[haesslich]

Originally Posted by SteveHoward999

I didn't gather your emphasis on see as in 'on the bus with my own eyes' from your previous post. I agree totally that you rarely see people out in public doing anything but amuse themselves with their phones.

Well ... not like that, you understand ops:

I think you and I are in agreement over how we see the iPhone and the use of phones in general. Really our only point of disagreement is in the definition of a 'smart' phone.

I define smartphone as having an OS which is fairly standard across devices: this means that a WM phone is a smartphone, a Nokia s60-based phone is a smartphone, while a Nokia using the older S30 OS or a Motorola or LG are not; the OS is the key here, since otherwise you've got programs which say "Requires: Nokia 6000, Samsung a720, Motorola v660" instead of "Nokia s60 OS, 3MB storage". That's a LOT easier to write programs for; Java does its bit in allowing usage of the same source code across platforms with minimal rewriting... but being able to write and know that the platform you're writing the code for has the same capabilities (or at least, the same MINIMUM capabilities) encourages more development. Like I said, my s60-based phone has a photo editor loaded into it, along with a music player... and the advantage is that by doing so, I've added OGG support (including ringtones) to a phone which didn't natively support it (it only does MP3 natively). That's expandability for you, and that's a smartphone (or in my case, a not-so-smartphone).

One thing which may encourage application adoption beyond standardizing OS's and interfaces across phones may be a marketplace-wide reduction in data pricing, however; right now, if I intended to download software to my phone, I either have to download it onto PC then send the application to my phone with BT or else I have to buy it from the phone company and THEN pay extra for the data charges. Reducing the cost of a voice-and-data plan would probably encourage me to buy more programs online, or at least to make use of the web functionality that it offers.

Cingular's pricing for the voice-and-data plan that has been proposed for the iPhone SHOULD be of some concern to Apple; too costly a plan, and the phone itself may become an albatross around Apple's neck, no matter whether or not it can sync with iTunes: if I have to pay $80 a month for the voice-and-data package on TOP of the $500 I shell out for the phone... well, I could get a $250 iPod Nano and import an LG phone and be done with it.

Incidentally, the above rumor (I've seen prices as high as $100/mo for a combined voice/data package quoted for the iPhone) is one reason I believe that Apple made a BIG mistake tying itself to one provider. If they'd sold the phone by itself for $500 or so, and made it quad-band PLUS 3G capable (reducing the need to have separate phones for EU/Asia and North America), they'd probably be in an even better position. It's a bit like if they'd sold the iPod back in 2000 but tied it to AOL so you had to get an AOL membership to download music and ALSO had to pay extra data fees because you'd have to dial up AOL to get to the iTunes store... and couldn't rip your own music. I suspect that the iPod would've tanked if they'd tied it the way the iPhone is currently locked down to one provider.