing holding them back is technology. Once they can put a phone, internet appliance, PDA, camera, camcorder, GPS/navigation system, and high-capacity MP3 player into a sleek, light, cheap package, they're going to be everywhere, and will eviscerate the markets for the stand-alone units. Yes, there will be demand for each type of stand-alone unit, but it'll fall precipitously.
The ones that will fall the least are cameras and camcorders, because there are huge constraints on the quality of camera you can pack into anything that small, and there's no technological solution on the horizon. They'll be handy for snapshots, but the significant portion of consumers who like to take nice, clear pictures or video that look at least as good as film from the 50's are going to want a real camera too. Sure, they can cram lots of megapixels into a camera phone sensor, but megapixels != good pixtures. The chip will be so small each pixel division on the sensor can't gather much light, yielding crappy ISO's and grainy pictures. The lens is so small it can't resolve as many megapixels as the sensor, meaning you're just throwing away storage space storing image information that was never clear. The tiny lenses have tiny apertures that don't let through enough light, especially for the tiny, low-ISO chip. And forget about a decent zoom. Some day, maybe they'll be able to put the equivalent of a decent consumer camera, or maybe even a good SLR, into a tiny phone. But barring a total revolution in camera technology, those days area long way off. The crappy cameras in phones will be good enough for some people, but I don't think Canon and Nikon need to worry about them eating into any of their medium to high-end camera lines anytime soon.
Technological constraints apply much less to the other functions these devices will subsume- for most purposes, the MP3 Player, GPS, etc in the phones will be as good as the stand alone devices.
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Yes and when your iPhone battery has "bit the dust" you cant just get a replacement from the shelves like any other phone... No you will have to send it to Apple, and usually when a battery wears out its "out of warrenty" because its longer than a year in most cases, so you WILL be paying those Apple premium prices just to get a simple thing like a battery replaced.
No, you can buy a new battery dirt cheap from newertech.com, sonnettech.com, or any other of many iPod replacement battery vendors. They even give you the tools to disassemble the case damage-free. And if anyone can't handle replacing the battery themselves like this (or doesn't have a friend that can do it for them), they deserve to pay big bucks for the service.
No, "back in the day", you picked up the phone and Mabel asked who you wanted to talk to...
Later on, you 'rang' someone on the shared bus. I still have a wooden hanger with the instructions to "ring 52" printed on it to get the cleaners.
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