OK, Computer (I mean iPhone) by Travis on February 14th, 2008
It’s no secret that generally speaking, people are pretty happy with their iPhones. The 4.8 ounces that make up these are pretty awesome.
I recently updated my unlocked iPhone to firmware version 1.1.3, and realized something that I haven’t heard much rumbling about. It’s something small but in the big picture makes a huge difference. Since Apple is a computer company, an industry where software and hardware vendors race to new levels of technology every single day, and in a space where simple point releases bring whole new levels of functionality to existing and paid-for products, Apple is able to bring what would normally be a version 2.0 product from say, RIM, as a simple point release to the iPhone.
Let me elaborate. In the 2 years I had my BlackBerry, its OS very well may have been updated but I never did such thing. How about the Nokia you have sitting on your desk? Or that Motorola? Ever updated it? Didn’t think so. Yet here we are. All 3.5 million iPhone users updating our $400 MP3 phones so we can have Google Maps tell us where we are. Apple did what Apple does best–made a better than average product to begin with and then updated the crap out of it to be a much better than average product (in slightly unrelated news, you MacBook Air haters take note.)
That brings me to my second point which is, not only has Apple made this process easy and painless (most of us are using iTunes anyway) but they actually provide worthwhile upgrades at a pretty steady pace, and those upgrades are free. That’s that computer industry blood I was talking about earlier.
When you sit back and think about this for a moment, you’ll realize why Apple has so quickly gained market share in this sector. You’ll also realize that unless companies like Nokia, Motorola or dare I even say, RIM, get their acts together soon, they really will be casualties of the Smartphone war.