“Apple’s new iPhone appears to be the clearest statement yet of what Steve Jobs’s impact has been on consumer electronics,” John Markoff reports for The New York Times. “Mr. Jobs himself acknowledged that when asked during an interview on Tuesday whether he thought the iPhone represented a trend toward the convergence of computing and communications. ‘I don’t want people to think of this as a computer,’ he said. ‘I think of it as reinventing the phone.'”
Markoff reports, “If the iPhone succeeds commercially, it will be new proof of Mr. Jobs’s power and influence over the world’s consumer marketplace.”
“The device is not currently compatible with the faster 3G wireless data networks that are driving sharp gains in cellular revenues in the United States, although several Apple insiders said the phone could be upgraded to 3G with software if Apple later decides to do so,” Markoff reports.
Markoff reports, “It appears that [Jobs] wants to control his device much more closely than his competitors. ‘We define everything that is on the phone,’ he said. ‘You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers. These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any [old] software on them,’ he said. ‘That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.'”
“Is it a phone, a PC, or something entirely new? For instance, despite the fact that the phone has high-speed digital Wi-Fi capability built in, Mr. Jobs was coy about how that capability would be used.,” Markoff reports. “During an interview on Tuesday, he said that Apple had not decided whether to enable a voice-over-Internet service like Skype.”
Full article here.
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