More iPhone musings

Two interesting bits on the newly announced Apple iPhone:

1. Apple iPhone signals the death of the ringtone industry.

Let me be the first to say that the iPhone is huge problem for the ringtone industry. In many ways it makes the ringtone industry completely obsolete. It’s an iPod so any song that you own can be used as a Ringtone. Don’t want to pay $1.99 for a low-quality re-sampling of a song that you already own to be used as your ringtone? Great, you don’t have to. What about wallpapers? Well, any photo on the iPhone can be used as a wallpaper, so just download one from the iPhone’s built-in web browser and you’re golden.
Goodbye $9.99 per month ringtone subscription fees!

Except, of course, most music doesn’t make a good ringtone — songs with 30, 15, even 5 seconds of “opening” before you get to the meat of the tune (let alone the chorus) aren’t very good when people expect to answer the phone after 5 seconds of ringing. I know — I played with doing MP3 conversions down to my Treo for ringtones, and very few songs are suitable; the best fits are, interestingly, TV theme songs, where there is also a premium placed on brevity.

So the ringtone industry won’t go away — but the cheesy product they produce will have to dramatically improve.

2. iPhone yes, customizability, no.

Moreover, Mr. Jobs also appears to be restricting the potential for third-party software developers to write applications for the new handset, like ring tones and word processors.

To be sure, this strategy has not limited the success of the iPod, which has become the defining hand-held consumer appliance and fashion statement in the last half-decade. The world of digital cellular phones, however, is rapidly becoming a simple extension of the world of personal computing. The leading handset makers — Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Research in Motion, Samsung and Sony Ericsson
— are all pushing in the direction of making their devices increasingly look like PCs you can put in your pocket.

Mr. Jobs is moving in that direction, too, but it appears that he wants to control his device much more closely than his competitors do. “We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

The iPhone model, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry. “These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

Actually, I have a lot of sympathy toward that stance. I’ve messed up my Treo’s functionality on numerous occasions by downloading stuff to it that either interfered with the telephony or, more commonly, just made the thing unstable. As long as the functionality is there, I don’t necessarily mind a more controlled and reliable environment for my phone/PDA.

And it’s that last acronym that matters here — I have a Treo because I didn’t want to carry both a cell phone and a PDA. What I want for the PC in my pocket is solid and flexible functionality and stable, dependable telephony. Will the iPhone model work for that better than an open-ended PalmOS or Windows-based system?

I’ll be curious to see.

(via GeekPress and BoingBoing)