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The Brave New Mobile World Countdown: 35 days, 18 hours…
NEW YORK, December 4, 2006 – Wall Street Ideas.com – Top industry executives at some big mobile communications device makers like Motorola (NYSE: MOT), Samsung, LG, Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM), Sanyo, Ericsson (Nasdaq: ERICY), Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM) should be nervously marking 9:00AM PST January 9, 2007 down on their calendars.
That is when Steve Jobs is rumored to be set to unveil Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) secrecy shrouded new iPhone during his keynote address at the 2007 Macworld conference in San Francisco. The new phone(s), hints about which were unveiled in a recently released Apple patent filing, are expected by analysts to contain integrated email, text messaging, personal organizer, and cellular capability into an extremely compact device that will also include an iPod.
If this was just another new cellular phone with the ability to play some songs, browse the web and send email, it wouldn’t be a big deal. The fact that it is by Apple, who has stolen the “make technology easy to use” crown from Sony and vaulted to a huge lead in portable media players with its iPod, makes the upcoming introduction of the iPhone a whole different type of product introduction.
Remember when everyone with any pretensions to technology coolness had to have a Motorola StarTac? If you don’t, just look at the current portable music player market, where there is the iPod, and a slew off also-rans. Now combine the two, and throw in the off-chance that an iPhone with user friendly embedded email may also convert the “crackberry” addicts, and you can see why the makers of a whole range of portable devices have quite a bit to worry about.
Among industry analysts, perhaps the biggest “show me” issue regarding the iPhone is not whether or not Apple will be able to deliver a great product that can do everything that the rumors suggest and still have the appeal of the iPod, but rather, their concern is more technical: Can Apple really deliver a device that does all this and still has reasonable battery life?
If they can, then this time next year we may all be carrying iPhones and wishing we had purchased more Apple shares back when they were going for less than $100 a share in December 2006.