iPhone Take 2

Like the Poohbah I also am jonesing for one of these bad.  However, I think the iPhone is very much a Blackberry and Palm killer.

The reason is that Treo’s and Blackberry’s suck.  But people buy them because the alternatives suck worse.  Text input on a Treo is painful at best, but it’s the best option that anyone has come up with so far.

A Treo, when you come right down to it is a heavy ugly kludgy compromise of a machine.  But it beats the hell out of everything else because it’s the best compromise between a phone and a handheld computer anyone has yet come up with.

Enter Apple and the iPhone.  Right off the bat it looks better than a Treo and a Blackberry and a Q.  Right off the bat it has more memory and media capabilities.  If it works half as well as it looks, it’s going to kick ass.
Winners

Storage: 4gb of Data is not much in mp3 and PSP world, but it’s huge in smartphone world.  The Treo 700p comes with 128MB for example.
Price:  $499 is killing people who are not familiar with what things cost in smartphone world.  Treo users shrug and say, whatever.

Don’t know yet

Screen:  Bigger and sharper than anything we’ve seen so far.  How will it handle smudging and scratching?  Did Apple learn from the Nano gen1?

Usability:  Text input from the screen has the potential of being better than teeny-tiny buttons, but it’s wait-and-see for now.

Enterprise Access:  They say it works with Exchange, but if it’s imap that’s probably not good enough to counter Blackberry and Treo/goodlink, but that’s a wait and see too.
Losers

Network:  Exclusive deal with Cingular?  Boo!  Cingular coverage blows and EDGE is not better than EVDO for Data access.  The deal should not have been exclusive and Apple should have a multi-carrier phone.  Palm did it.

If any of the carriers were dragging their feet, just release it with all the capability and let popular pressure force the carriers hands.  But too late now for that.
Around the Web:

Engadget takes a look at the Apple stock vs. RIM (Blackberry) and Palm (Treo).  Wow.  More pics.
Bizzy wants more business support.

Spacetropic has ilust.

I think Lou Minatti nails it:

Apple will gain a huge chunk of the market. Surely not 80%, but they will become a dominant player. Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Blackberry, all of them will struggle to come up with something competitive. They’ll probably throw some clunky feature-packed designs together in a hurry, much like Microsoft did with the Zune. No one will want them.