Why pitting your new device against the iPhone is a bad idea
There should be no question in anyone’s mind that the iPhone completely changed the mobile space. Some could even argue that it did a whole lot more than that. Since its release in 2007, dozens of copycats and wannabes have emerged, but none have been able to topple the king. Before anyone accuses me of being a fanboy, I think the result of Apple’s latest earnings call should do that talking for me: 7.4 million iPhones were sold during Q4, the most iPhones sold in a single quarter. With numbers like that and no real signs of slowing, the Apple iPhone is obviously the mobile phone to beat and many have been trying, but no one has completely succeeded so far.
It started in the Spring of 2008 when Sprint decided to launch a massive and expensive campaign for the Samsung Instinct. While many folks today have no idea that that phone exists, those in the know might remember what a tremendous failure that campaign was. To start, its timing couldn’t have been worse. The Instinct television commercials, funny as they were, pitted itself against the first generation iPhone. This was, of course, a problem since the iPhone 3G was launching around the same time and it pretty much negated everything the Instinct had over the iPhone. Once the iPhone 3G was announced and became available, the Instinct quickly became an afterthought.
Next up was the BlackBerry Storm, which was launched in the U.S. in November 2008. Verizon handed its employees training materials designed to offer rebuttals for customers looking to buy an iPhone. The Storm allowed over-the-air music streaming and featured Verizon’s VCast services, and it also had a clickable touchscreen called SurePress. It turns out that no one really cared about its clicking screen technology and it ended up being one of the downsides of owning a Storm! The second iteration of the device is scheduled to be released soon and many BlackBerry fans are hoping it fixes most of the issues with the first Storm.
Just a few months ago, Palm decided to try its hand at taking shots at the iPhone with the Pre. Again, it touted the fact that it has a QWERTY keyboard hidden underneath a vivid touch screen display. It, too, was capable of handling third-party applications like the iPhone. However, its app market was very premature at the time of launch and didn’t proliferate quite like the iTunes App Store. Having a touch screen was about the only thing the Pre had in common with the iPhone, and it certainly didn’t have much of an edge. This didn’t stop Roger McNamee, a Palm investor, from saying that people were dying to be freed from their iPhones and would buy up the Palm Pre in droves. The Pre was also a victim of bad timing being released just days before the iPhone 3GS hit the market. iPhone sales during the opening weekend were quite impressive and it was enough to keep Palm and Sprint mum on its sales figures.
The most recent challenger to the throne has been Verizon and Motorola with the upcoming and highly anticipated Droid phone. The device features an updated version of Android, a powerful 600 MHz TI OMAP 3430 processor, touch screen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. To promote the new phone, Verizon put out this clever video, obviously mocking Apple’s advertising style:
At first viewing, it’s funny and somewhat clever (it’s also golden fodder for iPhone haters), but I quickly realized that people might not care. Most people don’t know what widgets and open development are, so why should it matter if the iPhone iDoesn’t do that stuff? No real keyboard? That hasn’t stopped tens of millions of people from buying an iPhone. No multitasking or running simultaneous apps? Not a big deal — there are push notifications for that, which saves both batter life and internal memory. (Any BlackBerry owner, such as myself, would know that having multiple apps running simultaneously quickly drains the battery and hogs up memory and resources.) Of all the things that Verizon and Motorola could have picked on, namely dropped calls, lack of signal and the inability to use the phone due to AT&T network strain, they decided to focus on the stuff that really doesn’t matter to most people.
The way I see it, if a company decides its marketing strategy and launch plan is to pit itself directly against the iPhone, it has already failed. Manufacturers and companies shouldn’t just try to steal Apple’s market share, but also its mind share. Everyone knows about the iPhone, but outside of the geek community, not too many people know about Droid, Instinct, Pre, Storm, G1 and other phones that have tried to dethrone the iPhone. My grandparents know what the iPhone is! By making strict comparisons against the iPhone, the up-and-comers are just reinforcing the iPhone’s mind share. They are reminding consumers that there is another option out there, and it’s a very popular one, too. I’ve tried to convince my parents to get BlackBerrys but they went ahead and decided on iPhones, but if you asked them they couldn’t tell you exactly why (they even switched carriers for it). They just heard, and therefore know, that it’s good. Other manufacturers are going to have to work hard to break that mindset.
Another downside to pitting devices against the iPhone is that they rarely ever deliver the same experience. Most Android devices suffer from serious lag and its app market is quite small compared to Apple’s App Store. The Palm Pre hardware was questionable and the App Catalog was plagued with issues from the start. The Storm experience was so terrible that I said I’d sell it on eBay if i received one for free at a pre-launch party last year. Every “iPhone Killer” out there has said, “This is what our phone can do that the iPhone doesn’t.” While some of it may be true, and some outdated due to iPhone hardware and software upgrades, none of those phones delivered an overall package and experience that the iPhone does. My 8-year-old cousin could figure out how to make a phone call and browse Safari on the iPhone, but I think his experience would have been different on a Pre or an Instinct.
So, here’s the bottom line: Manufacturers who want to hold their own against the iPhone, if not make a dent in its market, are going to have to come up with a new game plan.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Marc Flores, Corey H. Corey H said: RT well said @mdflores: Do you want your newly released phone to fail? http://bit.ly/43zza1 [...]
Even worse, most of those competitive networks have whole marketing and sales departments devoted to upselling all sorts of “value added” crap, such as music subscriptions, ringtones, wallpapers, as well as functionality they disable on phones in order to resell its reactivation. Verizon is particularly awful in this respect, and for that they should die slowly of canceraids.
What I would like to see is a deep, dumb network with great coverage, low prices, and none of these dopey “value added” services. Basically, I want a wireless Walmart to come in and destroy Vz, Sprint, ATT. Not holding my breath, alas.
Agreed! While the Droid is supposed to be a pretty formidable competitor to the iPhone, I thought the commercial was neat, but a little bizarre for a mainstream audience. The ominous DroidDoes at the end probably didn’t have much of an effect because I think that many people don’t even realize what Android is, nor do they really care what their phone operating system is, as long as it works.
Most people outside of tech don’t understand what the word “platform” means, let alone “open development.” It’s why the G1 was described as the “G1 with Google” and not the “G1 built on Google’s Android OS that will power Internet connected devices across multiple devices instead of on Apple’s closed ecosystem.”
The other day, I was at a media company and someone was asking me about my iPhone and if I would ever switch. I said that I would definitely consider getting an Android phone because I could get it with a cheaper plan and it comes with most of the applications that I would use anyways. I was asked “What’s an Android phone?” Just like I would be asked “What’s Web OS?” or even, “Phones are on platforms? Wait, explain that.” M
Most of the world doesn’t live inside our tech bubble, doesn’t know what “open source” or “open platforms” or really, just “open” means in technology, and people just want their stuff to work. Apple didn’t explode into the smartphone world by touting technology, they did it by showing simple things that just worked.
(other than making phone calls or texting when you’re in a crowded environment, or syncing Bluetooth headsets, or trying to unfreeze your phone, or have battery life for more than a day, but that’s not important when you have technology)
[...] every somewhat-formidable touchscreen that has come after the iPhone has been labeled an “iPhone killer,” Verizon is well aware that that is not what the Droid is. As a matter of fact, [...]
[...] commercial didn’t seem to do so well, and I think I made it pretty clear that going head-to-head with the iPhone wasn’t the best idea. Instead, consumers are already sold on the Droid thanks to blogs and reviews showcasing its [...]