Saturday, April 18, 2009

The myth of the iPhone Killer

Right now, there are many phones on the market which proclaim or are proclaimed to be "iphone-killers" by their most loyal fans. These phones include the HTC Diamond and the Nokia 5800 Music Express. The idea of an iphone killer is that there is a phone which is so stable, fast and sexy that it will effectively kill the idea that the iphone is the best phone on the market. These phones are great - they have all the hardware, they've got the sound, the battery life, the gps, the huge amount of memory, the accelerometer (the thing which detects movement). They even have some great apps - the nokia has a touch screen app for browsing photos which mimics the iphone's app. So why then are these phones still not in the same market? Why is it that with all these capabilities, that the iphone is still the best phone out there?

Go to facebook. Go to yahoo. Go to amazon. Go to any site and try to find an application made for your phone. They don't exist. That's not 100% true. Many of these sites are actually supported by Blackberry, but Blackberry lacks the hardware support that these other great phones have, except for the notable exception of the Storm, which has it's own problems (like slow web browsing).

The point is this: no other phone even comes close to the iphone's large application catalog. On top of that, no other phone offers an usable alternative to the iphone's ipod function. Nokia has supposed music management software which is at best a bad attempt. RIM's Storm has no music management software and the HTC Diamond also uses very rudimentary software. But if you want something that downloads podcasts and records ratings and records the number of times that you listen to a song and then makes playlists with that information, the iPhone is your only bet.

The iphone is not perfect. It costs a ton of money. If you opt for the 16 GB model, it's $300 upfront, and then $15 a month just to have the iphone and another $15 a month for the mandatory data plan. The second flaw is that it has a fixed camera lense. The 5800 and the Diamond both have variable focus lenses, which can possibly allow you to focus on objects near the phone, like QR Codes. The next big flaw is that the iPhone has no IR transmitter, so no universal remotes for iphone users. Despite all this, no other device mixes so well all of the good features you could want in a phone as the iPhone does. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

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