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I was pretty harsh in my comments on the last iPhone article you guys linked (Is the iPhone a portable computer?), but I think this guy has identified a basic truth even if he has exaggerated a bit to make the point. I agree with some of the comments here that Aunt Sue is unlikely to go from no computer or other electronics to laying out hundreds of dollars plus large monthly charges to try an iPhone. But that's not really the point since Aunt Sue was just a metaphor for people who are not phone geeks. Here's what I've seen in my world.
I teach at a small liberal arts college so my circle of people ranges from young to old, from geek to Luddite. The vast majority of people I know do not have a smart phone at all. Most of the students have phones with roughly the capabilities of the RAZR, that is, they use them mostly for talking and texting, but they don't check email or browse the web on their phones. A few do have iPhones, but I've never met a student at my college with any other smartphone.
The few of us who do have smartphones are adults, basically geeks, who like to play with whatever cool toys are new. Most of us do not have an iPhone because it really does lack features we came to depend on long before the iPhone existed.
So why do I say the author is basically right? Because I've watched the few people who do have iPhones and seen how other people react to them. If I am with some people and I pull out my Touch, get onto Google, and answer a question that we were discussing, everyone says thanks for the answer, but no one focuses in on the phone and carries on about how great it is. But I've seen a student do the same thing and other people ooh and ahh over the phone, ask to hold it, and so forth. Let's face it, there is something charismatic about the iPhone that makes people want to try it. And that's where I see him as being right. If someone takes someone else's iPhone and, without instruction, makes it do things they would find useful, then they're much more likely to go out and get one themselves. I see these people as not being smartphone geeks, but every day people who already pay for a cell phone and who suddenly see that their phone can do more. I'd have to tell the same person what to do on my Touch to get the phone to do something impressive. That doesn't carry the same wow factor to regular folks.
Startphone geeks mostly won't be happy with the iPhone, unless their actual needs were quite light in the first place, but everyone else won't care what the iPhone lacks because it's more than they ever considered having in the first place. And as the author of the article says, there are many, many more people who aren't gadget geeks than those who are.
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