Aardvark Daily

The world's longest-running online daily news and commentary publication, now in its 30th year. The opinion pieces presented here are not purported to be fact but reasonable effort is made to ensure accuracy.

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What could be bigger than iPhone 3G?

15 July 2008

Even now that over a million iPhone 2.0 units have been shipped, the news wires are still full of stories about Apple's latest must-have gadget for the fashion-conscious and technophile.

And let's face it, there's good reason to talk about the iPhone 2.0. It has almost everything you could want in a phone - or any portable gadget for that matter.

It's a music player, a video player, a WiFi and G3 enabled web-browser, an email client -- bla bla bla.

In fact, it's pretty hard to imagine anything that could surpass the iPhone in terms of technical merit and capability, let alone the chic that is Apple's trademark ultra-contemporary styling.

But I think there is something just around the corner, and it's not the iPhone 3.0 either.

I'm talking about an iPhone killer that will likely come from the Open Handset Alliance (OHA).

Member companies such as Nokia and Samsung certainly know how to build killer hardware and Google's Android operating system has the potential to turn an otherwise "also ran" iPhone-inspired mobile into a very real contender for the crown of "best mobile device".

You may recall that nearly a year ago, the tech-wires were rife with reports that Google was working hard on a GPhone to compete with the iPhone - but nothing came of it.

Well word in the back-alleys of the tech underground is that Google and the OHA have been working hard on the new iPhone-killer but keeping things very quiet.

This makes good commercial sense of course. Why release your iPhone killer, or even finalise its design, until you've seen the latest offering from Apple?

But, now that iPhone 2.0 is on the streets, you can bet your bottom dollar that the geeks, stylists and ergonomists are hard at work in their efforts to bring the Gphone to the market ASAP.

So will Apple really care if another iPhone-like product appears on the market?

After all, the Chinese have been knocking out pretty reasonable clones of the iPhone 1.0 for some time now and it hasn't hurt sales of the genuine thing one little bit.

Well I think Apple are very much aware that if the OHA get their act together, the iPhone 2's honeymoon period could be rather short.

Even if the Gphone doesn't have the "oooh, ahhh, I want to hold it" styling of the iPhone, it will have one very real advantage - it'll have an open-source operating system in the form of Android.

Instead of having to sell your soul to the devil to get legitimate access to the programming interface and instead of having to jump through hoops to lick the boots of the great Apple if you want to "tweak" your iPhone, Gphone developers will have a much cheaper and easier time.

And this will turn the Gphone from "just an iphone-inspired mobile" into a kick-ass piece of portable electronics.

No matter what you might want your Gphone to do, some geek somewhere will come up with a bit of code to do it -- and odds are that it'll be a free download.

The current iPhone 2.0 doesn't do video recording as a standard feature. If the Gphone falls short in this regard, it's only going to be a matter of days before some enthusiast makes that functionality available and someone else improves it.

Another big bonus for the Gphone is that it'll almost certainly have some very smooth interfaces to the growing range of Google services.

A Gphone specific GMail interface, a slick and sophisticated interface between Google Earth/Maps and the onboard GPS, etc, etc.

Quite frankly, I think that the Gphone could be the "next big thing". Geeks will buy it because they'll be able to make it do exactly what they want it to do; and regular folks will buy it because they know that some geek will have written code to do what *they* want it to do.

Perhaps the only people who won't buy it are those who don't give a stuff about functionality, performance or flexibility. They're the fashion conscious who just love the Apple brand (nothing wrong with that though).

So, if the OHA produced a piece of hardware with pretty much the same features as the iPhone and if Google's Android OS allowed you to implement all the iPhone software features (and more) - which would you buy, assuming they were priced about the same?

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