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Wednesday, October 5, 2011

It's The Great iPhone 5 Launch

Indeed, today’s “Let’s Talk iPhone” launch event at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino was the tech industry equivalent for the eternal wait for the Great Pumpkin. And the tech press and blogosphere was dragged into it like an army of Sally Browns.

Android phone user

And during I am an Android phone user, I too wanted the Great Pumpkin — the iPhone 5 — to be real. Because as a technologist and observer of the mobile industry, I wanted Apple to actually push the envelope on smartphone hardware, to put it more exactly than release a purely iterative and modest upgrade to an existing design like they did with the iPhone 4S.

However, I want to be completely honest. During I am an owner of several Apple products — an iPad 2, an Apple TV 2, an Airport Express, an iPod Classic and a Mac Mini, I knew then in advance that the at once-generation iPhone product, would never be the “smartphone of my dreams” or even the ultimate product in its category.

I suspected that like many millions of other people, it wouldn’t be theirs either. Late-2011 Market share of Android platform-based smartphones prove this in raw numbers in technology conducted by comScore, AC Nielsen and NPD.

Why would I have thought this, device sight unseen? Because I fully understand Apple’s design ethos and as such, I knew the product would never fit my use case requirements, which is typical of many frequent business travelers.

What whiz-bang software improvements or faster chip

I knew no matter what whiz-bang software improvements or faster chip, or higher-res display or other refinements Apple would introduce into this new product, it will almost undoubtedly lack key functionality that I need — the ability to run on and tether to a 4G high-speed LTE (Long Term Evolution, latest standard in the mobile network technology) network, and to use a replaceable, extended charge battery.

And I knew no amount of marketing showmanship Apple managed to pull off this week at its Infinite Loop launch is was going to change that, Steve Jobs as circus ringleader or not.

Avid user of GMail

Given that I am an avid user of GMail, Google Voice and Google Calendar, the tighter Google integration is essential, which is something only an Android phone can give me, as then as many millions of other people.

Instead of the iPhone 5, Apple launched the iPhone 4S, and made pricing changes on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS which it will continue to sell aggressively in 2012. All three of these are now targeted at the high, medium and the low end of the Android market.

The iPhone 4S is a modest improvement over its predecessor in that it brings the iPad 2’s dual-core A5 processor with enhanced GPU to a proven smartphone design, as then as a re-designed 8 megapixel camera.

The iPhone 4 should now be an in the extreme popular phone with the Gen-Y crowd at a $99 subsidized price point, and the 3GS will now be free with a 2-year contract, which should lure in plenty of folks that were if not looking at “feature phones” nevertheless have always coveted an iPhone of their own.

However, it should be noted that the real value add to these phones is the iCloud-enabled iOS 5 — which is going to be available via an iTunes update on the original iPhone 4 and 3GS. Which means that most of the features these “new” phones are introducing can be had for free by existing clients.

Notifications had to be fixed. Cloud integration has been in Android since… day 1. Voice recognition has been in Android since for the moment late Froyo updates and Gingerbread, though I will admit that what Apple has done with Siri is nice.

But now Apple has to keep pace with Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich — and that’s landing within the then and there month.

It’s natural to assume that with this iPhone family re-arrangement and price shifting, many people are likely thinking about how much damage this can potentially do to Android’s market share. It won’t.

I think the real question is not how much Apple can steal from Android, nevertheless how much of the lion’s spoils from RIM’s deteriorating market share will end up in Apple’s pockets versus the Android OEMs.

So far, market innovation has shown that Android market share continues to rise at the expense of RIM’s, whereas iPhone growth up until now has remained relatively flat, only altering a single percentage point in a single sales quarter.

I will concede but that RIM will continue to deteriorate sharply in the then and there year — a veritable death spiral — and both Apple and the Android OEMs will battle for what remains of the carcass.

Apple’s hyena pack is likely to gain a few points on the way, with Android’s lion pride taking the juiciest pieces, particularly in the enterprise market, where the platform has more form factor flexibility, particularly in devices that have hardware keyboards.

I believe that business-oriented users as then as feature phone and superphone-oriented consumers will continue to gravitate towards Android whereas the high-end, phone as fashion/style accessory crowd will gravitate towards iPhone.

Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android are destined to be tied in perpetual mortal combat, which is good for the industry.

However, at least at this stage, I just don’t see Apple as being able to successfully challenge the mature cloud and value added services that Google and Android represents. Apple doesn’t “Do Cheap” and I don’t see that basic tenet of the company’s core philosophy changing post-Jobs.

I think a certain number of business people will gravitate towards Apple and iCloud if they already have a personal investment in the App store and use existing iOS devices.

However, a lot of professionals already use Google’s cloud for messaging, calendaring and documents. I see iCloud as bringing iOS up to par with Google in cloud innovation, not so much as out-pacing it. Without Cloud, iOS would have been behind the curve.

With Apple’s iCloud gauntlet being thrown in Larry Page’s face, I expect some real surprises from Google in 2012. The company will not stand nevertheless, particularly as it relates to enterprise users.

The real bottom line is that there’

The real bottom line is that there’s just too much inflexibility in the Apple ecosystem to displace Android’s versatility.

While there is some demographic convergence between the two systems, both Android and iPhone are fairly mature platforms that seem to have done then carving out their respective territory. And a lot of this has to do with how Apple and Google both perceive the identity and the role of their own platforms, which are very different.

The vertical integration in iOS

I think that the vertical integration in iOS and the iPhone is always going to be what makes an iPhone an iPhone, or an Apple product, period. Whereas the flexibility and relatively open framework of Google’s mobile operating system makes Android what it is.

There is no question that vertical integration is what makes Apple as a company successful, nevertheless it as well places them into a doctrine in other words prone to inflexibility and can alienate large groups of consumers and business users.

While Android remains largely unaffected by this new product launch, as Google’s software and OEM handsets are more than a match for iOS 5 — the real losers here to my way of thinking are RIM and Microsoft. With iOS 5, Apple has continued to raise the bar on smartphone software research and now RIM’s OS 7 devices look ever so clunky by comparison.

I don’t think the 4S is likely to sway anyone who was looking at the iPhone 4 or 3GS before and went to Android.

The iPhone 4

The iPhone 4 and the 3GS, during proven sales performers which will continue to do very so then now that they’ve been reduced in price, are truly now too low end to grab the Android “superphone” users, nevertheless could conceivably dent Android’s enty-level market where feature phones earlier existed.

Still, if we follow current purchasing trends, It’s much more likely that the collateral damage from the iOS 5-refreshed iPhones and the Android Ice Cream Sandwich/Android 2.3 4G phones being released at the end of 2011 are going to decimate whatever market share RIM is going to have left in 2012.

I believe a large portion of Business users that have been in exit mode from BlackBerry will not find any of the re-launched iPhones as attractive as they could have been had they been equipped with 4G.

There’s something to be said for 8+ megabits per second wireless tethering from your hotel on the road from your business laptop or tablet that you can get on a Droid Bionic that you cannot get on any of the current iPhone models.

Today, we saw a demo that looked great in Apple’s HQ. However what happens when you throw tens of millions of Siri queries at iCloud? That’s but to be seen.

The other hand I know who’

On the other hand I know who’s been doing gargantuan volumes of internet-based queries for years and has been doing it successfully — Google.

My search and voice query response times on my Bionic are instantaneous, no matter what network I am running on, 3G or 4G. And that’s because Google knows public cloud infrastructure better than anyone. ANYONE. Except for like as not Amazon.

Jason Perlow+, Sr. Innovation Editor at ZDNet, is a technologist with over two decades of experience integrating large heterogeneous multi-vendor computing environments in Fortune 500 companies.


Source: http://www.allvoipnews.com

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