Is Apple Planning a Smart Phone? - What Apple would Need to Do
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Some who have seen Motorola’s Rokr phone have found it a little, well, retro in design, and not in a good way. Apple is known for creating products that are a joy to interact with, which means the company will have to design an iPhone from the ground up. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing –- after all, look at the success it had with the iPod –- but it will call for some real effort. Especially after its big success with MP3 players, everyone expects Apple to be able to take something that’s already on the market and work magic on it –- you know, the kind of thing that makes you simultaneously think “How innovative!” and “How obvious; why didn’t someone think of this before?!” That’s a lot to ask from a smart phone, but Apple will make a lot of people happy if it can pull it off.
Once the company designs the phone, it would need to work with a contract electronics manufacturer to get the thing built. That shouldn’t be a problem; Apple has done this before. Of course, the company’s notorious reputation for supply and demand problems (not enough of the first and too much of the second) may follow it here, though from what I’ve heard that particular problem hasn’t been too serious with the iPod. On the other hand, the recent problems with the relative ease of scratching and breaking the screen on the iPod Nano may also rear their heads in one form or another.
Once Apple creates its iPhone and gets production going, it will need a network to work with. Sure, smart phones have many features (more on that in a minute), but most people still buy them so they can make and receive phone calls wherever they are. Apple doesn’t have its own network of towers for cell phone signals, and it seems unlikely that they’ll get into that part of the phone business. So the computer maker would have to team up with a wireless phone company (such as Cingular) who would then sell the phone in its own stores. Or, if Apple wants to sell the phone in its retail stores, it could set up a mobile virtual network operator. An MVNO does not have its own network, but purchases minutes from other carriers and resells them to customers. This would be a way for Apple to keep the iPhone as entirely its own brand. In either case, Apple would have to keep the wireless phone carriers’ differing network technologies in mind as it designs its product.
Next: A Closer Look at Smart Phone Design >>
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