Is there an iRipoff coming to my stoep?

So the buzz around the iPhone has resurfaced after Apple king Steve Jobs unveiled it last year. Having seen shots of the thing and read of its capabilities, it struck me as odd that the world would suddenly get so hyped up about a product that has existed in Japan for over 4 years already in different forms. One Japanese guy interviewed after the iPhone announcement earlier in the year said his phone could even talk to his TV and fridge about upcoming shows and what kinda food was going bad respectively. The Japs unfortunately, are like South Africans; they just don’t have a clue as to how to market their technology like the Americans can.
It reminds me of the dash-bound, front-loading 6-CD changer I first experienced in an old Lexus way back when the likes of Mercedes-Benz and BMW were still using CD shuttles sitting in the boot of a car. Here was a CD player you could load up 6 CDs into through one slot, without even opening the door of your car. Awesome. Years later the Europeans have caught up to it and suddenly it is the in-thing!

iPhone is the same. Essentially an iPod/ cell phone combo is what the iPhone is, with its 4 – 8GB storage capacity. A phone that plays music (MP3 files), makes calls, surfs the Internet, handles emails…I’m sure by now you are thinking “wait a minute, that sounds like phones I already know!”. This is true. One of the latest is Samsung’s F300 which has been popularised by Beyonce on the TV ads. Clever technology, stupid idea. For one, I can only speak on the F300 phone OR listen to music, not do both at the same time. Which means surfacewise, I don’t need two to operate these functions, one will do, as it has over these years. The other thing of course, is how do I place it down since both surfaces are scratchable? Not smart at all. My old 2005 model Nokia 7710 too has all these capabilities as well, including QWERTY touch keyboard, radio and Bluetooth.

Nevertheless, Apple has an extremely busy and well-funded marketing machine that has bolted it into people’s minds that the iPhone is revolutionary (touch-screen), that it represents cutting-edge hi-tech that no one else has come up with before. It’s true there’s some nice stuff there, but hell, not even the name itself is new; Apple had a legal tiff just a few months ago with the original owners of the name iPhone, which was tech firm Cisco Systems.

At the announcement in January Apple said the iPhone would only be available in the US. I’m told it will sell over there for between US$500 and US$600 a piece. That is R3 570 and R4 284 respectively today. Of course if it ever came to sunny Mzansi you might see prices of between R6 000 to R10 000 each without contract.