If You Show Them, They Will Come

Look, it's no secret that I'm skeptical of the iPhone's ability to miraculously heal small injuries while cooking you breakfast. But it's not just the hype that bothers me, though that's an aspect of it.

A few hours before I began writing this, I suffered through watching an NBC news segment which seemed to depict everyone in the western world waiting breathlessly for the release of iPhone this Friday. Some of those people I don't pretend to "get" at all -- comprehending herd mentality is a completely different thing than understanding it. Others I understand all too well, and it bugs me.

No, what frustrates me the most about the iPhone is that everything it does, things that are regarded as so cool and revolutionary, are things which have been done for years. Cell phone with a touchscreen? Check. Music, movies, Internet? Indeed. Organization and play? Bluetooth and Wi-Fi? Yep, got all that. No matter what the interface that Apple puts on top of it, the iPhone isn't new, it's just well marketed, which is practically a first in the mobile device sector. Prior to the iLaunch, I can't remember the last time I saw a serious advertisement by one of the major players, other than Palm's rather anemic Treo promotions.

Apple may have built a really impressive interface -- having not yet used one myself, I'm loath to say yea or nay, though I am admittedly unsure about a phone without buttons. But a little interface work is not exactly the Atlantic Wall in terms of insurmountable obstacles. Other manufacturers could have done much the same thing, and some have even produced exceptional devices, but for one critical flaw: no one knows about them.

Outside the circles of people who pay attention to such things, nobody has heard of the i-mates and the HTCs of the world. Everyone knows about the iPhone, and what it can do, and while some of that is thanks to the Apple name, not all of it is.

Advertising really does matter, and if you look at Apple's ads, you'll see the critical component: they show the iPhone actually doing the things it can do. Show me an ad where another manufacturer has really shown off the multimedia and Internet capabilities of the device. Show me an ad where a manufacturer actually admitted that their device has multimedia capabilities.

People are buzzing about the iPhone not necessarily because it's the best device out there, but because it's the only one that they've heard about. With a little bit more and better advertising, a lot of other companies could have cashed in on this sort of market too. Call it shortsightedness, call it groupthink, call it whatever you like, but now Apple has the ball, and the other players had better hope that the big "i" fumbles big time if they still want to play.