Stut.net

Ok, so the title of this blog post may not be true, but based on what I describe below it may be.

This is a big week in the geek calendar, with both the Consumer Electronics Show and Macworld happening.

Macworld is obviously very Apple-centric, and features a keynote presentation from Steve Jobs. The CES has a keynote from Bill Gates.

Steve’s keynote was yesterday, and I finished watching the video earlier today. Only two announcements were made. The Apple TV which everyone knew was coming, and the iPhone which was far more than any of the rumours had dared to predict.

I’ve not seen the CES keynote from Bill Gates yet, I will watch it later today. However, I did watch an interview he did with bloggers last week where they talked about a very wide range of things. One of the issues that was discussed was unification of devices. Note that at this point very little information was around regarding the iPhone.

About 19 minutes in, Robert Scoble says that…

“Steve Jobs puts out devices that do one thing where you [Bill Gates/Microsoft] put out devices that let us do lots of things.”

…at which point Bill interrupts and says…

“Look, I’m the biggest unifier in the world, so if anything can be done on one thing, your mapping, your phone, your camera, your wallet, fill out your tax return can be done on one device.
Believe me Microsoft wants to do that because we’re software-centric, we’re not hardware-centric.”

He goes on to say…

“We see eventually that mapping, wallet, media and phone come together but today there’s real trade-offs in terms of size and battery and cost and even usability that mean that there’s just huge variety happening in the pocket-sized device.”

That was last week. This week… enter the iPhone!

Let’s compare the trade-offs Bill mentioned to the iPhone specifications…

• Size: The iPhone measures 115mm (4.5″) by 61mm (2.4″) and is 11.6mm (0.46″) deep. It weighs just 135g (4.8 ounces).
• Battery: Apple claims up to 5 hours talk/video/browsing, and up to 16 hours audio playback.
• Cost: $499-599 in the US, don’t know if that’s with a contract or not. We’ll have to wait and see how it’s priced in the UK when it comes out late this year.
• Usability: Multi-touch, combined with Apple’s legendary skills in creating intuitive interfaces has to be a winner here.

The only trade-off I can see is the price, and that’s sure to come down in time as with any ground-breaking technology. But even at launch the price is comparable to the cost of individual devices to cover all the functions.

I’m not sure where Bill Gates got his information, but it seems to me that Apple has overcome nearly all of the problems he sees.

In my opinion this is due to Apple building their own hardware. Bill makes the point that Microsoft is software-centric rather than hardware-centric. Apple is neither. They create both the hardware and the software, and as far as I can tell they consider them both as equally important when it comes to creating a great product.

It’s likely that the iPhone that has just been announced is just the beginning. It’s almost certain that they’ll be releasing development tools for creating software for it (hopefully backed up by a site similar to the Widget catalogue). I hope they create a model that supports 3G, and I’m sure they have a lot of other ideas they want to pursue.

Whatever they end up doing, I’m certain they’ll make a big splash in the mobile phone/pda market and I’m sure other manufacturers are scrambling to incorporate the innovations in the iPhone into their upcoming products. They’d better be careful – Steve mentioned in his keynote that Apple have registered over 200 patents covering the technology in the iPhone!