A huge advantage of the Apple’s new iPhone is its high-resolution screen that lets users do ‘real’ web browsing. That’s because the iPhone uses Apple’s standard Safari browser. Granted, it’s not perfect. It doesn’t support Flash or Java, and the 480 pixels of vertical display still presents some challenges in navigating information found on standard web pages, but the screen is ‘high-resolution’ when compared to other cell phones.
This one feature of being able to smoothly browse to standard web pages opens up a new world to cell phone users — gone are the crude miniaturized cell-phone-specific web pages.It may obsolte the usefullness of mobile-specific web pages — and it’s only been a year since the introduction of the .mobi domain names.
Cell phones sporting fully functional browsers will be a boost to SaaS predicts Red Herring. Applications will begin to more easily reach past Windows and Mac-bound consumers. The US market researcher M:Metric found that 26 million Americans and 7 million Britons were ’strongly interested’ in buying an iPhone. That’s a lot of phones, and while there may be interest, the cost is still higher than what most people want to pay for a phone, so total conversion isn’t going to happen overnight.
In a competing survey by IDC that focused more on the realities of cost rather than just ‘interest’, they found that only 10% of respondents would be willing to pony up the full price for the iPhone and also enter into a two year contact with AT&T. Although that would jump to 18% if the cost of the phone dropped to $300. But even with the high prices, iPhones are flying out of the stores, and with this kind of interest, handset makers like Erikson, Nokia and others will be sure to take notice and to imitate and spin out new flavors and at lower price points.
There are more than 1 billion handsets out there. As these are replaced with next-generation technology, powerful cell phones will become commonplace, and that will only further drive the growth of mobile data services, eMarketing and SaaS applications.
