¤ jetless heights

+ Tue, July 27

One Step Towards A Real iPhone?

I made it six days without directly talking about Apple.  That’s a major accomplishment for me.

It was just last night when Mike Davidson made some pretty heady predictions about Apple’s entrance into the cell phone market.  With no definite plans or rumors to back up his claims, he went out on a limb and went so far as to say,

I’m going to go on record as saying we’ll see this [the Apple iPhone] around the beginning of 2005. I’ll also go on record as saying if Apple doesn’t capitalize on this opportunity soon, the market for iPods will dry up and they won’t have a digital lifestyle leg to stand on.

That’s some drastic talk about the company who is absolutely leading the digital lifestyle revolution in the consumer’s eye.  It’s not without warrant, nor is it terribly far-fetched.  It’s simply an extreme statement that I think many people have trouble swallowing.

Regardless, his thoughts on an Apple-branded third-party cellphone running Apple software that would allow you to bind it with your Mac and its Address Book and iTunes and Mail and what have you, are very interesting and would certainly produce a must-have device for me.

And it is tonight — only one day after Davidson wrote out his predictions — that Apple and Motorola announce a version of iTunes that will run on Motorola phones starting early next year.  It’s certainly not the grandiose plan Davidson envisioned, though it is a first ground-breaking step where one did not exist yesterday.

Apple never moves their most important products to foreign platforms when they don’t feel they will turn a healthy profit from it.  In fact, I can only think of one time they did that in the past: October 16, 2003 - iTunes For Windows.  Need I remind you that Apple has sold well over 2,000,000 iPods this year alone?  iTunes for Windows allowed the iPod to blossom into the must-have device for our day and Apple knows the brand power of iTunes.

The only reason I can see iTunes moving from the desktop to the cellphone would be if a truly Apple created/licensed cellphone is sitting in the wings in Cupertino, waiting until the perfect moment for deployment.

It seems Mike was just thinking different.

5 people have chimed in.
→ Add your 2¢ by reading through and commenting at the end.

1 → skippy  –  (Jul 27 2004,  9:21 AM)

while i gottta say i love the itunes.i dont know if i would care that much about an iphone. but on to the truly important question, what/where the hell is cupertino?

2 → pd  –  (Jul 27 2004, 12:58 PM)

> where the hell is cupertino?

Cupertino, California is where Apple Headquarters is located.

3 → Debashis  –  (Jul 28 2004,  1:55 AM)

…you know where the headquarters are located…were you this dorky in highschool and I was just oblivious to it or is this a new found nerdiness discovered in college?

4 → pd  –  (Jul 28 2004, 10:11 AM)

Would you prefer that I write about subjects I don’t know much about?

5 → skippy  –  (Jul 28 2004, 11:02 AM)

keep writing it your way, as long as you keep explaining all the stuff i dont know!






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