Mobile Telecommunications in a High-Speed World by Curwen Peter; Whalley Jason; & Jason Whalley

Author:Curwen, Peter; Whalley, Jason; & Jason Whalley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2010-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

The iPhone: A Case Study of Innovation in the Mobile Handset Market

Introduction

On 26 June 2007, the share price of Apple fell by 2 per cent – on the face of it a fairly trivial event except that it was about to launch (exclusively in the USA in conjunction with AT&T) the arguably most-hyped mobile device in history known as the iPhone (Allison 2007b). The iPhone is a variant of what are generally categorized as smartphones, although your average handset is now so smart that the term is becoming outdated.1

The iPhone had initially surfaced at the MacWorld trade show in January 2007 when Steve Jobs announced that, having previously changed the music industry via the launch of the iPod, Apple now intended to do the same for the mobile communications industry via the iPhone (Allison 2007a). By June, shareholders had become edgy because the value of Apple had risen by $34 billion since January and they stood to lose much of their gains if the iPhone proved to be a one-week wonder. The curious aspect of this was that the device in question was, by the standards of the time, fairly expensive, relatively large, on the heavy side, lacking a keyboard, short on memory and would initially at least be launched over a so-called 2.5G network rather than one capable of 3G speeds – the sort of attributes that would leave the reputation of any ‘normal’ handset vendor in tatters.

But not that of Apple, because it had set out to address the fundamental flaw in existing handset design, namely the inherently user-unfriendly nature of the beast. Anyone working their way through a lengthy series of drop-down menus, or trying to type accurately on a tiny keyboard, finds the experience frustrating, and may also be unable to access parts of the Internet. What Apple set out to do was to give the user unrestricted access to the Internet via an operating system (OS) comparable to that found on most desktop computers, as well as to simplify the process of making voice calls, listening to music and managing contact lists. That was achieved by replacing the keyboard with a touch-screen that could immediately replace one set of button functions with another according to whether the user wanted to make a voice call, send an email or whatever.

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