Think Secret has posted a speculative story about who will carry the iPhone in Europe. Orange and Vodaphone are listed as the top contenders.
The article doesn’t mention the most important thing about the European carrier, however (important, at least, to North Americans). There are businesses who make it their work to take advantage of foreign economies to purchase an unlocked mobile device and then resell it in a different nation. Some nations, like Belgium, mandate that all phones are sold unlocked. So, one might be able to buy an unlocked iPhone via Belgium, for example. The purchaser may end up with a European warranty, sending their device across the Atlantic to have it serviced, or an outright refusal to service the warranty.
The idea is that the purchaser gets an iPhone on Rogers or T-Mobile, etc, instead of Cingular. It’s not possible to get an iPhone on Sprint, Verizon, or Alltel, unless you can get one of them to give you a SIM card, which you likely can’t. We will, of course, post updates as they come.
According to a survey by Markitecture (via Ars Technica), only 6% of people polled plan to buy an iPhone in the next year. Only six percent, they say! You know, if they follow through, that could put Apple in front of Microsoft in market share, currently at 5.7% (via Canalys). The article doesn’t say if it was a global or national survey, however.
Markitecture notes that the RAZR had about 6% of the phone market at its peak. Ars Technica doesn’t note the margin of error, but 6% of the global phone market (around 1 billion phones) is 60 million phones. At $500 each that’s 30 billion dollars. Granted, not net profit. If Apple is looking for 20% profit margins, as they’re wont to do, it looks like they’d potentially grab about 6 billion dollars.
It’s starting to look like Jobs set the bar low in January when he announced he was looking for 1% of the global phone market. Of course, one doesn’t like to set goals and then miss them, it makes one look bad. But, that’s part of what makes watching Jobs fun. When they destroy the 1% goal, he’s going to act like the most astounded person in the world. Whaaaa?
In a recent interview with USA Today, Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) stated several things, none of which are really news. He promised to not come out with a Zune phone, he made some claims about what a great CEO he was, etc. This quote interested me, though: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” That’s really interesting. He thinks they’ll see “2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.” Really, really interesting. According to Steve Jobs in his keynote this January, Apple is aiming for 1% of the phone market one year after the iPhone comes out. Pishposh! That’s just 10 million phones! At $500 each that’s just… oh wait. That’s $5 billion. By Ballmer’s own estimates, it’s $15 billion. And this is likely a zero-sum equation — people that get the iPhone probably won’t get a Windows Mobile phone.
Update:Macworld.co.uk seems to assert Microsoft only has about 5.6% of the mobile market. This puts another quote of his in perspective — “Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market?” He doesn’t have 96% of the market, not in this segment anyway. He’s sweating bullets in this market segment.
In other news, he promised to not release a Zune with phone features, stating “It’s not a concept you’ll ever get from us.” I’m not sure I believe him — if Linux phones really have 3 times more market share than Windows Mobile, I’d be surprised if he didn’t have a team on it already.
Technorati Tags: Ballmer, editorial, Microsoft, news, Zune
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New York Times columnist David Pogue has published an ammended blog entry containing a second round of FAQs everyone seems to interested in finding answers to. This is definitely worth the click, as it paints a clearer picture of this “micro” OSX platform. I found one comment from Steve Jobs to be rather dishy…
Markoff: “And what are you thinking about Flash and Java?”
Jobs: “Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.”
Markoff: “Flash?”
Jobs: “Well, you might see that.”
Markoff: “What about YouTube–”
Jobs: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”
Err..I hate to break this to Steve but YouTube’s embedded video playback feature is based on Flash, so I’m not sure whether he understood the relevance of Markoff’s line of questions regarding Flash and its inclusion in the iPhone. Partnering with YouTube isn’t going to enable playback of YouTube content on the iPhone unless that partnership involves said company building a portable Flash package for Apple’s new phone. But I digress.
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As “iPhone euphoria” slowly wears off, replaced with sobering reality, some of iPhone’s less shiny aspects are beginning to come into view. Wilmington North Corolina’s StarNews (I didn’t know they had newspapers in NC. Wonder if they have internets as well 
) pointed out the unfairness of Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management (DRM) technology which locks users into Apple’s walled garden by limiting playback of songs purchased through the iTunes Store only on Apple authorized hardware. Since Apple doesn’t license FairPlay to any other vendor, that means you can only listen to these legally purchased tracks on an iPod, or iPhone in this case.
Needless to say a good many users, and competitors to Apple, are not happy with this arrangement. Some are seeking legal recourse, accusing Apple of being a monopoly.
As consumers become more aware of how copy protection limits perfectly lawful behavior, they should throw their support behind the music labels that offer digital music for sale in plain-vanilla MP3 format, without copy protection.
Apple pretends that the decision to use copy protection is out of its hands. In defending itself against Ms. Tucker’s lawsuit, Apple’s lawyers noted in passing that digital-rights-management software is required by the major record companies as a condition of permitting their music to be sold online: “Without D.R.M., legal online music stores would not exist.”
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If there is one thing I cannot tolerate it’s a technology company playing with my emotions by promising one thing and delivering another. During the keynote, Steve Jobs clearly indicated the iPhone will not have 3G support built-in, meaning it will not poses UMTS or HSDPA technology. And yet John Markoff of the New York Times is claiming that Apple will provide a firmware upgrade that will unlock this hidden functionality.
Hint to Mr. Markoff 3G is a hardware feature, not software. Meaning that it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than a firmware upgrade to add 3G capability to iPhone if the underlying hardware that enables it is missing. Smacks John on forehead
Read on
PC World’s Yardena Arar and Eric Dahl interviewed Apple VP Greg Joswiak, posing some of the same questions formulated by Mike Elgan of ComputerWorld.
I found this item particularly juicy, and disturbing 
…
The touchscreen technology worked, but not as perfectly as it did in the demo, at least in my brief experiment with the prototype. In particular, I had real problems with the software keyboard: My thumb-typing was consistently hitting keys adjacent to the ones I targeted. The iPhone has auto-correcting text entry technology that’s supposed to figure out what word you were trying to enter, but there’s a limit to its second-guessing skills after you’ve entered three or four incorrect characters in a row. Joswiak kept telling me to stop trying to backtrack and correct the typos (”Have faith,” he said repeatedly), but it just wasn’t working for me.
Renowned columnist Bob Cringely, an old favorite of mine, has written a great editorial about iPhone and Apple’s struggle to wrestle control of the product name away from Cisco’s clutches.
The iPhone is cool; the iPhone is neat; the iPhone is weird in a couple of ways. You know it isn’t even close to being the most expensive mobile phone on the market, for all the grousing I’ve read about the price. My Nokia N.93, which was technically not available yet in the U.S. until recently, but could be freely found in the United States of eBay, costs substantially more at around $800.
What’s weird about the iPhone is, first, its name, since iPhone is a registered trademark of Cisco Systems, which sells a variety of products under that brand. Apple has been negotiating with Cisco about licensing the iPhone name, so they can hardly claim ignorance of the trademark, yet this week they announced the product without such a license and of course Cisco filed a lawsuit in response. As the trademark holder, Cisco had no choice, because to not file suit would have been to not defend the trademark, perhaps making it more vulnerable to poaching by Apple.
Read
More industry publications weigh in on iPhone, forecasting a less than rosey outlook. This from Mercury News…
“My perspective since I first learned about it is, `Wow, this is really cool.’ But `really cool’ doesn’t mean success right away,” said Neil Strother, an analyst who covers the mobile phone business for NPD Group, a research firm.
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