Apple iPhone Rumors Resurface

donkeyDevil writes: "Following the rule of 'i before e except before P,' rumors of an iPhone resurface in the New York Times (registration required). The evidence: OS features, foiled acquisition attempts, PIXO relations, and the genius of Steven P. Jobs. Unmentioned, Apple's tried phones before. PIE produced a nifty desktop phone design, Apple Europe produced some nice telephone-computer integration software."

Everyone's Desk

[MikeOttawa]

The thing is, a phone and a Computer are the two things that everyone has on their desk. Judging by their past successes (keyboards, mice) maybe Microsoft should start making phones as well.

If these companies want to compete in the future of VoIP, then they need to start building up their knowledge base now. Even if they start by building regular POTS phones, they will gain the expertise and experience of phone ergonomics and production.

Yeah, and the price would be....

[Brento]

Mobile phones are an extremely competitive market: if you bring out an overpriced phone (relative to the other phones on the market), it just plain doesn't matter how cool it is - you won't sell enough volume to make a profit. Makers like Nokia can afford to make uber-cool super-phones, because they enhance the company image and make you want to buy a cheaper Nokia phone. Apple doesn't have that kind of market model, so how are they going to succeed on their own?

Clueless

[ianscot]

The "evidence" in the article is insubstantial. Hey, Apple and Palm have had their moments of differing opinion: must mean Apple's developing its own PDA again. Anyone who looked at OS X and said not "This is a modern OS GUI over Unix" but "Hey, there are lots of features here that would make more sense in a cell phone," please raise your hand. We need to cull you from the herd.

The reductionism of the history of Apple to "Wasn't that Newton a bad proposition?" is especially obvious and seems like the sort of journalistic conceit that pushes faked-up drama in a story. I mean:

In a remarkable turnaround effort, Mr. Jobs has taken pains to distance Apple from the Sculley-Newton legacy. He canceled the Newton soon after returning and has pooh-poohed the industry's personal digital assistants as "junk" and worse.

The Newton might have lost Apple money, okay. But it lost Apple money for a variety of reasons -- among them the problem Apple's always had with supply chain on its products, and the way Apple collapsed in the laptop market for years before releasing the first shoddy Power PC powerbooks. To lump Apple's entire fortune as a company into that one product just to create a false sort of journalistic flow in the story is just lame.

Real story: There are some indirect signs that Apple may enter the PDA market again. They did once before, but they were a little ahead of the market and they eventually cut bait. Wait and see.

Re:Take a crack at it, why not...

[mccalli]

Don't make the iPod mistake, make this thing Win compatible...

Err....mistake? From whose viewpoint? Apple got to service their customers first, got a cool product to entice the OS-agnostic to their machines for a while, and then once demand had died down a bit they added Win compatibility and now have access to that market too.

I don't see much in the way of a mistake being made there.

Cheers,
Ian

Palm and the future...

[MosesJones]

Palm is currently the OS of choice in a grand total of zero of the major phone producers. Symbian however is the OS of choice in pretty much the whole raft of them.

Partnering with Palm for phones would be akin to partnering with Suse for the Mainframe market. Apple are much more likely to partner with the companies of the future like SonyEricsion, or to develop standard extensions to Symbian to make all Symbian phones interoperate seemlessly with the Mac.

Palm needs to change, it not a reliable OS for phones to run on. Symbian is, and it has the backing.

Apple and VoIP

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple's certainly got something up its sleeve when it comes to telephony, but everyone's hung up on the hardware aspects - why not think about software for a second?

With QuickTime 6 (especially) the potential for clear, bandwidth-adaptable communications is right in the OS. Anyone who's seen streaming QT6 broadcasts knows that it's a quantum leap in quality over previous incarnations. There is a strong likelihood that some form of realtime video conferencing will be built into future versions of iChat - using Rendezvous and the Address Book to locate people across LANs and WANs, for instance. Now, eliminate the video component, and imagine those algorithms being brought to bear on multiple audio streams. You could pack quite a lot of conversations on a Gigabit Ethernet connection...and with the appropriate gateways, iChat becomes a softphone. I presume Apple is already up to speed on H.323 and its rapidly rising successor, SIP.

Furthermore, with the emergence of T.38 Fax-over-IP, Apple could integrate a T.38 client into the OS (as part of Print Center or a Telephony Center) to work with FoIP servers like XMediusFAX.
I've even heard that Apple might integrate IP faxing into .mac or OS X Server as some sort of add-on.

Future versions of Xserve might be used as VoIP gateways and softswitches - combined with the usual hardware from Cisco, Alcatel, Avaya etc.

If there is a hardware "phone" it might not come from Apple. Most likely it will just be a 3rd-party phone or PDA loaded with a combo of Bluetooth and 802.11g to allow synchronization and wireless "roaming" in-office, respectively. I've seen solutions like this (minus Bluetooth) running on Compaq iPaq PDAs, so there's no reason Apple can't do it.

But what network would it work with?

[patiwat]

The problem with phones is that there are significant issues of network compatability.

The US, Apple's core market, has too many incompatible cellular phone networks. Having multiple versions of the iPhone that support PCS, GSM, and god-knows-how-many-analog versions would be a pain in the ass in the logistics and product development perspective. Making a phone available only on one network would limit the market significantly.

Even worse, an iPhone would have to compete with phones given away for free from the network operators. The Nokia 3390 phone that Voicestream gave me for free is extremely well designed and easy to use - I don't see how Apple could improve on it, besides maybe Bluetooth PC-phone integration. But I would certainly never pay hundreds of dollars for that.

Just the facts, Ma'am

[freerangegeek]

1) Palm is tanking, badly.
2) Handspring has yet to support OS X native despite platitudes for over a year.
3) Windows CE devices are not Mac compatible.
4) Sony doesn't support Mac OS directly.

Apple's PDA section of the digital hub is about to get very sparse and remain unsupported if it doesn't do something fairly soon. Options are:

1) Kick Handspring in the nuts. (Please do!)
2) Buy Palm outright.
3) Convince Sony to play nice.
4) Live with outdated PDAs.

Or, in my not so humble opionion, dump the whole problem by making the right move and producing (either on their own or in cahoots with a mobile phone manufacturer) a combined PDA/phone.

Think about it, it doesn't make sense to spend time and effort syncing your PDA, your Phone, your iPod, and your desktop. It makes a lot more sense to start putting them into one device, and syncing that to your desktop.

Battery life is now reasonable to support it, Apple has repeatedly proved that the can put out UI that makes a device world class. (See the iPod). And nobody else out there wants to support Apple's hub strategy, they all want a share of the Bill Gates' market.

While I don't agree that Apple will likely produce a proprietary phone. They don't have to. All they have to do is work their interface magic on the front end of one.

Who care's who's 'talk to the network guts' live inside the phone, at that level, there is no differentiation from Nokia, to Erricson to Kyocera. What's going to make thing killer is a new 'front end' that makes your phone a better tool. And who's produced the most innovative tools in the last 15 years?