Some startling statistics suggest you just might
By William J. Brown

Since being launched on June 29, 2007, Apple Inc.’s iPhone has continued to drive radical innovation and upheaval within the global wireless telecommunications industry.

Now in it’s third-iteration (with a new, improved model launched each summer just around the anniversary of “Original”), more than 7 million iPhones were sold in 3Q09, which according to advisory Gartner Group accounted for a 17.1% global share of all smartphones sold – all the more remarkable given that Apple had never manufactured a phone of any kind as recently as three summers ago. Prior to the iPhone’s emergence, the marketplace for handheld mobile phones had become saturated with indistinct candy bar and flip phone form factors with ever lower pricing points, often sold as “free” when bundled with a 2-year contract commitment by many of the postpaid service providers. In effect, the industry was on the verge of becoming, if it hadn’t already, a commoditized marketplace with lax innovation and little brand loyalty.

While other manufacturers such as Blackberry and Nokia were increasingly bringing to market more advanced cell phones, with integrated email and the ability to play certain kinds of multimedia, the product that Apple introduced has seemed to reinvent the entire segment. Reported to have been designed over 30 months’ time and at a cost of US$150 million, the iPhone’s ingenious form, with only two buttons and a refined, flat glossy surface, was viewed as “transformational,” and its functions, including the phone’s multi-touch screen and virtual keyboard, coupled with its integrated iPod media player (which itself was tightly woven with Apple’s immensely popular iTunes download store) and its Internet connectivity which permitted mobile web browsing, instantly captured the fascination of technophiles, enthusiasts, and consumers who loved its ease-of-use and dynamic aesthetic. Indeed, Time magazine named it Invention of the Year in 2007, and based on Apple company estimates, some 33.75 million iPhones have been sold to-date – with approximately 6.4 million active in the U.S. alone, all the more impressive given the state of the economy and a demonstrated willingness by consumers to forgo other frills in an apparent effort to save more.

According to the NPD Group, June 2009, the iPhone attracts users of all ages, and 40% have a household income over US$100,000. With each new version of the iPhone, media reports document long lines of consumers waiting before dawn to get first the latest version of the product.

A New Paradigm
In March 2008, Apple innovated the product significantly by publishing a software developer kit, made available freely to third-party developers, which enabled programmers to develop feature-rich native applications for the iPhone. These third-party “web applications,” developed using AJAX web programming techniques – which permits the “client” (in this case, the iPhone) to retrieve data from a web “server” in the background, without interfering with the experience and behavior of the existing page the user is interacting with – meant that the iPhone could be updated with useful as well as frivolous new tools that would vastly improve the utility value of the product, in effect enabling it to mimic much of the capability of a desktop computer connected to the Internet – all in the small form factor of the iPhone, which can fit in a user’s pocket and be fully accessible wherever there is data coverage. While the development code standard was available at no cost, loading an application onto the iPhone was only possible after paying an Apple Developer Connection membership fee ($99-$299), testing and debugging the application as necessary, and receiving approval from Apple that the resulting “app” met its quality standards and could be deployed. For more information on Apple Developer Connection, visit developer.apple.com/iphone/program.

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