While the iPhone is by no means at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to hardware specs, Apple’s road map of releasing only one phone a year does put them at a bit of a disadvantage when competing against phones from other platforms such as Android, and we all know how fast phones in the Android world turn obsolete.
According to some observations from a Morgan Stanley analyst, Katy Huberty, Apple will focusing less on hardware and shift their center their priorities on software instead. In this case, the iOS operating system. The analyst pointed out that the iPhone 4 will be sticking around longer than usual. It’s almost mid-year and there’s nary a word from Apple about the next iPhone. Previous rumors have pegged the phone for a September launch, others say it will only begin production in September – but nothing is confirmed for now. And if Apple decides to focus on creating the best software experience instead, they would be on the right track.
Because while the iPhone may not have the most powerful processor or largest display; it does have one of the best user experiences around. iOS is one of the most, if not the most, user-friendly operating systems out there, and in some cases miles ahead of Android when it comes to the learning curve. In addition to a great user experience, it has a gigantic app store with over 300,000 apps available, and more added on a daily basis. If they keep on refining iOS and make some changes (i.e. clunky notification system), and open it up a bit more to let consumers customize their devices anyway they want, it would be a pretty hard operating system to beat, and Apple could sell devices based on that. Or would it be insufficient to please today’s consumers? What do you think?
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