“Apple’s new smart phone, the iPhone, stands a fighting chance of becoming an ‘It Object,'” Alice Rawsthorn writes for The International Herald Tribune. “That’s one of the elite cadre of products, that have such a strong impact on so many people’s lives that, decades later, they’re remembered as icons of their time.”
“It doesn’t have to sell more than its competitors… Nor does the iPhone need to be more expensive than other products… And the iPhone doesn’t have to win the news media’s approval, at least not at first, as another Apple “It Object,” the iMac computer, demonstrated in the late ’90s,” Rawsthorn writes.
“What then does the iPhone need to do to ascend to “It-ness?” The first step is to be more alluring than other smart phones, and to achieve that it must do two things: 1. Look and feel great. 2. Enable us to do something that we couldn’t do before, or couldn’t do very easily,” Rawsthorn writes.
“Apple pulled it off six years ago with the iPod. There were plenty of existing MP3 players, but they looked tacky and were irritatingly over-complicated… And it didn’t just look good. The iPod’s refreshingly simple user interface design… and the launch of iTunes as Apple’s online music store made it much, much easier even for the technologically-challenged to download music from the Internet,” Rawsthorn writes.
“Can Apple do the same with the iPhone? Well, its competitors have helped, albeit unintentionally, by producing smart phones that are as tacky and irritatingly over-complicated as pre-iPod MP3 players,” Rawsthorn writes.
Full article here.
Rawsthorn gets “it.”
You know, whether iPhone’s going to reach it’s target sales or not, I have to admit that it’s a remarkable piece of technology. It’s beautiful, it’s simple and it’s an eye candy. And obviously, it’s expensive.
http://www.pspconverter.com/iphone_converter/
I had ‘it’.
Once.
What’s this bullshit about the phone needing to play well with IT infrastructure to be a cultural icon and hit product?
Because the “Real IT” clowns look for every reason to keep Apple out. Any incompatibility with existing infrastructure is a valid concern.
Until iPhone is big enough to have it’s own ecosystem, playing with others is a factor. A little compatibility would be a nice wedge into otherwise closed corporate doors.
No 15 year old girl is asking her parents for blackberry. But she is asking them for an iPhone.
This must be the same 15 year old who’ll want a new Porsche next year.
I don’t want my future iPhone to have anything to do with my company’s IT infrastructure. Who cares?
The iPhone will be an ‘it’ product if it stays clear of the myopic decisions of IT personnel suffering from job insecurity. Besides, the iPhone is compatible with the world of open standards when it comes to calendar, address book and e-mail formats, etc. It just isn’t compatible with Microsoft’s “standard”.
Not a bad place to be.
..to become iconic …it would probably take 11 bloggers at ZDNET to write over 50+ negative blog posts in a little over a week for a product not even out yet I would think ,,and that would be a stretch.
This would be the ultimate IT-worker’s tool if the following software were on it (or able to be added by the customer):
VNC
X11
(Microsoft) Remote Desktop (the open-source X11 program rdesktop would be fine for this need).
Cisco VPN Client
The article seemed a bit contrived to me. It was as if the author was inventing these so-called definitions of “it” products as she went along. What was with the “Sustainability” mess at the end? A product has to have ecological credentials to be an iconic product now? She lost me when she brought the Prius into the subject
And, please…
“Apple is still bruised by Greenpeace’s recent attacks on its environmental record, despite having denied most of the claims.”
Greenpeace is bruised over its idiocy, not Apple. Anyone with half a brain saw through their bullsh*t.
.mac and ATT
Good point you’ve made. But like with the iPod, the vast majority of iPhone users likely will be Windows people.
That means .mac will have to work on Windows.
Which comes to a bigger issue. With Apple becoming more of a device company. And their devices relying on software that was exclusively for macs, does that mean they will eventually release all of their stuff like iLife, iwork etc. for windows?
I mean if you need ichat or iphoto to do really cool stuff with the iphone and 3/4 of you customers use windows, they almost have to release those things for windows.
Remember the original windows iPod used some forgotten music player to sync and was firewire etc until the vast majority of iPod owners became windows folks.
With the visual list of voicemail messages, iPhone’s already got number 2 down pat; instead of having to listen to 10 messages to get the one you really need, you’ll be able to just get to the one. Like when my husband calls me 5 times to tell me the same info (that he loves me), I can skip those and just get to my friend’s call with details about my upcoming Chicago trip… (grin)
Unfortunately I gotta wait a couple of weeks…why did Apple decide to release this the same time rent for next month is due? (grrr)
Re the iPhone’s camera, am I alone in thinking that 2 megapixels is pretty crap for kit of this quality and price? That’s the same as my aging and cheap Samsung and nowhere near good enough for half-decent images..
knowhowe,
How could you be looking to a phone with a TINY lens to produce “quality photos.” No matter how many megapixels a camera has, it’s the lens that makes all the difference, and no lens the size of the one in any camera is really going to do the trick if you care about your photography.
The camera in the iPhone is just for snap photos.
Doh!
er.. I meant no lens the size of one in a camera phone!
Re: Ultimate IT worker’s phone:
I forgot one very import app they need to add, and that is SSH (secure shell), and they need to support tunnelling via secure shell (so I can connect to my home IMAP server without opening it up to the internet).