With some technology businesses it can be a feat of crystal ball gazing to tell what they are going to do next. Their number of product lines, slow speed of reaction to the public conscious and demand, their lack of an identifiable and consistent strategy, their endless product variations that compete with each other – or all the above make a difficult smokescreen to peer through.
Not so with Apple. The ‘second coming’ Jobs years have brought strategy and focus. This is not necessarily to say they are winning the war against the mighty Windows-based PC, but they have retained and expanded their fan base (we ‘fanboys’ as you see us referred to) with insightful products and services that now go way beyond the desktop.
It is this focus, strategy and approach that allow us to see into their highly secretive world. Not by looking at what IS there, but by looking at what isn’t. Yet.
The most active Apple rumour mill surrounds the will-it-won’t-it tablet (insert suggested name here: iTablet, iTouch, etc.) device. In truth, even the better informed pundits either don’t really know what is really there, or isn’t, or could even be spreading the traditional Apple smokescreen at the behest of the Infinite Loop HQ itself. But let’s look at what ISN’T there for clues…
The iPhone is the world’s most popular ‘smart phone’ at the time of writing. It has introduced us to a vision of mobile gaming, communication and working that has overshadowed other mighty names in this arena by gathering market share faster than its competitors and has even kept powerful pretenders to the throne such as Google/Android out of the game almost entirely to-date. Personal users are very happy. Some of us even use the iPhone as a mobile office, albeit with a feeling of last resort (laptop out of juice, no bag to carry one, caught without one) or to-see-if-we-can.
So why hasn’t the iPhone killed the Blackberry yet? What happened to all that talk of Enterprise users and usage? The iPhone, unlike its MacBook laptop brethren (consider me very unhappy that the OS Snow Leopard proudly announced its ability to connect with only the latest and less-available MS Exchange Server 2007 and not 2003), connects seamlessly with MS Exchange amongst a host of other office-based server solutions and it offers VPN access. It has a far superior screen and more software options than I imagine that RIM have even dreamed up yet.
But it has two flaws: one critical and one less-critical-but-obvious.
It has no physical keyboard and it has a camera and video capability but the camera is on the opposite side of the device to the screen. So… it takes a while to get accustomed to the keyboard and, even then, the lack of tactile feedback on the keys means slower and more difficult typing that on the physical keyboard of the Blackberry and we can’t do video calls.
No optional Bluetooth keyboard or add-on camera has been released. Surely not as a result of lack of consumer demand? There are even manufacturers with these products ‘ready to ship’ but they have been locked out by Apple’s own Terms & Conditions and/or firmware restrictions. I can envisage several products that would slake the thirst of gamers, typists and business users everywhere – how about a hard protective clamshell iPhone case boasting a keyboard/gamepad/both on the opening case? With an iSight-esque camera peeking over the top for video calls? Or a Bluetooth (or even wired, for goodness’ sake!) folding version of the beautiful Apple keyboards currently on sale? Or a portable dock that mimics a desktop laptop dock with outputs for screen and audio with inputs from keyboard, microphone etc.? I’m sure the product innovators could go mad with brushed aluminium and aesthetic minimalist design.
Why aren’t they there?
I imagine it’s because we are describing the tablet.
Write a list of all the things you wish the iPhone had that would make it a viable contender to a 13″ MacBook as a portable office solution and I imagine that you could draft a pretty good spec to send to the Apple pundits.