AT&T to market iPhone to business customers? - Page 2

I use voice dialing on my RAZR all the time. Personally, I don't think you should be fiddling with the buttons while you're driving anyway.

The battery could be an issue, though, depending on how Apple handles battery replacements.


I agree. I've had my RAZR less than a year and a half, and the battery has already deteriorated so much that the phone is practically useless. (I charge it all night, but it dies during my second call of the day.) As a result, yesterday I had to purchase a replacement battery.

All rechargeable batteries have a limited lifespan. So there needs to be a simple, cost-effective way to get a replacement battery in your phone. If you're spending hundreds of dollars on a phone, you're not going to want to have to throw it out after a year because it no longer holds enough charge.

As long as Apple provides a simple and inexpensive way for me to get the battery replaced while I wait, I don't mind not being able to do it myself. But if it's too expensive or I'm going to have to leave my phone with someone for a day to get the repair done, that would be a major downside for me as a business customer.

Correct.

All this 'analysis' is just chattering in the wings while the main event is elsewhere.

Another thing, someone was talking about battery size.. the battery will have to be larger than that of an ipod. Talking on the phone drains a battery at an amazing rate. It's not like the battery will be microscopic.. There really is no reason why it can't be replaceable by consumers. The only reason i can think of is battery placement.. perhaps it is not easily accessible (which leads to a second question, why not?), otherwise, this is like having a built in inconvience from a company that prides itself on simplicity. Imagine, i am at home and i realize i can no longer put up with my iphone battery, i must jump into my car and locate the nearest apple authorized facility (which is not nearby, apple authorized facilities, including their stores are not obiquitous) and drive to it?.. all just to change a battery?. This from a company with the reputation for ease of use?. Am i missing something?

The analyst did not say it would not sell (i did not see anywhere he stated consumers would not buy the device).. he did not even say business would not buy the device.. he stated that they would be crazy to buy the device in its current form being that it is a closed OS, it's first generation, no easy battery replacement, etc.

Personally, i don't think it will sell a lot.. i know why AT&T wants to sell to business though.. that high price must be scaring them.. i mean really, the market for that device has a definite ceiling. after the first two quarters (when apple fanatics have all bought their iphone) and AT&T needs to find customers elsewhere, the sledding will be tough.. what's the next best market other than apple fanatics?.. business of course!!!

I'll bet you use Vista too, don't you?

That's what I used to think. I am a business user, and I never have purchased an additional battery, but you'd be surprised. Many people spend hours on their phones and go through 2 or 3 batteries a day. I would tell them "get a car charger" but people have habits and they don't want to have to break them.

No, probably still trying to figure out how to upgrade to Vista.

Do you remember how much the Razr was when it came out? It sold for upwards of 500 dollars. I saw people walking around Wal-Mart talking on Razrs. Price doesn't really stop people. It's a classic economics demand curve. When they sell to the crazy people willing to pay that much (including myself ), they will then lower the price so that everyone else gets them (i.e. $99 razrs). Cingular is good at this. T-Mobile is not (nokia 8801). That's why apple chose them.

I agree with the analyists that it's a bad idea. Once the iPhone is released in June, there will be a big discrepancy in the number of people who currently say they will buy the $500 iPhone from those who actually do. There will also be a big discrepancy in purchasing numers between different demographic age groups. Young people will care less about the actual functionalities of the product and more about the hype and coolness of it. Older business users are the exact opposite. Because of this, I think it would be a waste of AT&Ts resources to market towards business users (for the first generation iPhone anyways).

There have been quite a few polls from different research firms showing a wide range of interest in the iPhone.

Change Wave Research: "9% of the population that is somewhat to very interested in getting the iPhone"

http://www.intomobile.com/2007/03/23...le-iphone.html

Lets Talk: "52% of the surveyed users answering that they will NOT buy an iPhone"

http://www.intomobile.com/2007/03/18...an-iphone.html

PiperJaffray: 85 percent of high school students said they were already familiar with the multi-function Apple gadget, and of those students, 25 percent said they'd be willing to buy one at the previously announced $500 entry point.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...or_iphone.html

I recently switched from Verizon to Cingular. Boy, what a fight that was - Verizon is truly comprised of a bunch of Nazis). Regarding Voice Dialing; Cingular offers a voice actuatred dial option which links to their server. You issue the command: Voice Dial and then your requested to name the contact and which phone to call.

Prefty nifty. I use it all day. The only difference is that the Verizon phone stores the info in the phones internal memory wheras Cingular uses an external server. You update your address book bt logging onto the wedsite. The only issue that I have is that you can't upload Address Book contacts diretly to the website - you have to convert the vCards. I've been unseccessful with that process so I do it amnually. I would expect by the time iPhone is released Apple will have that isse resolved.

nope, work on 3 macs. see how easy it is to fool yourself when you get religious with your computers? you fail to see that nobody/nothing is perfect....

Big Business = Standardized smartphones = no way.

However, if they have decent Outlook sync for calendar and contacts, I could see some small business people being willing to put up with an IMAP-only phone. If the Windows sync support sucks, however, then no way.

Exactly; utterly irrelevant to the launch success.


You are wrong if you think it won't sell. The high price won't be scaring AT&T in the least. It is a rare chance for them to achieve decent margins on a phone. The only ceiling for sales of the device will be that Apple will not be able to make enough of them. And who exactly are Apple fanatics?

You know nothing.

What this analyst is overlooking, and what everybody else seems to be overlooking as well, is that this is a first generation product that will undoubtedly spawn a wide variety of different models with varying features and price-points in the 1-2 years after the debut of the first model. I would be very surprised if we don't quickly see models that address many of the "shortcomings" of the first version. Apple has already stated that they will upgrade to 3G sometime in early 2008, and I'm sure many other features and configurations will eventually be unveiled. Probably a model that is a Phone but NOT an iPod, for example. Wouldn't need so much flash storage, wouldn't be as much of a battery drain, etc. Also probably a next-gen iPod that isn't a phone. And so on......

More crucially, does anybody honestly think that Apple intentionally built this phone using OS X, indeed marketing it as such and going so far as to specifically refer to Cocoa in various places, just so they could have a set-in-stone set of features only provided by Apple? Come on! Just because they haven't publicly disclosed the details for extending iPhones with third-party software is no reason to assume they aren't planning on making that possible for all time. It may never be possible to do with the first version, although from what I can tell, there isn't any architectural reason why the software on the first iPhone couldn't be upgraded to facilitate installing third-party apps once that capability is announced in general. It isn't like the OS is burned into a ROM never to be changed. It's essentially Mac OS X, modified, on a flash drive. So, if we read between the lines, clearly there is no technical obstacle to installing third party software, and the iPhone is simply too robust a platform NOT to be able to install third-party software. To not allow any third-party software, ever, would be an enormous waste, and Apple just isn't that stupid.

There are probably a few specific technical issues that Apple needs to resolve before it can announce third-party software capability. First, they would need to establish clear programming guidelines for issues that would be moot on a regular Mac, such as how a program utilizes resources and how it affects battery life. A normal desktop application would operate in a way that would be horribly wasteful where battery life is an issue, so applications would need to be engineered in a way that specifically addresses this issue by minimizing what things they perform in the background constantly that would cause a steady drain on the battery. It's basically a task and resource management optimization issue. Apple probably hasn't gotten all of this completely figured out itself, and needs to get all of that ironed out. Once those sorts of technical issues are completely resolved, they would need to produce an SDK and user interface guidelines, establish a separate developer structure specifically for iPhone development, and basically lay down a lot of infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. Sure, a lot of basic infrastructure would be the same as with Macs, but the crucial iPhone parts don't yet exist at all in any public form. All of this takes time to organize and execute, and Apple is probably more focused on finishing the basic model in time to ship it.

Eventually Apple will have a developer plan for iPhone development and all of the necessary infrastructure and documentation and SDKs. How soon, I can only guess. Probably sometime within 12 months of the first iPhone's release. Perhaps much sooner. Once all of that is in place, it will be child's play to write custom applications for iPhones and install them.

Steve Jobs remarks about being too worried about stability and the integrity of AT&T's network is a laughable cover story. It wouldn't say very much about the stability and robustness of OS X if you then tried to maintain the position that an OS X based phone would be too vulnerable to compromise or failure simply because of a misbehaving third-party application. On Macs, doesn't that usually, worst case, result in the bad application just shutting down? When was the last time a messed up application hosed the whole system? (Excluding drivers and kexts and so on, types of code that no third-party end user application would have any reason to use)

Really, the only thing to think about is simply how Apple will choose to implement all of this from a user perspective. What would be the mechanism for installing or removing applications? Where would you obtain them? Etc. While I'm not personally thrilled with the ever-expanding use of iTunes as the tool for accomplishing everything, its highly probable that Apple will continue doing what they are already doing with third-party games on iPods. iTunes will govern everything related to getting the software onto the iPhone.

Ok, so I'm too wordy. Here is what i actually predict is going to happen:

Apple will announce that it will, after all, be possible to put third party software onto iPhones. They will announce all of the documentation and developer programs that any interested parties would need to follow. And overnight you'll see a a massive stampede for all kinds of companies to produce third-party iPhone software for every conceivable task.

I believe that these programs will ONLY be available through the iTunes Store for purchase (if they aren't shareware / freeware), downloading and installing. I believe that Apple will have a fairly rigorous process of testing or certifying these applications before they are ever made available to users, to ensure that they are stable and that they conform to the user interface conventions that Apple will undoubtedly be enforcing very strictly. All of this development and testing will happen through an iPhone developer process, so you won't be able to just write something and get it into your phone without it making its way through the formal process. I don't think there will be any significant obstacle to anybody doing this -- possibly some developer membership fees, probably not prohibitive, but which would have to recover the cost of conducting the testing and certification that doesn't happen for Mac software in a centralized fashion. But whatever apps somebody chooses to write, they would just go through this process and eventually show up in iTunes. Once they show up in iTunes, the process would probably be identical to iPod games, you would just check some boxes in your iTunes syncing setup to select what you wanted to install.

I also think that Dashboard widgets are going to play a HUGE part in all of this. While some programs will simply be too complex to implement as a widget, and would consequently be written as a conventional Cocoa application, many many many programs could be implemented as widgets -- indeed, that might be the very best way to do so, and certainly the easiest, quickest and cheapest. So I expect to see widgets for an almost limitless variety of functions. I strongly suspect that the iphone was a key factor in the whole reason why Apple even produced Dashboard to begin with. They have been working on this phone for a long time now, and I'm certain that Dashboard was conceived with an eye towards iPhone app development long before the iPhone itself was ever announced.

The one area I can't quite predict where or how Apple will choose to take things is third-party in-house apps that are not intended for sale or for general use. Companies will probably want to create their own custom applications that are specific to their business or industry, and it would not make a lot of sense to have these programs listed in iTunes along with everything else. So I think there will have to be a method for installing programs onto iPhones that bypasses actually obtaining those programs off of iTunes. This theoretically means that such programs could get installed without having undergone any kind of QA. How Apple chooses to implement this ability, and how it differs from the standard apps available from iTunes, is something I haven't come up with a theory for yet.

On the other hand, I might be making things way more complicated than necessary. It could be that iPhone programs will take the form of a self-contained application bundle identified as an iPhone application -- simply double-clicking such an application on a Mac or PC might just trigger some kind of "The program you double-clicked is an iPhone application. Do you want to install it on your iPhone?" prompt like the ones you get when you double-click on Widgets, PrefPanes, etc. Download your apps from Versiontracker, unzip, double-click, click OK at prompt, which copies it to certain folder and launches iTunes and displays the iPhone sync settings, third-party application tab, where you can check or un-check apps you want to have on your iPhone. Next time you sync, the app is installed. It could be that simple.

Bottom line, though, is that NOT allowing third-party apps, ever, on any iPhone, now or in the future, makes absolutely ZERO business sense, and Apple is just too smart not to know this. So, expect third party apps, eventually.

It isnt like Apple is going to put Blackberries and Treos and Windows Mobile PDAs out of business overnight. Rome wasn't built in a day. I expect it to take 2-3 years for Apple to completely crush the competition for PDAs and smart phones. ;-)

-Pete

Welcome to the conversion.. this has been discussed by me and others here many times already. I'd say we're looking at an iPhone nano early 2008, but it will need an iPod in it. That's where I believe they will clean up, it's the device I'm waiting for personally. As for 3G, they could have easily made the US model 3G if they wanted, but the US lacks 3G towers, so they picked Edge. Anyway in the US Wi-Fi will be the killer app. I still remain adamant that Euopre will see only a 3G version in 2007.

Oh, brother.

Well, it's a different case here for several reasons :

First, the iPhone is going to suck a LOT more battery power than the average phone, with it's bigger, brighter screen, touch screen (which will draw more power than a trad. keyboard), and movie/audio options, which will be more heavily used than in other phones. Also, people will be "playing" with the phone more. So, because battery will lose charge more, it will go through it's cycles considerably faster than other phones, so the battery will become an issue.

Secondly, Apple, you must admit, has a pretty lousy track record with batteries the past few years. If the iPhone battery has any sort of flaw that requires replacement, it won't be a matter of simply getting a new battery, the user will have to mail their phone in or drop it off at a care centre, which means not having a phone for 24-72 hours (or the stored emails, contact lists, etc. etc.), which could be deadly to a business user.

You are a member of apple fanatics.. you'd buy shit if jobs excreted it and sold it to you.. that's what i meant by apple fanatics and i know a lot, thank you. I've been around a while. Apple has had quite a few failures due to ridiculous pricing and underwhelming product (apple lisa anyone?).

It will sell to apple faithfull ((is this term better than fanatics to you?) and be an initial success but after the faithfull is all tapped out, this product will experience a dramatic drop of in sales (unless apple drops the price and/or dramatically increase the device capabilities).. one thing for sure, i would never buy this product initially.. i have a feeling mac faithfull will feel betrayed when apple lowers this product price significantly to move it.. talk about feeling like you overpaid!!!

It may be simple...it may not be simple. I need to constantly synch my mail, my calendar, my contacts, my notes. Exchange does this seemlessly with by Blackberry instantaneously. With the new 8830 coming out in May, I am seriously considering staying with Verizon for one more year so that I am guaranteed support to wait out any uncertainties with the iPhone. Waiting this out for one year until iPhone troubleshoots inevidable nuisances, gains 3G support, and works through synching issues. I have heard rumors that all these will synch wirelessly on the iPhone through dotMac...but whether this is entirely true AND how effective this will be through EDGE is a completely different story. If I was smart, I would wait a year...

That is the best argument I've read about not having user changeable battery.



I'm glad you cleared that up.

I think that study is probably spot on, but I don't think having the mp3/photo capabilities is much of a problem if it is an iPod mp3 player and the camera is not too expensive.

I am wondering for business whether the lack of plastic keys for Blackberry geeks can be compensated by a better iChating experience. I actually hate texting and so an elegant system with shorter messages like iChat is better for me. I realize many people just can't live with the thought that someone can actually live without getting a message from them, but I think this is a transitional medium and will be thought of as quaint in 20 years.

The exciting part to me also is found in the Apple website QT overview of iChat in Leopard. if you haven't seen it in a while check it out. Some of those features might work their way into the iPhone (since it uses OSX) and those are much more useful and cool than texting your office mates or middle school clique.