A little over a year ago I voluntarily returned my company-paid Samsung Blackjack Smartphone and switched my corporate-sponsored AT&T plan into a personal private plan. In other words, I switched from a perfectly good mobile smartphone, that the company permitted me to use for limited personal use and bought my own to the tune of $299 and about $80 a month ongoing.
I was saving quite a bit of money - Why would I do that?
I did it to get an Apple iPhone, which my company at the time did not support.
I feel that the the launch of the iPhone represents a paradigm-shift for the mobile industry. Apple is succeeding in doing what other mobile operators have struggled too long to do. It gives a compelling reason to use mobile data and the mobile internet.
The iPhone marks the beginning of mass-market use of mobile email and the mobile internet in the U.S. (parts of Asia have already surpassed this milestone). Others have now entered the fray, but Apple did it first.
I also look forward to how this technology is impacting the use of social media. Many social media channels already incorporate a mobile platform.
Ward;
ReplyDeleteyou got the crux of the innovation that Apple applied to the mobile "phone" market: easy internet. The engineering and design put into making the internet easy to access blew up the wireless industry. From June 2007 to present, everyone else is playing catch-up. The App Store only put them farther ahead.
The interesting part to me is how unprepared AT&T was (and is) for all of the bandwidth used by iPhones. Their network and use projections never accounted for people that actually used their devices as much as iPhone owners do. I'm hoping that the exclusivity deal ends so other companies can carry the phone and spread the impact around different networks.
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/08/28/bandwidth-hogs-iphone-and-other-smartphones/
Yes, Apple took it where no one else had. Of course paradigm shifts are not without their pain points and they will learn as this evolves. My point is that as an Internet professional, I was obliged to experience this first hand.
ReplyDelete