Dialing Into the Future

That's changed, big time. After a tense period of struggle in which Apple tried to get that message across to iPhone users, Jobs and his team have now embraced what seems to be a much more exciting prospect: iPhone as the leading launch pad for cool and productive mobile applications. It's clear now that the computer that we use as a phone is the digital device that will dominate our lives in the future, and Jobs—who has the best gadget on the market—sees an opportunity to take on competitors like Nokia, Microsoft RIM and Google in a war of the smart phones.

Is it possible for Apple or anyone else to rule in the mobile realm the way Microsoft did on the desktop? The way to do this is to go mass-market with a device that can do anything the others can do. That's why Apple is creating business-oriented apps like exchange-style mail, starting its own new mobile-oriented cloud-computing service (MobileMe), and encouraging everyone to write new applications.

A quarter-million developers have downloaded the iPhone SDK since Apple made it available barely three months ago. Apple has also made massive efforts to make the iPhone a worldwide phenomenon. As I'm typing this my inbox is filling up, spam-style, with press releases announcing arrangements with carriers in different nations. Orange in France, SingTel in Singapore, O2 in the U.K., Hutchison in Hong Kong and Macau, Vodaphone in Australia, Italy, South Africa, Turkey, Greece, India, New Zealand and the Czech Republic … and so on. All while making sure that no one in the world has to pay more than $200 to get an iPhone.

The Macintosh, the computer Jobs introduced in 1984, was a technological breakthrough that never became the worldwide standard he believed it should have been. Today begins his effort to make the iPhone a mobile device not for the rest of us, but for most of us.

© 2008