01-14-2008, 10:00 PM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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WIRED: "The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry"
"The demo was not going well. Again. It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, "We don't have a product yet." The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs' trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. "It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill," says someone who was in the meeting."
Photo by Landov
Love or hate it, Apple's iPhone shook up the North American wireless industry in a way no product before it had done. This Wired article is a superb piece of writing that delves into the guts of the troubled start the iPhone had, the negotiations they had with Cingular (now AT&T), and the price that both sides had to pay to have this product come to market. It's a fascinating read that's well worth your time.
The question for us Windows Mobile users is, has Apple paved the way for companies such as HTC to bring more tightly-controlled experiences to market, without so much interference from the wireless carriers? Perhaps, but there's still a long way to go. I was amazed when the HTC Touch came to markets across North America not only still branded as the HTC Touch, but also with it's very slick and simple Today screen plug-in intact, and not ruined by the wireless carrier selling the phone. On the other hand, we haven't seen features such as visual voice mail that require the low-level phone hardware and wireless network come to market for our platform.
The carriers are always desperate to avoid being just a "bit pipe", a carrier of voice and data bits, but Apple managed to convince AT&T to be exactly that. Can HTC, Motorola, or another Windows Mobile phone market convince another carrier to do the same?
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