Apple reinvents the handheld computer market

Some days ago, while watching Apple's introduction of the iPhone SDK I realized how amazing the events unfolding (in Quicktime replay) in my computer screen were. It would all have been amazing, no matter what company had been demoing such features, but considering that it was Apple and that the device behind it all is the iPhone it was even more.

Let me go back a couple of years to explain my amazement with all of this. I used to have heated discussions with friends of mine on the future of portable computing devices. Everyone was of the opinion that mobile phones were getting more and more powerful and that soon they would make handheld computers a thing of the past. Being a personal fan of handheld computers I was of a different opinion, of course.

I used my PocketPC, a Dell Axim X3i model, to read eBooks and I loved it. I had always been a huge reader but my job kept so busy that I was down to reading no more than half a dozen books a year. After I got the Axim I started buying eBooks and in six months I had read over 30 books. I would carry the thing everywhere and use those totally useless moments, waiting for the elevator, waiting for lunch at the restaurant and such to read a little bit.

I would always argue that you could never do that on the screen of a mobile phone, they where too small and if they ever had big enough screens they would end up being handheld computers anyway.

Recently I had felt that I would have no choice but to give in, as one after the other the companies that make handheld computers stopped producing them. Last week that all changed.

As soon as I saw Apple's Scott Forrestal show the slide with the architecture of the iPhone OS compared to that of the Mac OS X, it hit me. Sure, the comment that iPhones were powered by OS X had been made Steve Jobs when the iPhone was introduced, but it just seemed to me at the time that it was a firm base on which to build the Phone software. Seeing the architecture and later the demos of the things developed with the beta SDK it became clear that the iPhone is not a phone at all. Oh sure, it runs a very nice looking and smoth phone interface, but it is nothing less than a handheld computer.

Actually, the iPhone seems to be as a generic handheld computer as a PocketPC. Making a direct comparison you could say that the iPod Touch is the equivalent of a PocketPC with Windows Mobile and that the iPhone is the equivalent of a SmartPhone with Windows Mobile Phone edition. The difference being that Apple's implementation of this solution stands head and shoulders taller than Microsoft's. I guess it is only fitting, considering that Apple invented this market with the Newton, so many years ago.

Well, now it seems that Apple has reinvented this Market and I will wager that the iPhone, iPod Touch and any other forthcoming products to share in this platform will not only beat generic devices which run Windows Mobile but will give other specialized devices such as handheld gaming devices as good a run for their money as the iPhone is already giving all other smart phones.

This reminds me again of those old discussions... Perhaps I was right after all and the future does belong to handheld computers. It just happens that they are phones as well.