A Convergence of the Gadgets: the IPhone

There are a great deal of small electronic gadgets on the market. There are cell phones, mp3 players, video mp3 players, cameras, gameboys, and BlackBerries. All these pieces of technology have done quite well commercially, but there is a limit to the degree to which they can keep going.

The iPod is proof of this. When Apple initially released the iPod, it was quite a big deal. The ability to fit your entire music library on a convenient little device in your pocket proved to be quite an appealing proposition, as proved by the tremendous sales the iPod generated. With a massive and well-executed marketing push, the iPod became the most popular single piece of computer technology ever.

After a while, though, other companies began releasing viable competitors to the iPod, and Apple was forced to add features such as video playback capability to the iPod. This proved not to work as well. While everyone would like to be able to stroll down the street while listening to their favorite tunes, walking down the street while watching television proved to be a somewhat less attractive proposition. iPod sales began to decline somewhat.

The idea many electronics manufacturers have come up with is the idea of combining gadget function. Why not add a camera to a cell phone? Video on an mp3 player? Music on a phone?

Most of these ideas are somewhat limited by the degree to which manufacturers can pull these ideas off. A camera on your phone is a nice thing, but it certainly doesn't come close to replacing a digital camera. Its resolution doesn't come close, its lens can't compare, and it the cell phone just doesn't feel like a camera in your hand. It isn't convincing.

Music on cell phones seems to be a somewhat better idea. 250 million Americans have cell phones, a far greater number than the number of people with mp3 players, and so if any company can successfully combine the two, it will make quite a lot of money. Several companies have tried to do this, in one case even selling songs at three bucks a pop, (as compared to $1 on iTunes) but none have even been intended as a real replacement to mp3 players. Storage space and battery life have proved to be problems. You can't put a forty gig hard drive on a phone, and if you have run down your batteries listening to music before taking an important call, you have shot yourself in the foot. Consumers realize this.

Apple, the company that started the whole business, is stepping up to the plate with the iPhone. Scheduled to be released in June, the iPhone convincingly combines a phone, and iPod, and a remarkably powerful web browser. It successfully serves the purpose of a phone, an mp3 player, and even, to some degree, a BlackBerry. (We'll see whether business people will be able to take themselves seriously with iPhones) However, starting at $500, plus pricy cellular internet service, the iPhone might prove prohibitively expensive for many.