Image via CrunchBase
It’s not the “clone wars,” but the “phone wars” and I’m wondering if they are over or just heating up?
I consider myself an early adopter of technologies, but I have to admit, I came very late to the iPhone.
For a few years, I was extremely satisfied with my Windows mobile phones. They were email workhorses and did much of what I needed them to do. Recently, I discovered apps that made it possible to Tweet, check Facebook, and shoot video on Qik.
That was great until I received a 1st gen iPhone from my dad (the techno-geek thing is genetic, he bought a 3GS) and started to play around with it a lot.
Which is when I saw the light.
You know how Apple says “there’s an app for that?” Well, they are right, there is an app for that.
A whole new world of possibilities entered into my horizon. The iPhone task-specific apps made my social networking (and general) life much simpler. Not only Twitter and FB, but LinkedIn, Foursquare, Skype, Pandora and more (love the Sushipedia app as well).
When I am mobile (which is frequent), these became must-haves not just “nice to haves.”
So, I realized then and there that I “needed” a new smartphone (mostly because I am on T-mobile and my jailbroken iPhone can’t get 3G speeds).
I didn’t want to change providers so I visited T-mobile and checked out their Windows and Android-based phones.
While the form factors worked (I need a QWERTY keyboard since I am still email intensive and found that I still made too many mistakes on the iPhone virtual one), I kept coming back to the same issue:
The “app Gap” was just too large.
The Android marketplace has something like 15k apps. The iTunes store has something like 100k.
And Windows? I love MSFT and think they do awesome stuff, but it’s a distant third.
I had become too dependent on the apps on the iPhone and started to think “the phone wars may be over for now and Apple may have won them.”
And the data may be supporting that.
- Google is paying providers to drive Android phones.
- Apple is approaching RIM/Blackberry for smartphone dominance (at least according to 1 study).
- 10% of MSFT employees use an iPhone (according to the WSJ)
If you’ve never had a smartphone, getting an Android or Windows phone will do the trick for you. But, if you go up to an iPhone, it’s pretty difficult to come back down to one of the others.
And that’s when I put it all together.
In this classic video, Steve Ballmer rallies the troops and reminds them of who is most important for the future of Windows: “DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!”
Apple is doing on the phone what MSFT did on the desktop.
And, with the recent release of the iPad, I wonder if Apple is taking a “flanking strategy” to get people to see the power of their app gap that way first, which leads them to the iPhone along the same line of experience.
I know MSFT and they won’t go quietly into the night and Google isn’t stupid, so this is far from over, but once smartphones hit some sort of mass adoption and the power of the apps from a mobile perspective become apparent (plus the announcement that Verizon will have iPhones), this should get VERY interesting and fun.
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