1 post tagged “cellphone”

Read all about Apple's newly announced iPhone.

Looks spiffy, though I don't know how successful it will be at $600, particularly if Apple's careful design loses the spotlight to a mediocre cellular network.  At least it will put competitive pressure on other phone manufacturers, whose designs too often suffer from baffling limitations and eccentricities.  And the price will drop over time, with Apple possibly abandoning iPod altogether in favor of iPhone.

This is another step on the logical and inevitable (though long-delayed) path of progress for mobile devices.  There really is no good reason to keep SMS, chat, and email separate; to understand the difference between Wi-Fi, EV-DO, and DSL; or to tolerate address-book mismatch on one's phone, PC, and Google Mail.  The consumers are increasingly realizing that the vendors are perfectly capable of shielding them from these trifles, and they now reward those who do.

The only question on my mind is how an investor can profit from this inevitable future.  Would it make sense to back one of today's players in the field?  It seems obvious that Google, Apple, and Skype are all racing to provide a user-friendly, multi-faceted communication solution that works seamlessly regardless of which hardware, OS, or network the user is on.  And it's unlikely that the old giants will sit idly on the sidelines.  Is it reasonable to expect that one or two of them will out-compete the others and end up dominating the market?  Or will there be some small player that provides an essential service consumed by all the competitors?  What kind of essential would that be?