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Voice Mail Of iPhone Is A Major Innovation

Posted by John C. Welch, Jan 11, 2007 08:44 AM

Now that I've had some time to look at the information on the iPhone, I can see some nice innovations. First, it's still just a phone. Really. It's a cool phone, and Apple shows that it has taken a look at the state of high-end phones, and come up with a new take on them.

The one thing that jumps out at me is the rather nice improvements on accessing voice mail. Instead of having to access messages serially, you get a list of voice mails, so you can skip the ones you don't want to listen to without having to skip past them a la fast-forward on a tape. That's not enough to make me leave Sprint, but it's a nice feature.

I don't think the iPhone is targeted at the Palm/PocketPC/BlackBerry market.

Those folks are very much into Exchange/Domino integration, and that's something that Apple's not that interested in. I do, however, think that it's a direct shot at Symbian. The iPhone is for people who want more than a "basic" phone, but don't really care about enterprise integration. That's not a tiny market, but it's not going to suddenly make Apple the single most dominant cell phone vendor. (The size of the cell market is far, far larger than the computer market. Even a 1% market share is many, many billions of dollars. Apple can do quite well with many, many billions of dollars every year.)

The Apple TV made less of an impression, because for all my geekery, to me, an HDTV is not the best thing since sliced bread, but rather a $4,000 television. I'm the wrong person to ask about or care about the Apple TV.

I've been talking to the Microsoft Office folks. Once I have a bit more information, I'll post some things on Office 2008.

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