Hello everybody. My name is Matteo Pelati; I’m an avid technology blogs reader and I thought it would have been nice to have my own blog to share my thoughts about technology with others. This is also for a particular reason: 2007 has been a great year for the mobile industry and I believe that 2008 is going to be even better. What happened in 2007 that made me think this? Actually a lot of things. I will try to go through them one by one posting some comments in the next days.
The launch of the Iphone
I think the launch of the Iphone is kind of revolutionary. First of all the UI: even if the device lacks a lot from a hardware perspective (3G support, low-res webcam) compared to many other phones, it features a terrific UI and provides a tremendous boost to usability. My feeling is that many phone manufacturers never paid too much attention to the OS and especially the UI. If you look back at innovation in the mobile industry it’s easy to find out that hardware has advanced much faster than software. In a decade we have gone from simple phone to wireless megabit networks, multi-megapixels cameras and a dramatic increase of flash storage. Instead, from the software perspective my brand new S60 phone has not much more that the first S60 I bought 6 years ago. The UI is a bit nicer, the web browser has improved a lot but usability is about the same as it was 6 years ago. From a hardware perspective we are 100% ready for the mobile web (especially in Europe with HSDPA networks) but we lack a on the UI and usability. To my opinion, the hardware vendors have never invested in software as much as they did on the hardware side. Apple has decided to do the opposite and it is proving to be a success. Even if the hardware of the phone is not the state-of-the-art people around the world want the iphone because of its usability and its cool UI. If you think software is also behind the success of the Blackberry. The push mail service and a very usable mail client are what made the Blackberry famous around the world. It’s all about software, usability and services. Not hardware.
The other interesting point about the Iphone launch is the business model. For the first time in the mobile history it is a hardware vendor choosing the carrier and not vice versa. Carriers have always been dominant in this market, telling phone manufactures what they should or should not put on their phones. Apple has reversed the story picking its favorite exclusive carriers and even asking for revenue sharing.
Will all this open the eyes of other handset manufacturers so that they will focus more on software and services? Probably yes.
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