It’s not a pop talking about iPhone 4 and its mythical or real hardware problems. It’s about the iPhone revolution in common.
This is a retelling of a real story where I was asked to advise to buy or not to buy an iPhone. It’s necessary to clarify that an iPhone isn’t sold in our country, Ukraine, and the mobile internet revolution isn’t started yet. I mean there aren’t too much people use mobile internet everyday. It’s not only because its cost and quality, but also because most of people have no need to communicate so intensively and continuously. Also I should remark that a good internet access penetration grew up last few years only, now it’ll take time to understand mobile internet and services.
In spite of this I meet iPhone users everyday on the streets, shops, metro, bus stations, wherever. Could you imagine why they buy it? They don’t know about App Store, except IT guys. Most don’t use iTunes. I don’t mean buying songs and other media, but not using iTunes even to store backups of the data. Never. So why do they buy an iPhone? it’s simple, they do because it’s modern and somebody said it’s cool. I totally believe it’s cool, but not it’s cool to have. The problem is that some users is/will be disappointed. Not most, because not everybody likes to feel like a fool paid $1000. And when I was asked I had to find the reason people are upset – they bought a mobile phone, but have an iPhone:
I think, you probably don’t need an iPhone because:
1. iPhone isn’t a mobile phone.
It’s more than isn’t a mobile phone only. It does the phone functions indifferently. After years of Nokia-style it looks too complicated or too different and need time to adopt. Battery life time will never be a week, it’s usually 1–2 days with often call or long calls.
2. Call function is secondary.
iPhone and 200.000 App Store applications creates a special way of using. Buying an iPhone you’ll have to accept its ecosystem rules. You even will need to know that you should accept them. It’s not so obvious in the country without official sales. iPhone helps internet educated people. Other won’t find lots of benefits.
