iPhone? More of the same …

Seth Godin has pitched in with his thoughts on the iPhone. Sure it is a cool looking device but Godin says the iPhone doesn’t really do anything new. It doesn’t reinvent the mobile phone. The iPhone takes the functionality you see in mobile phones today and performs some of them a little better. Some of those functions are dependent on the Cingular network the iPhone will run on when it is released but, for the most part, it doesn’t exactly revolutionise the mobile phone.

Godin’s suggestions for reinventing the mobile phone include leaving voicemail messages for groups of people at a time, calling contacts or even strangers based on their location, interests and other factors you may think appropriate; incorporating a dating site’s functionality into the phone (perhaps also using geo-location services) and really facilitating targetted marketing in ways that you want to receive it.

Granted the iPhone isn’t just a phone, it combines a widescreen video iPod and an Internet communicator but none of those elements are really new. These elements are present in varying degrees in phones already on the market and in mobile devices about to enter the market. In fact, Nokia no longer refers to its coverged devices as mobile phones anymore but rather as multimedia computers What is making a difference now is how these devices go beyond the smartphone model with mobile phone and PDA functionality to becoming truly converged devices that handle good quality media, data and voice connectivity and additional services like GPS and social media.

Tags: mobile phones, iphone, seth godin, internet communicator, ipod, widecreen ipod, smartphone, social media, multimedia computer