In year 2009, iPhone and Apple did shake the cell phone market, Apple changed the rule of consumer cellular phone market and wake several new and old rivals up. Some people say apple is worthless and the phone sucks( compare to new google phone) but in fact when you think deeply, they did a lot of things and give in a lot.
The very important thing about the product sucess is marketing and the market of the product. Apple did very good job on iPod, as well as iPhone itself. When you talk to people, a lot of people like to get an iPhone is because of the easy to use, the situation just like game console nitendo’s wii; It gets in every market. Thats what apple does and it did make the image of iPhone is fun, easy n hip, after all it is a straight of apple Inc. itself(from Macintosh 1984 to now)
Beyond the target market, functionalitiy is playing the big part of it. When you see the iPhone, you only see several icons on the screen and one button on the front; one on the top and two on the side. Also it has the most important silent switch on the side as well, that’s why the product to get with, eye candy and less button. And the product comes out a fun, hip and easy.
That’s the other example of good marketing product, which is blackberry; Few days ago, when I talked to the lady and she claimed that she wants a blackberry but she stuck with her new Nokia E72. well that E72 looks pretty much the same as blackberry, also have bottom 40 plastic keyboard, and fake trackpad. So I asked her why she wants blackberry, and she replied that because of blackberry messenger and she added everyone in office are using blackberry with blackberry messenger, she wants to get into the cloud, and yes that is the reason of some blackberry rookie to get their first blackberry. Blackberry use the other approach to marketing their product and i think it calls professional image, a newpaper survey claimed 80% of first and business class passengers are using blackberry, only less than 10% used iPhone. That’s the reason of blackberry target on that market, professional and “it just work”, it is an oppsite side of the iPhone, cus when you ask those guy, they will say “I don’t need a fancy things in my phone, I just need what I need”. In fact, Blackberry did fail one time, they tried to enter iphone’s market(blackberry storm) but they fail so they go back to their position and unveiled bold next generation. Because the “bottom 40″ plastic keyboard is one major factor of the device itself looks professional, it just like a keyboard is a icon of the “work hard” people. Lucky Blackberry did learn that failure and back on their track.
What about android? I think it is hard to succes, because of the position of the market is blur and the target seems wrong as well, especially they have too many cone products on the market, and they are lack of position and target market at the beginning too. In fact Android want to get some of iphone’s market, such as easy, hip and fun, but the problem is they have to many vendor, HTC, samsung, Sony… etc, it is hard to create a image if hip and fun in different vendor, the customer only tend to choose the cell phone by outlook and the price, not by the OS itself, also the OS is too “customize”, once the solid OS is too “customize”, user is hard to learn the OS in the first place, and what that mean is the limitation of ”customize” is good for the product and the user. A very good example of Android phone screen unlock and view apps UI flow, they let vendor and user customize it, which is good things but it make the first time user have a difficult time to learn it, that is the downside of the android. Also because of different vendor, they can’t do things like blackberry does in professional field.
The future of cellular phone battle will become two separate way one is to high end and the other is to the rest. In the high end field, Apple and blackberry will remain their good hand in battle, and windows and google will have to counter them, but they have a lot of things to do, from their innovation to the marketing plan, and the key to success is do something different to blackberry and iPhone, not just follow their step.
The CPU is made by Apple itself, it called A4,and it is ARM base.
