I have been watching Steve Jobs giving
iPhone lauch Keynote 2007 and it just struck me - he was talking about Visual VoiceMail as "just an example" of "what's coming", and he assured the public that "this is just a first fruit" of cooperation between Apple Inc. and AT&T. He underscored that point, obviously it was important for him.
"The innovative Visual Voicemail feature lets you view all your voicemail messages at once, then listen to them in the order you prefer. Use the Play/Pause button to control playback of your voice messages. The scrubber bar even lets you replay portions of a message you find hard to understand"
In fact, the telecom industry, as a whole, has not been fast to adopt IT-led innovations, and Visual VoiceMail is not an exclusion from that.
(Reality Check: Of those coutries where iPhone is sold, how many have VVM now?)
It does not take much observation power to see that user services innovation rate is much slower in telecom than it is in IT. This only adds to user's attachment to the Intenet and aversion to mobile operator "innovations".
Nokia takes on that with it's
Ovi services suite. But Ovi is completely IP-based.
Is there a space for innovation of telecom-based services?
Will Apple take lead in that?
As if that "left hook" from Apple's honcho was not enough, there was a second hidden punch, an uppercut done by Cingular's chief Stan Sigman who went on stage and, incidentally, talked on the same subject - how Apple innovated [their sleepy] telecom kingdom.
At about 6:30 down the show he talks about partnerships with Apple, and at 7:35 he mentions VisualVoiceMail, ominously uttering "and I promise - you'll see more of that coming down the road".
Now, hold on. WHAT could they mean?Well, I have an idea.
It seems so that right now we are in need of "3G saviour", a killer app which would be the differentiator, a watershed, between old-style 2G networks and the new ones, "innovated and reinvigorated with some help of Apple Inc."
Of course, I hear you say, internet via 3G is so much faster!
Well, but WiFi on a 2G handset can give you better speed, not to talk of a wired computer.
And what about VideoCalls? "Yuck!", you'd say, "who needs those?"
Well, sure, like nobody "needed" internet on a handset before iPhone.
Remember, when there's no market, there's opportunity to create one - exactly Apple's business.
I'm very sure that further innovations in mobile networks must focus on this single feature - mobile video call.First of all, video quality must be improved.
Current 3GPP codecs were developed during the 90s era - they are just pure crap by modern merits, even when compared to YouTube's FLV (Flash Video) compression.
Ripping and replacing them for H.264 or some proper codec would be the first great step to improve usage rate.
Of course, next comes into play the high usability of iPhone user interface.
If it's easy to use and the quality/price is great - people will use it.
Why would you not make a "killer app" (and a cash-cow) out of that?
iPhone could do it to mobile internet usage, it can do the same revenue increase with proper use of video calls.
It also takes some consideration to notice that video calls are of greater use to long-distance (like Paris/Rome tourists calling Moscow home) and business users (telecommuting, making it a corp policy to call workers with video).
While the former group makes it harder to implement (all CSPs must be capable to handle the new H.264 codecs), the latter group is much easier to harness (as was demonstrated by the Windows gang) - they are policy-driven. And policies are centralized...
Next gen iPhone would need a
separate frontal camera for video call.
I was surprised when I did not see videocall demo by Steve at Keynote 2008, along with launch of iPhone 3G. There must be more to do, to be ready for such massive roll-out. New standards, RAN upgrades, new mobile phones...
Could this happen this year? Probably not, "thanks" to reduced budgets for innovations, worldwide.
But I secretly hope it's still in the iPhone's+AT&T roadmap.
Maybe LTE version?
1/ syncing over wifi (or bluetooth)
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