The iPhone

“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It's very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. ... Apple's been very fortunate in that it's introduced a few of these.”
- Apple’s Steve Jobs, revealing the iPhone

“Anyone privy to the release of the iPhone is going to hold on to their current device as long as they possibly can, all but Scotch taping their devices together so that they can crawl over the finish line and into the loving arms of a shiny new iPhone. (Oh, you know the box is gonna be sexy)”
- Singer/Songwriter John Mayer

From the moment that it was first announced to the public, Apple’s iPhone was a smash hit. When the product launched in June 2007, Apple sold an astonishing 270,000 units in the first 30 hours. Many people associate these high sales figures with Apple’s popularity at the time; the iPod and iTunes were already in vogue, and the iPhone’s sleek design and touch-screen interface clearly made it the next must-have technological advancement from Apple.

But while the general public was thrilled to have a more sophisticated phone that doubled as a stylish status symbol, media experts were more interested in the iPhone’s impact on media convergence. “The iPhone's key advantage over competitors may not be the interface or touch screen,” industry observer and journalist Glenn Fleischmann noted in an interview with Tech News World. “It may be the fact that it's perfectly simple to play music and video on an iPhone and also make calls and browse the Internet. There aren't any compromises, except on the keyboard.”

With the advent of the iPhone, as well as other mobile media devices such as the Blackberry, media consumers are able to get more and more information in the palm of their hand. But what are the consequences of having all of this information at our fingertips (literally)? Just like Steve Jobs pointed out about the iPhone, these new breeds of mobile technologies “change everything.” People can access all sorts of messages from the web browsers of their Blackberries and iPods, including instant messages from friends, sports scores, celebrity gossip, and even hard news from reputable sources like CNN or the New York Times. The popular Internet blog Read Write Web, which focuses on Internet and technology-related issues, uses Twitter to promote its posts (CNN and other sources do the same thing). Blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick writes, “Twitter is a remarkably good traffic driver to our posts. A healthy little group of people click through our links on Twitter, some more via FriendFeed and they often give us great early feedback.” This raises a question, though: what about those Twitter users, especially those on mobile phones, who don’t take the time to click on the links? Will their knowledge of news and current events be reduced only to headlines and story teasers?

Lastly, the iPhone and Blackberries may not be the harbingers of media convergence that everyone has praised them as. One skeptical consumer, pcmag.com reporter John Dvorak, feels that this current trend toward do-everything mobile devices is just a repeat of the black box fallacy. In his piece “Rethinking the iPhone,” he writes, “the iPhone is really a dream of consolidation. In other words, it's wishful thinking. It won't be more than a passing fad as a fashion accessory, and it will never cut it as an iPod replacement or a phone… Any sort of device consolidation, like what the iPhone possibly promises, is a pipe dream and runs counter to real and immutable trends.”