.Dust

Just a lit­tle bit more seri­ous than the pre­vi­ous post.

We, poor Euro­peans, will not be able to put our hands on the iPhone in the near future. The only option we have is to meet some old friend from states or read online reviews.

I have gone through the iPhone user guide (you can find it here) try­ing to find where this device makes the difference.

Here are my findings:

• You will need a per­sonal com­puter with the lat­est ver­sion of iTunes to get your iPhone reg­is­tered and func­tional. Just wan­der­ing how they guys who spent three days in the line felt after dis­cov­er­ing that they had to reach home before plac­ing a phone call with their brand new toy. Funny.
• The iPhone vir­tual key­board is the best imple­men­ta­tion I have ever seen in years. Just have a look at this video to under­stand why I do think this.
• To edit text, touch and hold to see a mag­ni­fied view, then posi­tion the cursor.
• Flick or drag up or down to scroll. On some screens such as web­pages, you can also
  scroll side to side.
• If you are going to use the Apple blue­tooth had you will have an option to buy the Dual Dock that will charge both your iPhone and head­set at the same time. Great idea.
• The Mail but­ton shows the total num­ber of unread mes­sages in your all of your
  inboxes. You may have other unread mes­sages in other mailboxes.
• The Phone but­ton on the Home screen shows the total num­ber of missed calls and
  unheard voice­mail mes­sages you have.
• Rotate iPhone side­ways. Safari auto­mat­i­cally reori­ents and expands the page. This will work even with a lot of other appli­ca­tion on the iPhone.
• In the Safari web browser, double-​tap the col­umn. The col­umn expands, so you can read it more easily.
• Always in Safari, you can have more than one web­page open at a time. Some links auto­mat­i­cally open a
  new page instead of replac­ing the cur­rent one.
• SMS with the same con­tact will show up as conversations.
• Flick left or right to see the next or pre­vi­ous photo in the photo viewer.
• Rotate iPhone side­ways. The photo auto­mat­i­cally reori­ents and, if it’s in land­scape
  for­mat, expands to fit the screen.

Lot of inter­est­ing stuff, isn’t it?

Well, if you look at this from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive I can­not really find any real inno­va­tion here.

I wanted to be provoca­tive in the last sentence.

The tech­nol­ogy that you can find in the iPhone has been there from years. Touch screens, motion sen­sor, your fin­gers, etc.

Any­way they have been able to com­bine this tech­nol­ogy in an inno­v­a­tive way bring­ing a new com­pelling device to the market.

How could they do that?

1. Apple did not have any kind of mar­ket pres­sure. They do not have a mobile phone prod­uct line to be sustained.This is a main advan­tage com­pared to all the incum­bent mobile phone manufacturers.
2. They started from scratch. No tra­di­tion to man­tain. No estab­lished cus­tomer base to dis­ap­point with rad­i­cal changes. Also a major for the suc­cess of the iPhone.
3. Apple has a well estab­lished tra­di­tion in design­ing good and flex­i­ble user inter­face and user experience.
4. Apple played the mar­ket­ing games at their best. The ghost mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties we have seen in the last six months will be a case study for future gen­er­a­tions of mar­keters. Every sin­gle way of com­mu­ni­ca­tion on the inter­net has been filled with iPhone sto­ries. They built the prod­uct in the con­sumer mind before the real prod­uct really existed.

Why do I blog this? At the end of the day I really have to admit that I love the iPhone. It has some of the con­cepts we have been push­ing to hand­set man­u­fac­tur­ers from a very long time. Now they will prob­a­bly change their mind, hopefully.

Related posts:

1. iPhone Sight­ings
2. The iPhone Is On Sale
3. Shall we write about iPhone ? Well, yes!
4. iPhone spec­u­la­tions
5. Really Inno­va­tors?