As everyone knows, I’m a huge fan of the iPhone…
Having used the original iPhone since it’s release, I can say without reservation that I’ve been extremely satsfied. It is an incredible piece of technology that I depend on every day – and I am pretty demanding of the tech gear I use.
And the free update to the 2.0 version of platform will only make it better.
Wireless performance (or lack thereof) on AT&T’s EDGE has been the one real disappointment I have had with my iPhone, so I will be moving over to the new iPhone 3G as soon as I can get my hands on one. But outside of that (and real GPS), the software update will give the old and new models fairly equivalent capabilities.
That is the beauty of the software centric approach apple has taken to the consumer electronics space. Devices can really age gracefully until they just don’t have the memory or horsepower to keep up.
But as sexy as the new iPhone 3G is, it really wasn’t the most significant announcement yesterday.
The big announcement was the update to Apple’s online service ‘.MAC’…
During the keynote, Phil Schiller spent some time introducing what Apple has decided to call ‘Mobileme‘. Outside of the questionable service name choice (and the snicker inducing ‘me.com’ domain), this service has the potential to deliver enormous value to the average person.
Mobileme is a cloud based service that will let you keep contacts, appointments, todo’s email, bookmarks, photos and files in sync – dynamically – across all of your computers and your iPod Touch and iPhone. If you change a meeting on your iPhone calendar, it can be updated dynamically on your work PC, your Macbook, and your iMac at home. Add a new contact to Outlook at work, and it will be updated everywhere, including your iPhone – and without having to dock it.
Though I haven’t seen Apple state this explicitly, I believe the new Mobileme service will support calendaring sharing (you can currently do it in .MAC). Combined with dynamic syncing, this would let families/friends maintain common calendars and tasks they can schedule around, with pretty much the same flexibility business users have through Exchange server.
To get a better sense of what Apple’s offering here, check out their guided tour:
Mobileme isn’t sexy, but it delivers the basic things people are looking for to support their mobile lifestyles. It doesn’t demand a persistent internet connection like web only alternatives do, and it has true cross platform support. I know that you can do some of this using free web services, but nothing ties it all together for the typical non-technical user like the Mobileme package. And a family plan subscription (up to 5 people) is less than $12 dollars a month – not cheap, but certainly not unreasonable.
Apple has been delivering on what everyone is talking about recently. They are building out a cloud of services that work on Mac’s, PC’s, and iPod/iPhone. They have iChat, iTunes, and now Mobileme and the AppStore (I’ll post more about this one in the future). Apple is building a whole segment of their business in the online space, and doing it in a way that leverages the broader Apple ‘ecosystem’. They have great penetration in the consumer, academic, and media professional markets and are starting to tie them together with these cloud based services.
It seems to be the correct strategy…
Combined with the new aggressive pricing on the iPhones ($199-$299), Mobileme might end up being a lot more successful for Apple than the niche offering .MAC has always been. It’s very powerful, yet simple – the two hallmark features of every successful Apple product. I’ve been a long time subscriber to .MAC, so I’m pretty excited to give Mobileme a try.
Who knows. I might even grow to like the name…