In my opinion, the iPhone 2.0 represents a monumental milestone in the role of the mobile phone in our daily lives for the following reasons:
1. Platform: the iPhone is the latest platform that is generating entrepreneurial passion. I spent the weekend downloading and engaging with a handful of apps, and I did so while out and about in cafes, restaurants, lounges, and the park. A few apps I tried were Twitterrific (a twitter reader), whrrl (a location based service to find friends and see where they are at/going), and the facebook app. Both Twitterrific and Facebook offer a very cool feature to take a picture and automatically load it into your feeds, thus removing one of the painful manual processes in social media which I talked about in previous posts. Apple has done a wonderful job managing the platform via the App Store, which makes finding and loading apps extremely easy and efficient. Additionally, the process to get an application approved for the store creates an environment which is far less polluted than other platforms like facebook and MySpace which have become breeding grounds for application spam.
medialets , a startup ad network for iPhone applications has been posting some very interesting analytical data about the economics of the app store. The chart below indicates that in a few short days, simple economics are taking shape and the average price of iphone apps on the platform is dropping as competition increases with each additional app that is added. My belief is that most apps will end up being free as a result of price wars amongst competitors and applications will modify their business models to monetize through advertising via companies like medialets.
2. GPS>LBS: The GPS technology enables location based services which will finally come alive on the touch screen iPhone. it is the iPhone's touch screen and ease of use that finally moves LBS services like whrrl and loopt from niches plays into the mainstream.
3. True Internet Experience: The iPhone 1.0 was the first mobile phone to deliver much of the full internet experience on the go. In 2.0, it is combined with the application platform and GPS to deliver functionality that come close to matching or surpassing those that we achieve on our PCs. While the PC will have a place for writing documents, crunching numbers, etc, the scope it will have in our lives will begin to trend down.
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1 comments:
I spent 3 hours yesterday (2 in line and 1 in the store) getting my iPhone 3G, which was absolutely painful. But, it was time well spent -- I agree with you that this is a killer platform. LBS's are finally usable and the app store is genius. It's never been so compelling and easy to spend money, IMO, as it is buying useful apps and music. For example, sSpending $9.99 on a French phrase translator (with audio) was a no-brainer for me, as I'm flying to France, tomorrow.
a bientot (see you later),
-Jim
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