“Iphone and Digg. The first victim of user-generated reviews” An exercise in predictive writing

With only a few days to go for the much hyped and seemingly revolutionary coming of the Apple iPhone to retailers, it seems like the perfect time to look at the potential success or failure of such device and what all this will mean for mobile phone users and the industry in general. (please note all dates are approximate)

A timeline of possible events in the coming weeks/months:

0h. the iPhone era begins - Apple iPhone hits the stores. Long queues to get one. Police involved in several incidents around stores. People being assaulted when they’re going home from the shops. Some assaults have serious consequences. Many stores sell all their units in the first hour of opening to the public.

24-48h after the Iphone - Less than glowing reviews start to pour in from the gadget-loving websites. Users are already complaining primarily, of slow internet connection times, non-user friendly keyboard for SMS, the battery, and the camera.

24h after the Iphone - Some Digg users and other die-hard apple supporters, having flocked to the shops to get their “piece of history”, can’t stop boasting about their new iPhone (even if they don’t have one).
However, and at the same time, said users are already realizing its shortcomings…although they won’t tell, of course!
The first poor iPhone reviews are being submitted to Digg. And buried right away. However, the bad user reviews and images of cracked iPhones hit youTube and are seen by hundreds by the day. The growth of visitors to some of these video reviews proves to be exponential.

36h after the iPhone - the hype is still in full swing, supported by last minute marketing and PR efforts from Apple.

2 days / 1 week after the iPhone - at least two attractive mobile phones from competing companies are unveiled worldwide. (Who would have thought so?!)
Not only do they boast some of the usability advances of the Iphone, but are cheaper and have better specs than the iPhone. One of the makers is Nokia.

1 week after the iPhone - Apple shares are down. The market is uneasy about Apple’s seemingly sub-par attempt to become the market leader in the highly competitive mobile phone handset market. Apple investors have doubts at this time of the potential effectiveness of the iPhone’s scheduled marketing plan. The 10 million users benchmark starts to seem, at this point, unreachable.

2 weeks after the Iphone - users start to realize one of the biggest problems that most overlooked: a touchscreen may not be the best way to interact with a mobile phone…particularly if it requires two hands and a pair of eyes on it to actually do the job.
In the other hand, business users, realizing how bad a greasy and fingerprinted phone makes them look, are already thinking on passing the Iphone away to someone else and getting one of the shiny, new, competing models recently unveiled by other companies.

3 months after the iPhone - Iphone released in Europe. Although the Apple device for the European market is an improved version of the first iPhone (iPhone 2.0) and not as limited as the first iPhone, it still is a sales failure. The European consumers, being accustomed to higher specs phones, having read the poor reviews and not being so sensitive to the Apple PR machine as their American counterparts, simply choose other handsets over the iPhone. (please note that depending of the success/failure in the US, Apple may not even launch the iPhone in Europe)

4 months after the iPhone - Apple shares are slowly recovering, although it is not sure that they’ll fully reach pre-iPhone values. The Apple brand and credibility are at its point. However, the Apple PR machine is already working in the next “revolutionary” product. It is just that much fewer people believe this next product is “revolutionary”.

5 months after the iPhone (or much before) - Public die-hard supporters of the Apple brand start to -discreetly but surely- get away from their old “I love Apple” stance. Being an Apple fan is no longer what it used to be. “if you are not cool, you’re nobody”

Sometime in the future - In an attempt to distance themselves from the iPhone “experience”, the next iPhone will not be called “Iphone” at all.

Some conclusions -from the future- of the failed Apple experiment

1- The iPhone has helped to popularize the mobile internet as a whole. People has grown to expect Internet access anywhere on their phones.

2- Some/(only) of the most user friendly features of the iPhone design are included in future handsets by Apple’s competitors, to everyone’s delight (except Apple’s)

3- The iPhone has helped to educate the American public on mobile phone handsets, their strengths, weaknesses and potential uses

4- The iPhone has shown once again the strong influence that bloggers, social bookmarking and “review websites” play in the immediate success or failure of a product

6- The iPhone has helped Nokia, Motorola and other makers to be better known and increase sales by showing to the American consumer what they’ve been missing all this time regarding the features that a high end mobile phone “should” have.

7- The whole iPhone campaign and its results have made Apple rethink its PR strategy for future products. They -and many other companies- have learnt the perils of over-hyping a product, and they are not inclined to do it again. The lesson to learn for Apple is that the rules have changed. When you are being watched by hundreds of thousands of real time skeptical interconnected global consumers, there is much less room than before to over-hype and under-deliver a product or service.

8- Advertising expenditure in blogs, websites like Digg, CNET and others has increased, in volume and price. This trend assists in the consolidation of Internet advertising in general, consumer generated paid reviews, and conversational marketing.

9- People have become more familiar with the concept of mobile web, made-for-mobile websites, and the impracticalities of having “the full internet” shown in a small screen

10- People have become more familiar with buying, getting all kinds of information and being located 24h a day through their mobile phones. Computer skills are on the way out, as more people use and depend of their mobile handset to do most of the things that they used to do with a computer before.

…………
Javier Marti is a writer, futurist and founder of Trendirama.tv, Trendirama.com and Trendinews.com
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……………… Reality check: What happened after this prediction was written ………………………..

The most hyped up product launch in history
http://blogpulse.com/trend?query1=iphone&label1=&query2=&label2=&query3=&label3=&days=60&x=0&y=0

http://www.slashgear.com/iphones-are-fetching-over-1000-on-ebay-295994.php

One of the first iPhone user reviews in youTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOgwJLWTQnk