KEY POINTS:
The most anticipated gadget of the year, Apple iPhone, will go on sale on June 29 in Apple and AT&T stores across America. Initial stocks will probably sell out in the first day, such is the frenzy of interest in Apples music player cum phone. AT&T (formerly Cingular) claims it has already received a million queries about the phone.
Analysts are confident Apple will comfortably hit its target of selling 10 million phones by the end of next year and its likely all of those sales will be made in the US.
That sounds like a tall order for one market, but when you consider that AT&T has 62 million mobile subscribers and a five year exclusive deal to sell the iPhone, it becomes clear that the two companies intend to sell most if not all of those phones in the US.
The phones work on the underlying GSM technology that AT&T uses, which means that if you are lucky enough to score an iPhone on your travels through the US, it would, in theory, work here on Vodafone's network. But it appears the phone will be automatically locked to one carrier - AT&T, so it can only be used in the US on the AT&T network.
This is to prevent T-Mobile customers in the US buying the iPhone, unsubscribing from AT&T and taking the phone to their own network provider. The iPhone will not have a CDMA version, at least for years to come, so Sprint and Verizon are locked out anyway.
There's already speculation around the web as to what will be required to hack the iPhone so it works on other networks. But doing that could cause more problems than it solves.
One of the most intriguing iPhone features is the visual voicemail function, which lets you look at the screen to see what messages you have and answer them in the order you choose. Will that work on a hacked iPhone? Unlikely.
The iPhone, for the meantime, will also be locked down in terms of software development, so as a smartphone, won't be as versatile as Symbian, Palm or Windows Mobile-based rivals.
Two models of the phone will be available: a US$499 ($667) version with 4 gigabytes of memory and another model, which will retail for US$599 ($801) and have 8 gigabytes of memory. Given the usual premium phones sell for in New Zealand, that would put the iPhone in the $800 - $1000 range here.
What can you get for that price? Quite a lot actually - from the iMate and Blackberry to the Treo and some high-end Nokias, you can get much better featured phones with the 3G data speeds the iPhone lacks. They may not have the aesthetic appeal of the iPhone, but by the time the iPhone becomes available here, maybe 2 - 3 years out, mobile handsets could look very different.
Meanwhile, if Nokia could get the price of its fantastic N95 down to around $1000, I'd take it over the iPhone any day.
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The local tech blogosphere:
Aardvark on what we're really Googling.
Russell Brown tries Apple's DRM-free EMI tunes.
Geekzone on countries poorer than New Zealand getting fibre-to-the-home.
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Would you be signing up for an iPhone if it was debuting here on June 29? What are the best alternatives seeing as we're left out of the loop?
