With all the excitement, free press coverage and raving fans of the Apple and its iPhone, the incumbent phone companies probably are starting to worry about how to compete. In particular at the high end of the market, where Nokia, Sony Ericsson, RIM and Palm earn their livings.
Apple is clearly going to take the music and fashion segments. With a few tweaks, they could take share in the business market. But for the bulk of the consumer market, there is an opening.
The iPhone is missing two things that appeal to the mass market: a lower price and a good camera.
It's clear from the early reviews that the camera has disappointed. Take a look at these reviews from the web:
"The one HUGE thing that’s keeping me from getting rid of my Nokia is the camera." Robert Scoble.
"Camera: horrible. Really Apple... what the deal!?!?!" Jason Calacanis.
Even MacWorld doesn't like it: "It's definitely more appropriate for fun shots when no other camera is around than as a replacement for your digital camera, even if your camera is five years old."
No phone can have everything and Apple chose a cheap camera. This leaves an opening for the next year or so for its competitors to respond. Music in your pocket is great, but photography is a vastly larger market.
Go get 'em..while you can.
Oh yeah. The iPhone works great with scanR Whiteboards, but won't work well with Documents or Business Cards.
Apparently the problem lies with the lack of an option during the attachment of the photo in iphone's email. The iphone reduces all photos to 640x480 with email sends. Apple says it keeps files sizes down for email traffic.
I successfully (without errors during my test as a scanr doc) sent scanr.com a photo that I transferred (1) from my iphone to iphoto, then (2) emailed from iphoto to scanr. If photos are transferred via the USB cable to iphoto the resolution is retained at 2K, which is the advertised camera res.
The document I got back from an average iphone photo of a yellow-tinted BOOK page came back without errors on the picture to text translation. Pretty cool.
Now if we can get Apple to give us an option to attach full res pics from iphone emails, we would be sitting just swell.
Comments?
Posted by: Jeff Gilchriest | August 01, 2007 at 02:02 PM
This is done easily enough with a variety of 3rd party apps - of course you have to jailbreak your phone. with the sdk out soon, you won't have to.
Posted by: mike ann | February 23, 2008 at 08:33 AM
What happened to the phone specific apps? When I subscribed, I installed a smooth scanR app on my Treo 700p, but after a reset I discovered that the app was gone from your site. Now, I have an iPhone 3G. Apple won't mail a full res image to anyone, so I REALLY could use a scanR app to upload directly. How about it?
Meanwhile, is there a recommended 3rd party app?
Posted by: Tony Mayo | July 22, 2008 at 09:41 AM