Touchscreens, Touchscreens Everywhere

Yesterday, Betsy Schiffman wrote that the iPhone, while being quite successful for itself and Apple, is actually a boon to the smartphone industry as a whole.

It's a standard line for companies to say they "welcome competition," but it's usually a throwaway meant to deflect attention from strategic vulnerabilities.

In the case of the iPhone, however, competitors earnestly have reason to welcome Apple to the market. Sales show that what's been good for Apple has been verrrry good for smartphone makers. Retail sales of the BlackBerry, for example, are up 38 percent in the year since the iPhone's introduction.
[...]
"What the iPhone did was make it cool to use smartphones," said Ramon Llamas, an analyst with research firm IDC. "Before, you had the BlackBerry, which mostly just resonated with enterprise users or business people. Now, there's a whole new market of smartphone consumers."

Thus, on a day where most companies would be more than happy to be hunkered down and out of the way of Apple's 800-pound gorilla, Samsung decided to roll out its own vaguely familiar touchscreen phone--the SGH-i900 Omnia (seen at right), which means "everything" in Latin and "wish" in Arabic (according to the Samsung press release found at Akihabara). As a counterpoint to the iPhone's OS X-inspired UI, the Omnia runs Windows Mobile 6.1 with Samsung's widgety TouchWiz UI running on top of it. It's got a 3.2-inch touchscreen, quad-mode GSM, tri-band HSDPA 3G connectivity, Wi-Fi, and a GPS receiver--much like the iPhone 3G. But it adds a 5-megapixel camera, stereo Bluetooth, microSD memory expansion, and an FM radio. The Omnia drops in Asia in the next week, and thenEurope later this summer.

And while it's not an official announcement, Research in Motion (RIM) was probably pleased to have its new touchscreen Blackberry, dubbed the Thunder, leaked to The Boy Genius Report. Obviously, it looks like it's coming to Verizon, with reports saying it will rumble on in sometime later this summer.

--Agen G.N. Schmitz

Comments

[Chris B. on June 11, 2008 at 05:08 PM]

That touch-screen Blackberry is interesting, for sure, but I need a lot more details. RIM doesn't exactly have a track record for understanding or developing media-based features, plus Verizon's habit of crippling features for their own financial gains is worrisome.

Plus, now they have to hit a $199 or so price point out of the gate. The Voyager, which was a pretend smartphone, was what? $299 with a 2-year contract?