David Emery Online

No alarms and no surprises

19 September 2007

Well, the much-reported UK Apple event has been and gone (where was my invite, Apple?) and as widely predicted saw the announcement of the iPhone for the UK. Widely predicted being a bit of an understatement, of course, as pretty much everything announced had been guessed already.

Gone are the days when we’d have absolutely no idea what Apple was going to announce at their now often ‘media events’; in fact these days pretty much everything is known in advance, except one or two small aspects. At the iPod event a few weeks back that was the iPod classic (which wasn’t rumoured anywhere) and the iPhone price drop, and at the event today the only thing that caught me unawares was the free WiFi hotspot access that’s bundled with the O2 contracts.

The free WiFi is a really nice addition, but it’s the sweetener on a pretty poor deal, all things told, and it’s obviously a token gesture to compensate for the like of 3G. I’m not surprised it doesn’t have 3G – they’re right about the battery life problems it has, and in reality it’s not that much faster then EDGE – but it’s a big psychological barrier in a country that’s had 3G being marketed at them as a “must have feature” for the last 4 years.

In a similar fashion, most people are used to paying nothing for their phones, especially when coupled with a fairly pricey £35/month contract (which doesn’t come with many minutes compared to the competition). While obviously your getting a whole lot more – on touch screen iPod, for one – it may well be a fairly tricky proposition.

On the flip side, Apple have yet to start marketing over here yet – we’ve had none of the TV adverts which seemed to work so well in the US; I’m sure that they’ll sell shed-loads of them on launch, but whether they can go on to have a long term success over here is much less certain. I’m also very interested to see whether – like the US – they have some form of pay-as-you-go plan if you fail the credit check; if they do, and make it easy for people to access, then I think they could sell a huge amount – I think it’s the contract that will probably be the biggest stumbling block.