Trends 2007: iPhone

Yes, I was one of the early adopters (Los Angeles Century City Apple Store, 10 minute wait in line), I have an iPhone receipt dated June 29, 2007, and I have no regrets, and my $100 "gift" is also welcome.

This device illustrates everything I like about Apple products: a delightful, human-centric user-interface, a clean design that meets the "emotional" test -- you want to use it because it's fun to use, novel technology, and a hackable platform. Beyond the current round of hacks to route around AT&T lock-in, the iPhone as a web platform is extremely interesting. Here's Apple's developer strategy as I see it: Create a standards-based web platform, with mechanisms to optimize for the iPhone within that framework, followed by leveraging the existing Dashboard widget framework for "native" applications. You only need compare Stock and Weather iPhone applications to their desktop counterparts to see where this is going.


From a person that rarely even carried a mobile phone, this is the device that has me happily and easily texting my college-aged kids, showing my and taking photos, looking at videos, listening to music and podcasts (at home and in the car), browsing the web, and even experimenting with developing content.

Initial reports from analyst firms like Gartner advised caution on adopting the iPhone in the enterprise, but subsequent reports moderated that stance somewhat as more enterprise-friendly features or versions were predicted. In my view Apple should resists the enterprization of the iPhone, and enterprises should embrace the iPhone as is, and can leverage it now by taking advantage of its web and podcast capability --- it's a platform, just like the PC, and frankly the the arguments against sound like the old stuff I used to hear in the 198os about personal computers.