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on iPhones, iTouch and lousy business models

Here's the obligatory post on the iPhone. At last its here and already there are a few around the office. It seems a few people from work joined the queues on Friday and bought themselves the ultimate in cool gadgets for the masses. Unfortunately I wasn't one of them but I have seen a couple of great impromptu demos! I have an iPod Touch so just cannot justify forking out for a new phone for a while so that will have to wait. Anyway, the other night when I got home and turned the TV on there was a story on one of the current affairs programs telling us how the iPhone is going to revolutionise education. While I love gadgets and can see plenty of potential I am not sure how practical this is just yet in the primary school classroom (where I think this story was pitched - I missed quite a bit of the story). Even with the DER it is hard to conceive how an iPhone could be given to every student in the class, and it would have to be every student! There just seems to be so many logistical and other issues to solve. What sort of plans would they be on, who pays for the phones, the plans etc, you would need chargers everywhere, what happens as the phones get lost/stolen/taken from kids (which they would) etc. What sort of training would be required and so on. Don't get me wrong - I would love to see technology such as this being used in classrooms around the country but doing so requires so much more thought than exploiting the hype around a new gadget. On to the iTouch and the business models employed by Apple. They make some cool technology but really irritate me when it comes to some of their approaches to business. Like many, I was an 'early adopter' for the iTouch. Our reward for that - pay up some extra cash to get the upgrade (which did have a few nice applications) to the software back at the beginning of this year. Now with the release of the 3G iPhone, there was another upgrade for the iTouch. There is a whole new raft of applications available now so I went to the Apple site to have a look, downloaded a few and then found out that they cannot run on my iTouch (should really read the fine print). So I paid for the software upgrade to enable them which, on the website had some great images of cool new applications - none of which actually come with the upgrade. The upgrade, at a glance, mostly seems to install an application that lets you install applications! Why Apple insists on charging these fees for minor upgrades that just annoy their most loyal fans I just don't know (I do really - PROFIT). So this time I am going to hold back for a while and not become an early adopter for the 3G iPhone, I might just wait for a few upgrades.

Posted July 16, 2008