David Pogue, author of Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual and a columnist at The New York Times, pours water on the recent iPhone rumours which I blogged (below) from ThinkSecret. He writes:
Everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with a cellphone. My answer is, "Probably never."
I have friends who worked on the Palm Treo. And to this day, my gut churns to recall the hell they went through.
The clincher? He says:
Don't believe me? Then have a look at this wonderful Museum of Bogus Apple Phone Rumors, extending all the way back to 2004 and filled with "photos" and "reports."
I have three quibbles with this. First, a lot of those mentions are not, in fact, Bogus Apple Phone Rumors: they concern the Motorola ROKR which, while it wasn't the iPhone, was actually a real product. Second, yes, we know the Handspring (ex-Palm) people struggled with the Treo, and Apple has had similar struggles with the iPod phone. That's one reason why it's taking so long. You can have years of rumours not because Apple isn't doing stuff but because it's finding stuff hard to do.
Third, it's obvious that there is a bigger market for music-playing phones than there is for standalone MP3 players, just as there is a bigger market for cameraphones than for digital cameras. (In fact, pretty much everyone who wants a digital camera also wants a cameraphone, because there are times when you don't have your camera but you do have your mobile phone. They are not mutually-exclusive markets.)
Since the market for music-playing phones will run to hundreds of millions of units a year (more than Apple has sold in five years of iPods), and since Apple clearly has an interest in the market (as shown by the ROKR), the idea that it won't do a converged device defies belief. It's the way the market is going. Apple can't stop it. Apple can either be part of the steamroller or part of the road.
The last time I saw a company in denial it was Palm, which repeatedly told me it was really happy to offer a two device solution (Palm plus mobile) and had no intention of getting into the smartphone business. The people who had originally set up Palm and defected to form Handspring had a different view, and it was Handspring that developed the Treo which, following a sort of reverse takeover, ended up as a Palm.
Saying Apple isn't working on a merged device is tantamount to saying that Steve Jobs is similarly in denial. You can make up your own mind, but I don't believe it.
