iPhone - Practical Or Pointless?

Apple’s iPhone has sparked quite a bit of debate on the merry old Internet. Forums have been ablaze with people ardently attacking or defending the new high tech phone. It looks stupid. It is overpriced.
It is overhyped. Phones should just be phones. Apple make it. I’ll let you make your own minds up as to whether that last one is a good or bad thing. But there you have a typical selection of ‘arguments’ for and against the existence of the iPhone.

So, practical or pointless? Allow me to cut through the thicket for you.

A few years ago someone who wanted to make a lot of money decided that ‘convergence’ was a very fun word. Fast forward down the line and we have internet fridges, talking toilets, DVD playing games consoles and phones that can play music, go online, play films and (thankfully) still make calls.

Convergence is the key to the technology market right now with companies seemingly going into battle with each other to see how much they can fit into one device. In our slightly idealised lives we all want to be a bit minimalist, clutter free and cool. We don’t want electronic boxes all over the place (apparently), so the solution is to bung everything into one.

Naturally, when this was advertised and chucked down the throats of the poor consumer we all jumped on the bandwagon like a bunch of suckers. Now everything electronic seems to be able to do at least one other things aside from its primary function. The hand-held market is perhaps the one that has seen the most change. Getting multimedia content into the palm of our hands is an industry that could one day be worth billions and is already garnering a lot of interest in places like Japan and Italy where TV on the go is growing by the day.

Services are being rolled out all over the world and take-up has surprised a lot of tech analysts. But these analysts forget one key thing: everyone loves convergence. Remember, that clever little beggar that wanted to make lots of money years ago? Well, I should think he’s now rolling in his piles of money and giggling with joy. Apple are after the same sort of thing. They’ve seen what they can do with the iPod and now they are looking to do the same thing by adding in some extra letters to the name (and yes, removing a ‘d’) and giving you the ability to make calls.

Enter, stage left, the iPhone.

Some note that this is a bit of a rip-off. You can pick up a Apple iPod 30GB Video/Black (5th Generation) for just over £150 (US$230 or €270) at most good retailers. Compare this to the projected price of US$499 for the 4GB version and US$599 for the 8GB version and you have a rather large price hike. So, are you paying too much for these extra features and can the iPhone be competitive in the market and most importantly to everyone who will buy one or consider buying one, will it be useful? In short: do the ends justify the means?

What you’re getting with the iPhone is a bit of the future right here and right now. The features that the iPhone will house have been around for quite some time now, but they haven’t necessarily seemed all that accessible to the average consumer. They have been the staple diet of the tech world but nobody has had the marketing sense to get them out their to the mass market...yet. The iPhone is going to make convergence cool again, just like the iPod before it and the PlayStation 2 before that.

Or, as Apple so eloquently put it in PR blurb.