Monday, January 5, 2009

iPhone and G1 Driving the Market

A few years ago, who would have guessed that Apple and Google would drive the cellphone market? Well, here we are - these two companies are now the high-end cellphone market. OK, RIMs Blackberries and a few similar gadgets are trying to adapt to hang on but they are not in the driving seat.

It's significant to consider the background of these two companies - one is an old computer company and the other born in the waves of the web. Apple may be a traditional computer company but it's a highly innovative player and it created a new market with the iPod. Google's lifeblood is innovation and they have been successful so far even if they made a number of PR blunders leading up to the phone.

The successful quest of these two companies is not a coincidence - the high-end cellphones are convergence gadgets. They're not phones and they are not computers - they are bit of both. I noticed that my usage the traditional computers changed when I started to use the iPhone. I also started to do some new things thanks easier access to information.

The access to the web browsing on the iPhone is good but that is far less important than what I anticipated - I don't browse the web that on with it. Instead, the apps provides easy access to the information I need and want. This represents another aspect of the iPhone/G1 concept - it's a highly customizible platform. Apple still controls the districution channel of the applications but they rely on others to produce the programs - this results in leveraging innovation on a scale no single company can compete with. The Google product has relinquished control completely and the total openess of the Android platform will probably respresent an important feature in the competition with the iPhone.

One important aspect of many of these third party applications is the integrate of the iPhone and G1 phones with other systems and information. Hence, the value proposition of these gadges is not only access to email and web but access to all other kinds of stuff we aready use (mostly on the computer). Additionally, Google and Apple have developed some new features and those are nice but they are not what makes these gadges fly.