State of the iPhone: neomania

While we all - well, us Apple aficionados, anyway - anxiously wait for DubDubDeeCee, it's worth considering the state of the iPhone.

The next operating system for the device is almost ready, and widely expected to be released at WWDC along with, most probably, a new Mac OS, Snow Leopard. There are potential synergies between the two systems, therefore, that nobody has really considered. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to do so either.

I guess we'll find out shortly. But I can tell you that OS 3 for the iPhone and iPod touch is pretty neat, slightly faster than OS 2, with an excellent search facility, and the latest build has been really stable. Indeed, Apple has told developers that every new app that goes on the Apple Store now has to be OS 3 compatible or it won't be accepted.

Hate it or (more sensibly) love it, the iPhone has certainly changed the smartphone market in a short time. Worldwide, mobile phone sales have decreased 8.6 per cent from the first quarter of 2008, according to US research firm Gartner.

This is the first contraction in mobile phone sales ever registered, year-over-year for the first quarter. But at the same time, smartphone sales actually increased, surpassing 36.4 million units, a 12.7 per cent increase from the same period last year.

Partly this may be because people are achieving combined computer-style web surfing and email plus phone, camera etc in one little and very portable device, thereby saving money. But partly it's pure neomania - despite everything, some people still want something new.

Nokia still has the majority, of course - and quite the lion's share at 45.1 per cent of the worldwide smartphone market. But relative newcomer Apple is in third place at 5.3 per cent, behind RIM's BlackBerry.

That's discounting the fact that the iPhone OS is also installed on the iPod touch, of course - that means that as far as smartphone OS types are represented, Apple's OS share is actually 10.8 per cent of the market worldwide, up from 5.3 per cent market share in the first quarter of 2008.

HTC is fourth and may well rise - an HTC using Google's Android smartphone OS will be released in June in New Zealand by Vodafone.

But Apple's share may well rise further too, once the hype of the new OS release at WWDC hits home. This may come, as most signs indicate, with an all-new iPhone (or two) as well. Even to date, Apple has more than doubled its share of the worldwide smartphone market from the year-ago quarter.

These relatively low overall sales figures (discounting impressive growth percentages) for Apple belie the device's popularity as a platform - iPhone and iPod users downloaded over one billion programs from the company's online App Store over a mere nine months. Fifteen of the 20 most popular paid App Store downloads since the service opened were games, according to the New York Times.

The new OS gives developers even more leverage for even more interesting and diverse applications, so this sector can only be considered to be exceedingly healthy.

From Swine Flu trackers to a growing market for business apps (even Lion-Nathan is ditching RIM and has just purchased 150 iPhones for corporate use), the iPhone app phenomenon just keeps swelling, making the device ever more desirable.

The latest frontier could be iPhone ads - Burger King, Zippo and Lions Gate Entertainment have all experimented with promotional software applications that can be downloaded onto the iPhone, or they have created ads that are placed within other popular applications for the device. In New Zealand, Beck's Beer caused controversy with a free iPhone app that has watchdogs crying foul, citing alcohol, minors, promotion and all that sort of thing.

And now Telecom reckons it's negotiating with Apple to sell the iPhone in Aotearoa in competition with Vodafone, actually, and it got picked up by many Apple-following sites in the US. This could generate some good deals to coincided with new system and device releases from Apple, so that's cool.

Well, I'll go back to waiting for WWDC, then, and throwing grains of salt at the rumours.

- Mark Webster mac.nz