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Editorial: iPhone taken to the 3G level
In admission of defeat or an assault on the market? However you view the new iPhone's hiked specs and slashed price, one thing is for sure: Apple's mobile phone has come of age. Rivals ought to be worried.
In fairness, it should have been a 3G device from the start, and it would have been had the 3G chipset not been so greedy. Jobs cited its insatiable appetite for battery power as the reason for settling with the less ravenous 2.5G in the first release, to the slight disappointment of European consumers. In the US, of course, it's a moot point, as 2.5G Edge technology was already prevalent, but in the UK and Europe it must have given the networks some cause for thought.
It's less than a decade since the UK mobile market paid an unprecedented £22.5 billion for the rights to lease five 3G licences from the government. BT Cellnet took licence C
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So it must have been galling to discover that the only way it could win the exclusive rights to carry the iPhone in the UK was to then roll out Edge coverage for a minimum 30% of the national population (which would appear to include only half of my house). No doubt it did this in the knowledge that a 3G iPhone was in the works. Even if Apple didn't tell it, its business analysts must have done.
Perhaps it thought that the cost was worth it, for the rights to get first refusal on the second edition. If so, it was a good call. If iPhone 3G was nothing more than a network enhancement, chances of mass uptake would be slim, but by slashing the price, giving it proper over-the-air syncing with MobileMe (bye-bye .Mac - you won't be missed) and building in new features like GPS integration with Google Maps and a fully-fledged application download store, Apple has all but sealed the smartphone market for itself and its network partners.
O2 and its ilk clearly took the long view when it came to the iPhone. Perhaps the rest of us should have done the same, and held off for the first proper hardware update. At least we can opt for an upgrade at the cost of a contract extension.
