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Fans Cheer as Apple's iPhone Finally Hits Europe
An anonymous reader sent in this article which opens, "Apple fans lined up through Yesterday night in Germany and Britain to be among the first in Europe to buy an iPhone, the must-have gadget that is set to shake up the mobile industry." Over 10,000 phones were sold in Germany by Friday afternoon. In France, however, the iPhone doesn't arrive until the end of month.
I'm sure the fact that Apple will finally have to reveal how much the iPhone will cost unlocked / sans contract has nothing to do with the fact that France is getting it last...
Jerm
Oh, you're not a real doctor, are you?
In the UK, we're used to getting our phones for free. Now, nobody is expecting to get an iPhone for free, however, this contract does show a marked change... Here, when we take out a phone contract, we get a phone for free ( higher the rate of contract, the more expensive phone you can have ). The carrier will lock you into the contract for usually 12 months ( sometimes now 18 months ), in order to recoup the cost of the phone. That's fair enough, good value, everyone happy. If you *buy* a phone here, you aren't locked into a contract, and can switch provider or have Pay-As-You-Go etc. With the iPhone, you have to *pay* for the phone, *and* you get locked into a min 18 month contract. So what cost is the carrier recouping? The fees it's paying to Apple, that's what. In the first instance, the benefit and the cost-penalty go to the consumer. Fair play. In the second instance, the cost-penalty stays with the consumer, but the benefit moves to Apple. Someone somewhere is rubbing their hands with glee, but it's not the little guy on the street. Sorry, it's a nice shiny device, with a very cool interface, but it's lacking in some important features, and I know a bad deal when I see one.
This is easy to explain. The iPhone brings nothing new to the table in Europe, where all of its features are available generally in other phones, and most are common in any high-end phone. In America, which for some reason appears to be 2-3 generations behind Europe in the mobile phone arena, this isn't true.
iPhone in America = OMFG this phone has everything, even a camera!iPhone in Europe = Pretty, cool, doesn't do X as well as Nokia or Y as well as Sony Ericsson and OMFG the price!
I generally agree that cellphone tech lags in in U.S., but you realize that pretty much the same high-end Nokia and Samsung phones sold in Europe are also sold in the U.S., right?
It's not the phones themselves that are hampering the tech, it's the carriers.
The iPhone does several things that no other phone in the world does. But that's not the point. Those "super-advanced" European cellphones don't do anything that 5-year-old phones do. Perhaps locate themselves a bit more accurately. Perhaps have a higher-rez camera. Perhaps have a faster Internet connection with a half-baked "web browser".
The point is that the iPhone does mostly what other phones do in a new way. The phone works like a cellphone would if it had just been invented, unlike other cellphones which are essentially a lot of bling and tech-spec thrown onto foundation/philosophy from 10 years ago. And that's why the iPhone is all that. And that's why you'll read reviews on European sites that say things like "my head says no, but my heart says yes." The iPhone makes sense, and has a unique feel, even if it falls short in certain individual categories.
In terms of actual new things, the iPhone has visual voicemail. All of those other "advanced" phones have voicemail that works like a 1970's cassette-tape answering machine.
The iPhone has a proximity sensor to turn off its light and touch surface when it's next to your face on a call. (Perhaps other phones do this. I have not seen or read that any do.) It has accelerometers so it knows what way it's facing (landscape or portrait), which may actually exist in other phones, but is certainly not widespread. The iPhone has a consistent, fingers-only interface with things like pinch and stretch (which are unique).
Just look at how you move through photos or through tabbed web pages: they made it work the same. Other phones don't even have real web browsers, much less tabbed web browsers, much less one where they've rethought how you move between tabs so it's clean and consistent with the rest of the phone.
In the end, I'm glad to hear the naysayers. The more the better -- up to a point -- for my stock investment. Apple stock does so well because so many people underestimate Apple. "Death spiral", "iPod-killer", "iTunes-killer", "nothing new iPhone", "market share too small and can't grow", "no halo effect", etc, etc.
(Not to mention this is iPhone 1.0 and it's competing against Nokia 15.0 (or whatever) and Windows mobile 6.0 (?). Not that much different from the initial iPods, which did not exceed then-current MP3 players in many aspects, but did do it in a more stylish and polished way.)
The iPhone isn't about features. Of course, other phones have camera's and music players and whatnot. The iPhone is about getting it right. I have a simple Samsung phone. I picked it because I wanted a phone with a music player and a decent amount of storage. When I got it, I realized that feature listings aren't everything. The interface is impossibly complicated, the music player is enormously whimsical, it's impossible to get it to play a specific playlist, once it's playing you can't turn it off, file transfer between phone and computer works only if you're lucky and, well, the list goes on and on.
That's why the iPhone is different. It not only has the features, but they're designed to be used. They got it right. The iPhone really is beautiful and exceptional, not because of all its features, but because of how they work and how well they work. Most phones are designed to be bought, the iPhone is designed to be used.