Much to the chagrin of the users of other pdaphone products, the iPhone has taken the smartphone market by storm and is becoming a household name. Now, as companies prepare to release new phones to make up for lost grounds against Apple’s surprise competitor, everyone scrambles to discover the golden secret for the ideal set of features to woo people away from Apple.
No one’s figured it out yet, unfortunately for other manufacturers, but fortunately for Apple.
The key thing to realize is that the iPhone added depth to the smartphone battleground. It has not merely revolutionized hardware (because even the iPhone, although it features some slick hardware features like it’s multitouch-recognizing touchscreen, lacks key features such as 3G support or true GPS access). The iPhone has brought software and interface as a crucial part of the mix: its successes show, at least partially, that a slick interface can make up for technical lapses elsewhere.
Iphone competitors need to focus on catching up to what Apple has innovated in both the hardware AND software categories, quite simply.
1) Larger, multitouch screens
More phones are coming out with touchscreens (such as the AT&T Tilt, Sprint HTC Touch, LG Voyager, etc.,) but the simple fact is that no other screen out in the market can match Apple’s gorgeous 3.5 inch, 320×480 screen (and devices that can lack in other areas). It’s surprising that HTC, the producer of the AT&T-branded Tilt and the Sprint-branded Touch, despite having phones that in all other ways meet and exceed expectations, sticks with the older QVGA screen resolution-certainly, to compete with Apple, they will have to improve in this area.
2) Hardware “goodies” (e.g., accelerometers, proximity sensors)
The iPhone’s 3-axis accelerometer is what allows it the futuristic ability to sense horizontal versus vertical orientation on the fly. Other phones can switch orientations, yes, (such as the Tilt’s ability to change with a few clicks of the stylus or by simply pulling out the keyboard), but Apple has simply used these advanced hardware features to polish this function.
3) Uncluttered, intuitive operating systems
Windows Mobile, for better or for worse, has become somewhat of a beast of an operating system for mobile devices. Similar to linux on the desktop arena, Windows Mobile allows users to dig deeply into the operating system, add third-party applications or tweak the system to their liking. Theoretically, quite a lot can be
