Mobile Opportunity: The war between Nokia and Apple
by Volker Weber
... when you stand back and look at what's happening in the industry worldwide, it's clear that Apple and Nokia both want very badly to be the dominant mobile computing company for young adults. That makes a huge, relentless conflict between them inevitable. They're like two armies trying to take the same hill. One's coming from the west, the other from the east, so there's not a lot of fighting at the moment. But as soon as they reach the hill, there's going to be an explosion.
[Thanks, Hanno]
Comments
Mobile computing - well indeed. Let me quote from the interesting editorial from Nik Rawlinson in this week's UK Macuser:
"[The iPhone] should really have been marketed as a forward-looking mobile communicator rather than a cellphone with irritating ringtones.........
"Why did [Apple] follow the crowd in producing a conventional mobile phone with snazzy added features, rather than a VoIP-based internet communicator that treats the cellphone networks as the legacy communication protocols that they are? ........
"What we need is an iPhone without the phone (presumably called just an 'i') for browsing the web, sending emails and checking online maps. Only trouble is, that would be the natural successor to the Newton MessagePad - the first product Jobs canned when he came back to Apple."
I don't entirely agree (voice messaging is still essential, I would have thought) but it's an interesting perspective. The sales figures don't seem to suggest that Apple have made too many mistakes with the iPhone, frankly, but even without a phone network it still has a role in Europe.....
