January 4th, 2010 
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Apple’s new iPhone is seen in this handout photo released Jan. 9, 2007. Apple CEO Steve Jobsdescribed the iPhone as “the best iPod ever” when he launched it on Tuesday and the companyis looking to the phone to strengthen its lead over other makers of MP3 players.
“Apple has positioned the iPhone as an upgrade to the iPod and many of the early buyers will be iPod users,” said Martin Garner, director at telecoms and technology consultants Ovum.
“In order to materially impact Nokia, Motorola, SonyEricsson et al, the iPhone would likely need to fall significantly in price,” Jeffrey said.
Apple hopes that combining the iPod with a phone will give it an edge against Microsoft’s recently launched Zune and Creative’s Zen. Even before Jobs spoke in California, Microsoft said it had looked at adding phone functions to Zune but that was not “the number one thing we are focused on,” suggesting Apple was wasting its time. Apple, however, hopes the iPhone will represent a new wave of mobile music growth.
“The music industry is hoping that the iPhone will provide a further boost to music sales,”added Richard Gooch, of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. “Digital music is in large part about convergence, portability and mobility. Apple’s iPhone seems to hit all these sweetspots.”
With the ability to synchronize easily with most email services and alert the user when new messages arrive, Apple is attacking the market also occupied by Palm, Motorola’s Moto Q, the Sidekick from T-Mobile and Nokia’s E62. The big difference is these competing devices have small keyboards, while Apple has gone for a touch screen.
The iPhone is also thinner than its rivals and includes a full-blown Mac internet browser rather than the pared-down browser usually found on a mobile device. The 3.5 inch display allows whole web pages to be easily viewed, which can be tricky on some other devices.
But the mobile network technology the iPhone uses could make web browsing slow unless you stay in one place and use the phone’s wi-fi. Analysts reckon BlackBerry’s corporate customers are unlikely to switch en masse, but Palm could see sales suffer.
The camera phone has turned everyone into a potential paparazzo. More are sold worldwide than digital cameras, and technology research house Gartner reckons that half of all handsets sold last year included a camera.
But photographers are unlikely to abandon their cameras for Apple’s new gadget. At just two megapixels resolution, the iPhone ranks as only a mid-range camera phone and is still well below digital camera standards.
Photo Gallery >>>But consumers will have to wait six months to test Job’s premise because the Federal Communications Commission has yet to approve the new mobile phone. Apple claims a U.S. launch date in June and three months later in Britain.
The biggest impact of the iPhone is likely to be on makers of multi-media mobile phones. The handset industry has jumped on the digital music bandwagon, which itself was set rolling by the iPod, and a third of new mobile phones now contain a music player.
Nokia is heavily advertising its N series, which includes the N91, with a 4GB memory, the same as the basic iPhone; SonyEricsson has 11 phones in its Walkman range; and there are a host of other handsets such as LG’s Chocolate that include MP3 players as standard.
There has already been one iTunes-compatible mobile phone — Motorola’s Rokr — but it could only store 100 songs and got poor reviews. Motorola now has a range of music phones that can store many more tracks and recently announced the MotoRizr Z6, which, though half the capacity of the iPhone, can accept music from 200 online retailers — though not iTunes.
To date, transferring music on to a phone has been laborious and sometimes frustrating. Moving music from iTunes to the iPhone, in contrast, will be as easy as it is to “sync” an iPod. The size of iPhone’s impact will be tempered by its price, says Stuart Jeffrey, analyst at Lehman Brothers.
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