“Video ipod? Don’t be silly”
“Here’s the ipod video!”

1% is only his milestone TODAY, not particularly tomorrow.

Had they done the MVNO route, aka Apple Mobile, they would not be at the mercy of the carrier.

Lastly, at $600, I would have included a SiRF GPS chip as this would make the device truely more powerful at a very marginal cost.

We’ll see what they do in the next few months……..

Take the ‘Visual Voicemail’. It looks to me like a handset client which is sent audio files (voice messages), and presents them to the user in an inbox fashion. Nothing remarkable about that, but carriers have not let that happen to-date because they make a packet from people dialling into voicemail.

Apple are clearly the only ones big enough to convince Cingular to throw this revenue stream away, in favour of a happy customer (who will probably make more return calls).

Great thinking, but it’s operator dependent, handset dependent, and I’m presuming its a proprietary service (although it might be IMAP or MMS based).

If anyone knows better, I’d love to be proved wrong, and see ‘Visual Voicemail’ adopted by other carriers and handsets. I’m guessing Apple have the patent though???:-(

Russell, I admit to bristling when you said it’s just a music phone. But, after reading Tomi’s well articulated open letter and follow up piece, I understood even better how that could be a prevailing European/Asian reaction.

So, rather than post a giant comment here, it spurred me to post my reaction to these sentiments. In a nutshell, my take is that yes, it’s the next progression in the iPod line, but it’s so much more than a music phone. And though purists won’t call it a smartphone, it’s the prosumer version that is totally appropriate in this phase of mobile development in the US (as we catch up the the rest of the world in adopting advanced features).

Cheers.

Palm, as witnessed by their CEO’s stupid comments a week or so prior, had no clue this was coming. No one did.

Who can do that? Apple.

Microsoft? Again, no clue, apparently.

The point is not that apple can keep secrets. The point is that they are innovating. This is round 1, folks. In a few years there will be a suite of iPhone models, some for people tethered to carriers for service, some for people willing to go VOIP/WIMAX.

Nobody else can realistically compete with that. Put Nokia and Microsoft’s best next to the iPhone. They do not even remotely compare.

Who else will spend 30 months in total secrecy to ship one model? Only Apple can do that and succeed.

Convergence just happened.