Steve Jobs – the holy turtleneck, godfather of gadgetry, hippie fruitarian and single-handed saviour of the newspaper, mobile advertising, music and film industry and overall brilliant marketer – has just launched the latest iWant-gadget aptly named iPhone 4.
Call me biased, but with the current history defying Apple market cap, dominant market-share in smart phones, mp3-players, ebooks, and lets not forget trend-setting compter hardware design and stable operating system, I don’t think that introduction is much of an overstatement.
I’ve so far passed on getting an iPad, but I’ll surely be waiting in front of my Mac on 15th June to pre-order a replacement to my iPhone 3G. While I still consider the iPad a luxury product that I probably would use mostly during the morning coffee and lazy sunday’s in bed, the mobile is a highly personal gadget that i thumb on throughout the day.
While there are plenty of other phone makers and in particular Google’s promising Android OS, there’s no doubt that Apple has set the pace and is keeping to push the boundaries of mobile technology.
So what’s the difference between Apple and the competition? Answer: It’s all about the user-experience.
Apple didn’t invent the mp3-player, smartphone or ebook. What they did was instead to wait until the technology and market was ready (let’s ignore the Newton for a while…) and then leveraged their incredible design sense and eye for detail to create a fluid interface that just worked the way people expected it to do.
A great case in point is one of the new features of the iPhone 4; video-calling. While other mobile makers rushed to be among the first to deliver video call over the then fresh-faced 3G networks six or seven years ago, Apple is still restricting the service to wi-fi. Why? The technology is simply not quiet there yet to deliver the fluid experience that their users have come to expect from the company. And by understanding that their USP is great user experience, there is simply no room for pixellated video-calls.
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