News item: Apple announced the iPhone
News item: Apple announced the iPhone
Analysis: The idea of merging all the portable devices (cell phone, PDA, MP3 player, etc) into one is not a new one. But the implementation has always been sketchy in practice. Part of the problem is that a cell phone and a PDA have incompatible goals: the trend for cell phones is to be as small as possible. The trend for PDAs is to have as large a screen as possible.
But Apple might have come up with a silver bullet. The key was to use a touch screen, allowing to have a screen covering almost the whole device while being able to use part of it for a keyboard when need be. This, and a myriad of other innovations makes the iPhone a very sexy product. Of course the pricing is a bit steep, so we'll have to see if Apple can and wants to cut costs in the long run.
Either way, this if bad news for Microsoft. First of all, the Zune was barely catching up with the iPod, Apple has just set the bar much higher and the Zune will have to improve much more to steal the spotlight from the iPod / iPhone.
But the worst news might be on the long term because the iPhone has not revealed its full capacity yet. The device indeed works with a lightweight version of MacOS X. This means it can run way more applications than just a Web browser. It can theoretically run a mini office suite. It can theoretically handle a much larger screen provided it has enough memory. So if you can plug in a portable keyboard and flat screen to the iPhone, you end up with a super PDA than turns into a laptop when you want.
In other words, Microsoft needs to ramp up their effort. On the MP3 player front, but on the PDA front as well where Redmond hasn't been doing much since Palm collapsed.
Analysis: The idea of merging all the portable devices (cell phone, PDA, MP3 player, etc) into one is not a new one. But the implementation has always been sketchy in practice. Part of the problem is that a cell phone and a PDA have incompatible goals: the trend for cell phones is to be as small as possible. The trend for PDAs is to have as large a screen as possible.
But Apple might have come up with a silver bullet. The key was to use a touch screen, allowing to have a screen covering almost the whole device while being able to use part of it for a keyboard when need be. This, and a myriad of other innovations makes the iPhone a very sexy product. Of course the pricing is a bit steep, so we'll have to see if Apple can and wants to cut costs in the long run.
Either way, this if bad news for Microsoft. First of all, the Zune was barely catching up with the iPod, Apple has just set the bar much higher and the Zune will have to improve much more to steal the spotlight from the iPod / iPhone.
But the worst news might be on the long term because the iPhone has not revealed its full capacity yet. The device indeed works with a lightweight version of MacOS X. This means it can run way more applications than just a Web browser. It can theoretically run a mini office suite. It can theoretically handle a much larger screen provided it has enough memory. So if you can plug in a portable keyboard and flat screen to the iPhone, you end up with a super PDA than turns into a laptop when you want.
In other words, Microsoft needs to ramp up their effort. On the MP3 player front, but on the PDA front as well where Redmond hasn't been doing much since Palm collapsed.
posted by LP at
8:41 PM
1 Comments:
Cette idée d'un super-PDA transformable en laptop en cas de besoin est super-séduisante !
Si cela pouvait être effectivement le cas avec l'iPhone, pour moi, ce serait vraiment une "killer-app"...
Car se trimballer un MacBook continuellement devient pénible à la longue car le poids est toujours trop important.
By
Propriétaire, at 2:41 AM
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