JeffKirvin.net

Okay, by now you guys know I’m not a fan of the iPhone. There are some things I like about it (battery life, durability, music UI) but I don’t think it’s a very good phone. The lack of 3G, inexplicable inconsistencies in the UI (different themes, different gesture effects) and the crippled Bluetooth profiles make the iPhone a non-starter for me. But what if there’s a method to the madness? Bob Cringely has an interesting column up where he talks about how Steve Jobs should know better than to release a device on hype alone:

Being better is not enough, as Steve Jobs learned at least twice before with the introduction of the original Macintosh computer and later with his own NeXT computer. Both of those products had spectacular introductions, rave reviews, and boffo initial sales, which shortly thereafter fell off a cliff. That’s the way it is with many new technologies: you can’t rely on early adopters alone. There are some people who will buy almost anything that is new, but there aren’t enough of those people to help most companies bridge the sales gap that follows a fantastic introduction after all the true believers have bought and the rest of us haven’t yet made up our minds. It hurt the original Mac, but then Apple had Apple II sales to rely on. It darned near killed NeXT. It HAS killed many a start-up.

You’d think after the original Mac and NeXT his Steveness would have learned. Did he? What if, to borrow from The Transformers, there’s more to the iPhone than meets the eye? Cringely goes on:

The question here is whether 3G is already built into the iPhones shipping now or whether it will require a new model? Given that it is coming so soon after the iPhone introduction, I can’t believe that even Steve would make us buy new phones. It is very likely that a firmware upgrade will awaken the 3G within all you iPhone owners.

We’ve all heard that the iPhone shipped with EDGE because the battery drain from current 3G chips was too high. But what if that’s a smokescreen? The iPhone’s battery life is off the charts, and a lot of the problems the iPhone has could be fixed by moving to 3G. Not just the data speed, but 3G allows a better voice codec as well, meaning better call quality. Add the bump to 3G to “fixes” to the UI consistency, minor bug fixes (why do you really think every Apple employee got an iPhone? product testing) and roll it all out the same time as Leopard, just in time for the Xmas shopping frenzy. And you could also use that opportunity to add things like copy-and-paste and the iWork office suite that is supposedly the real delay in getting Leopard out the door.

Is this Steve’s master plan to keep us buying iPhones into 2008 and avoiding the sales spike and drought that has nearly broken him twice already?