Don't be an idiot. Do you REALLY think Apple would put out such an important product without having a good battery life. If you're interested in facts instead of idle speculation, go here to read the specs on the iPhone's battery life.
http://www.apple.com/iphone/tech...logy/
specs.html
Excellent ideas Carl!
Trey,
I think you're missing the point of Carl's article... he's not saying the iPhone has poor battery life.
He's speculating that, in order to maximize battery life, Apple is keeping the system closed to third-party apps.
Yeah, because you know that third-party developers have no clue about how to handle power management issues or anything like that. They're all dunderheads who can barely make the computer say "Hello, world!"
For those of you who are humor-impaired, I was being sarcastic.
Someone from Microsoft pointed out this morning that the iPhone isn't going to be "a big deal" because there's no business software for it. I admit, he has a point. The iPhone looks cool, works cool, and is cool. No doubt. But if I have to carry around a laptop on my business trip in order to access my corporate e-mail via VPN, track my expenses, etc., I'm not gaining much with my iPod phone. Sure, I can surf the web via Wifi, but I can do that with the laptop that I had to bring along to get my e-mail anyway.
So who's going to supply all this business software? Apple? The guys who had to delay Leopard because of overbooked development resources? The guys who can't seem to get all the AppleWorks pieces put together into iWork? Those guys? Yeah, we might have an expenses tracker by sometime in 2009.
It's a Cube. Ahead-of-the-curve technology, great design, and will sell well for the first few months.
1) It's not just battery life, but also "out-of-box" experience that counts; Jobs already alluded to that. Uncontrolled/unregulated rogue apps would significantly diminish customer satisfaction (as well as battery life).
2) Apple normally tends toward UPOD; in their product announcements, initial specs, and earnings guidance. It wouldn't surprise me if the iPhone gets more than "up to 5 hours of talk/video/browsing" life.
3) Agreed that additional application nicing/throttling control might be in store for iOSX. (I claim coinage of that acronym! 
Perhaps that's part of what the "borrowed engineers" are working on.
Maximize battery life by excluding third party apps. Sure you moron. Put down that crack pipe before you got more epiphanies like this.
Peter; calm down. If you agree that MS has a point "because there's no business software for it", you've missed the point of the iPhone. It is not competing with Crackberry/Palm/winCE devices.
To have the best initial success, it needs to appeal to the best target audience, which happens to be iPod users that also have cell phones. The majority of these fall in the teen to mid-thirties age group, and aren't the least bit interested in "business apps" (except you?).
Eventually, there will be third-party apps, and perhaps some will be business oriented, but that will be later.
When Apple bought NeXT, I told people they would eventually return to selling servers. Anyone vaguely familiar with NeXTStep already knew its potential as a server system for Apple, but OSX was the seed, and future growth into the enterprise depended on it. What I didn't see was that video and biotech became two of the key catalysts for their server business success.
iPhone is like that in a way, much like the iPod was for music. Just the initial seed that grows into a larger ecosystem in due time.
Sebhelyesfarku;
With such quality insight like yours, I'll bet you're still long Vonage.
If a Microsoft exec says the iPhone is irrelevant because it won't do business apps, then you know it must be relevant, and troubling for MS. But why?
Possible answer: "The iPhone Halo effect".
Just as the iPod "halo" effect encouraged more home PC users to go Mac, The iPhone WILL be popular among business users, and lead to businesses buying more Macs. I believe this is what MS is worried about. I also think this has been APPL's strategy all along, so expect that the phone will do what business users want. Also expect the MS FUD machine to work overtime to kill as many sales as they can.
Thanks for taking the time to comment guys. As was noted above, I'm not dissing iPhone's battery life -- I think it will be just fine. But I do believe that one of the reasons Apple is excluding third party apps to be certain they can deliver on those battery life numbers. Sure, you can build a system that doesn't care about battery life, but you'll get better results if your apps are battery aware.
In response to Peter's comment, what makes you think the iPhone can't use a VPN? It has all of Mac OS X's networking code in it, including the standard VPN code. The iPhone will be able to be a first class business email client with one exception: it won't run Microsoft Outlook. But then again, neither do Blackberries, and they do just fine in the business world.
Thanks for the comments -- you'll get more iPhone data next week when I put out our first analysis newsletter. Preview: it's going to be a big deal (duh).
Carl
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