Jun 15

iPhone 3G - Rivals

Apple has a lot to do with religion, although some may say this is not true. If you are one of those, then you should remember about The Church of Mac and its reverend, Bobby Newton, but that's only the top of the iceberg. Today, I want to destroy some myths. I love Apple, but I don't take everything for granted - while I consider Mac OS X to be the best OS in the world, I see a lot of reasons for not liking it, especially if you have a strong Windows background, and I think iPods are more about being cool, than having the best music and video player on the market, or the one that provides you the best bang for the buck. Don't jump on me yet - all the above will be left behind now, because what I want to talk about today is the new iPhone. To be more precise, we'll see how the iPhone 3G stacks up against its competition!

If it wasn't for the Apple brand and the marketing machine, the iPhone 3G could really be in trouble. Why? Although the image above is nothing but a joke, the sad truth is that the iPhone 3G doesn't have any videoconferencing capabilities, as most people were expecting. Before we move on, feel free to check this article about the iPhone 3G videoconferencing kit on Gizmodo, just to have some fun before we move to more serious things. OK, once you are done with that, I am sure we can move on and talk about the iPhone 3G rivals in the wild, because these are really powerful enemies for Apple's smartphone, as we're going to see right away...

First of the iPhone 3G rivals we'll have here today is the Samsung Instinct, a handset that can easily beat the "iPhone 333" in a lot of areas, but has two big problems - first, it was specifically designed for Sprint Nextel clients, so it won't work with other carriers, and second, as a direct consequence of the above, the worldwide market presence of the Samsung Instinct will be greatly diminished.

The videos on the product page should say it all, but the problem is that those videos compare the Samsung Instinct with the old iPhone, so the truth is not that bad for Apple, after all. I'll leave the features aside, since those are not secrets for any of the rivals here, and get to the pricing issue...

Apple made a very smart move by announcing the 8GB iPhone 3G to be priced at $199, although this is because of being carrier-subsidized, but it seems the Instict follows the same pattern. On Friday, June 20, the Samsung Instinct will go on sale, and after a few days we'll probably have the first sales reports. Unfortunately, the $199 price tag hasn't been confirmed by Sprint just yet, but the Instinct can become a real "iPhone 3G killer" in the US.

Moving on, we have another phone from Samsung, the Samsung i900 Omnia, codenamed SGH-i900, if that's of any importance to you. Good, so why would you grab the i900 instead of the iPhone 3G?

Wide 3.2-inch WQVGA LCD screen, a five-megapixel CMOS camera "with the latest value-added features, which include auto-focus (AF), face and smile detection and auto-panorama shot"(I really want to see that "smile detection" feature - if you don't smile, the shutter is not released anymore?), 8GB or 16GB internal memory, MultiCodec support for DivX, Xvid and other video formats, Samsung's TouchWiz interface, and this is only the beginning, but the i900 Omnia surely looks much better than the iPhone in theory. If pricing will be decent, and all features work as promised, the iPhone 3G may be pushed in a corner by these two Samsung phones alone, but this is not all!

Third - and last of the iPhone 3G rivals we had here today comes from HTC, and features a 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera, 2.8-inch VGA display, eGPS and FM tuner, while using Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro, pushed forward by the 528MHz CPU and 192 MB DDR SDRAM & 256 MB ROM memory, supported by 4GB internal flash storage. Unfortunately, being given the OS used, this phone's great TouchFLO™ 3D interface and plethora of features are shadowed by its slowness, and the price of over $700, possible even $800, depending on the retailer, doesn't help much either...

What do you think - the iPhone 3G looks less scary now? Despite the fact Apple got an impressive piece of the smartphone market in only a few months, and its market share continues to rise, the battle gets tougher with each new model released by the competition - and the result is better phones for about the same money or even less, of course.

If you want to get busy with the iPhone 3G, then I think you should wait at least two months from this moment to see the market settle down, and the new "touchphones" arriving everywhere and starting to receive valuable user feedback. The iPhone always had rivals, but only Apple's excellent marketing efforts and brand saved it from being overrun. Now, we should wait and see if the iPhone 3G rivals manage to pass by, of they'll keep drafting the Apple smartphone, waiting for the first occasion allowing an overtake...