I have a vested interested in Apple stocks shooting up to unbelievable levels, as I own some, and it would help soothe the pain of the last few months performance on the stock market. OK, disclaimer over, even though I didn't need to do one in the first place.
There seems to be a lot of stock analysts who started off the week (or the last 18 months I guess) continually pinging the iPhone as something that will never work for business users. With today's announcement that it's going to support ActiveSynch and Exchange out of the box, it's got one business user here who's likely to move over once he can justify spending money on two different phones in one year (and yes, 3G would help make my decision a lot easier), and I suspect a lot more out there in the so-called business world (but do people really differentiate between their work and other life anymore, especially if they need a business phone that connects them to the office full time?).
Some of the analysts are still now saying that business users won't switch due to the lack of a tactile qwerty keyboard. I'm sure some won't, but I bet it's not everyone. I've tried typing on an iPhone, and it was a lot better than I thought it would be (and I never manage to get a full sentence right on my BlackJack II anyway, so not much difference there).
But, and it's a big but, I think the biggest part of todays news wasn't the business support - the iPhone will get new users in the business world who had been holding out, but there was a whole new market segment that appeared magically today - Gaming (and I mean real games, not Tetris).
If anyone saw a couple of the possibilities in the presentations today, you know it's going to be a pretty perfect platform for mobile gaming. Apart from pretty impressive frame rates (and the gorgeous graphics) to make games look pretty, the API for the motion sensor makes this the new mobile Wii. There are so many possibilities out there for this thing, and if it's as easy to develop on as they say, we just witnessed the next generation of gaming without even realizing.
So, I think Research in Motion has a(nother) viable competitor, but the real company who should be worried is Nintendo - the DS is great, but there's no movies or music. And if you could have a Wii for the road, that fits neatly in your pocket and makes phonecalls, wouldn't that be cooler? The PSP held me captive for a good few years with it's fantastic screen and decent games, but it ain't got no motion sensor.
Isn't gaming one of the big new markets the analysts watch these days? Didn't Microsoft sink a couple of billion into getting the XBOX to be accepted as a kick-ass system (even if the red flashing lights of death always appear at some point)? Didn't Sony help win the HD format war with the PS3? Don't Nokia come out with a crappy N-Gage every couple of years, trying to get us to pretend gaming on a phone would be the next big thing? Well, I think today, gaming on a phone just became the next big thing.
Labels: apple, gadgets, games
