Little bit o’ iPhone news
In a report that should surprise no one, NPD Group just released a report that lots and lots of iPhone buyers were once Treo (I remember that great day when I dumped my treo for an iPhone) or Sidekick owners (via). Blackberry’s doing just fine. I got my ratio’s inverted when I was thinking about this - I thought that far more Sidekick owners would switch and the Palm flood slightly less, but I guess given the price, Treo users are used to paying more for phones. I suspect that many Treo users were also fed up to here (and here is very high) with Palm’s antics and dieing for something better. I know I was.
Here’s the money quotes:
Initial iPhone buyers were 10 times more likely than other new phone buyers to have previously owned a Treo and three times more likely to have owned a T-Mobile branded phone, such as the popular Sidekick model.
iPhone buyers were no more likely than the average buyer to have previously owned a Blackberry.
So the Treo number is pretty firm in their minds, but it’s actually not easy to say that there’s been a flood of Sidekickers leaving. I suspect that Sidekicks are standing firm for a couple reasons, one is price and two is that they are simply better at text messaging. The iPhone’s hobbled SMS utility is a show stopper for the hardcore texting set - for which the sidekick is a favourite. Hopefully, Apple will get off it’s ass and send us an update soon to remedy that.
In other news, check out this Blackfriars’ piece on why EDGE and 3G might not mean as much as is ballyhooed (via /.). Their basic contention is that latency (the time it takes data to get from the server to your phone) is often just as important as bandwidth (the amount data that can get from the server to your phone in a given time). In the latency department EDGE has the edge, but 3G has it in spades for bandwidth which is the marketable number.
It is an interesting piece, but I wish it was less subjective. It would have been much more compelling if he’d done a few timing studies of how long it took to fully render different websites. Or even a theoretical timing based on latency and bandwidth for loading all the bits of various websites. All things being equal, I’d still prefer 3G - enough of the web is big images, big flash files, that I suspect overall even if the latency argument is a factor that things would be quicker.
Sadly, all things are not equal and here in the states, 3G coverage is sparse and as Jobs keeps pointing out (and the report talks about) it eats batteries. So for me, EDGE is fast enough for the most part and the browsing experience is so much better on the iPhone than the Treo that I am not complaining. I would not want any less battery life on my iPhone than it has now, it sometimes barely makes it through the day. Savvy?
October 16th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
Interesting stuff, considering I *was* an sidekick owner, and was heavily weighing towards the iphone. Of course for me the real showstopper was the sms texting was crippled. Only a single recipient is supported, and no copy/paste/fowarding of previously sent texts! Yes, it does seem this was probably AT&T and not Apple, but whatever the reason it was a no-go for me. Since then I’ve heard friends having problems with the screens, and sound, the keyboard doesn’t rotate in certain apps, etc. I guess that’s what you get with v1.0.
All I can say is I’m glad I went with the Blackberry 8820. Not quite as slick a UI as the sidekick, but blows it away in terms of features. Smaller, higher res screen, quick reconnect when coming out of the subway, better battery life, syncs with my mac, supports up to 32g microsd memory, GPS (which is super cool with Google maps), Gtalk gives you IM and with a little hack that can talk through the Jabber gateways to AOL, Yahoo, and MSN. What’s more it has the glorious WIFI. No I haven’t tried iskoot yet, but soon. And of course since blackberry has been making phones for a while, the phone quality just plain WORKS!!
YMMV
October 16th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Yeah, it’s a shame that they don’t have, basically, contact groups. I’d like that even just for contact organization. They definitely have some learning to do in the phone front, but I’m constantly amazed at how much I like the phone despite what it can’t do.
Blackberry’s definitely the best of non-iphones. It just does what it does very well - honed by zillions of corporate users. Honestly, I don’t know why winmob continues to suck - it’s been out for so long. Sigh.
My thinking, though, in this smartphone war is that the iPhone has easily the best base to build on. It’s easy for them to add in new functionality in a clean and easy way. It’s got an easy path up. Blackberry’s (and everyone else, too) are kind of at the top of their games, they’ll need a brand new major release to get a new base to build on and as far as I’ve heard, basically Palm is the only one even thinking about that. We’ll see, interesting times!