Many people question the iPhone craze and chalk it out to fan-boy-ism. They say iPhone was crazy since that was the first good phone to ever get released in USA first. They say, it is the multi-touch that makes it so awesome, when can we see this in an Android. They say, it made it because Apple is just “awesome”. While the last statement may be true, I’d like to argue that with the iPhone Apple did something that Nokia couldn’t.
Like the iPhone the Symbian phones from Nokia all supported applications, or apps as the current calling trend is. They didn’t have a fancy store back then, but the publishers could sell apps, just like Windows/Mac software. May be that’s where they didn’t do it right, but I doubt it. The problem was the app experience varied depending on how powerful your Symbian phone was.
What Apple did with the focus on a lone model (and at the time of writing 3) is that the app developers didn’t have to worry about if it will work on this model and not that. Instead they focused on the application itself. Added to that you have all the new tech that the iPhone had compared to other flagship phones, made for some very very interesting apps.
I believe Apple had finally created what for a lack of a better term an ecosystem in the mobile world. Just like how because you use Windows everywhere you really have to think hard about switch your system to Linux or Mac, Apple has successfully made people stick to this ecosystem. Just consider the number of upgraders from iPhone 2G to iPhone 3GS. In fact, it is so strong, that when I think about switching to an Android – and trust me I do from time to time – I reconsider because of the applications that I would leave behind.
Hopefully Andriod, Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile and Bada will all catch up, and you can chose your ecosystem and then stick to it.
