Treo 755p « Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Treo 755p « Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog:

Palm is doomed. They deserve it though. They haven’t really innovated in 3-5 years. Good riddance.

Yeah, pretty much. After a few years of carrying a Treo, both laurie and I upgraded to the Samsung blackjack, which I really like.

No, it’s not an iPhone. I expect my next phone will be an iPhone, or something similar. To me, the iPhone is game changing, whether or not Apple “wins” the contest here like it did iPod.

Why? It’s a strong move away from “phone” protocols and walled gardens. Instead, it seems to be the first phone to really buy into the concept of being a mobile internet appliance, and that has huge implications.

Cingular/ATT seems to “get” this, and understands that the days of selling locked-in services is going to be fading away, much as CDs are. They were willing to make that leap, and if they guessed right, it’ll be a huge competitive advantage. Over the next few years, you’ll see phones moving towards the “always on” — G3 or EVDO, and later Wifi and WLAN — model. One of the things I love about the Blackjack is it doesn’t have some funky-ass “email” client, it has IMAP, Gmail and Outlook. You can IM with it (but I don’t). It has a decent browser.

I was having this discussion with some folks this week, in a “we have to make sure we keep an eye on how things are moving” type discussion — that it’s not about email, it’s about communication; at the same time, though, I see the iPhone as being a major stake in the heart of SMS. If you have an internet connection and an IM client, do you really need SMS? If you have email on demand, a real browser (not a WAP browser) and IM, do you really need SMS and WAP?

Not so much. So if I were thinking about a startup, I wouldn’t be looking at monetizing SMS. What I’d be thinking about is how to take some of the things people are doing to monetize SMS today, and think about how to build services to monetize them on IM as robots or services, as people start making that shift.

the iPhone, whether it succeeds wildly or merely adequately, is going to change the game, change it away from selling “value added” services and lots of metered add-ons to a contract with a data connection and phone minutes. And the phone companies that see this and move their offerings to match will win, and the ones that fight to maintain their per-messaging charges and protect their existing business models will — well, will join the people who tried to prevent the end of the CD-era. or the vinyl era, for that matter.

I’ve been thinking a lot of the concept of When Trains Fly and what that means to the industry (and those of us in it). It really, to a good degree, sums up the success of Steve Jobs and Apple since his return. Apple — Sculley, Spindler and Amelios — tried to go head to head with Microsoft and Dell, and they got bitchslapped into almost bankruptcy. Jobs is smart enough to know that when you can’t win the game the rules are written that you have to change the rules, and he’s smart enough to know how to do the rewrite. He did with the iMac, making style a sales item in a product known for geek words and beige. He did it with the iPod by making it easy enough for my father to use, if he wanted to, and by convincing music people to stop hiding behind the moat and embrace the new reality (and THAT is an even bigger success than the iPod itself, if you at all understand the complexity and challenge that entails). And now, it looks like he’s going to do it for phones, too.

No related posts.