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Pants off: iPhone 5 has five prong plan for beating Android, BlackBerry

Pants off: iPhone 5 has five prong plan for beating Android, BlackBerry

The iPhone 5 marks the inflection point, Apple hopes, upon which its iPhone smartphone line heads toward the kind of majority marketshare its other products like the iPad, iPod, and iTunes have always enjoyed. Here’s a five prong plan, based on a combination of things Apple has already hinted it plans to do and external common sense about what it should do, for the iPhone 5 gaining enough marketshare to beat the pants off the competition and finally match the majority mindshare which the iPhone has always held.

Carrier foreplay: Why is it that the iPad is destroying the entire “Android [jalopy] nation” combined when it comes to tablet sales, yet the same half-baked geek platform known as Android is collectively is outselling the iPhone by a pinch? Simple: the cellular carriers have undue influence over phone sales, and the carriers love Android. Upper management at the carriers loves Android because they get to control it, and the geek salesfolk at the carrier retail stores love Android because geekdom is their religion. Apple can’t change the latter, but it can change the former by giving the carriers more of what they want in the iPhone 5 era. For Sprint and T-Mobile, that means simply giving them the iPhone 5 at all. For Verizon and AT&T, Apple must figure out how to appease these unfortunately powerful behemoths such that the salesgeeks are required to promote the iPhone 5 on at least equal footing with their pet Android phones – in such settings the iPhone 5 will gain the sale in nearly every instance unless the customer is also a geek.

Pricing: In an attempt to keep Android momentum going even as studies show that the vast majority of current Android users say they have no plans for their next smartphone to be another Android, the carriers and manufacturers are now offering Android phones for free (with contract of course) left and right. It’ll be tough for Apple to ask mainstream folks to pony up $200 and up for the iPhone 5 when Brand B is free. The iPhone 3GS at $49 is a nice start, but does Apple have the guts to turn the iPhone 4 into a free product and launch the iPhone 5 starting at $99? Such pricing may be necessary, even if margins are nil.

Lowbrow features: Apple’s biggest marketing pushes for the iPhone 4 were FaceTime and Retina Display. That’s nice, but the vast majority of potential iPhone 4 buyers knew they would never be making mobile video phone calls, and the “better screen” claims can’t be fully appreciated unless you’re in the store looking at the iPhone 4 and its competitors side by side; anything short of that, and it sounds like just another exaggerated marketing claim. With the iPhone 5, Apple must instead focus on pushing lower end features which will appeal to a larger number of users. The iOS 5 preview suggests that Apple has already figured that out. Android’s entire interface is a disaster, but it has a notification center, so now the iPhone 5 will have one – and of course it’ll be ten times better than the sloppy one Android uses. That’s an effective argument for luring Android users over to the iPhone. Similarly, even as most BlackBerry users will admit their platform is growing more irrelevant by the day, they appear to be in love with their BBM BlackBerry Messenger feature. Nevermind that it appears to be a mere fad. Apple must counter that with the iPhone 5, and it has with iMessenger. Doesn’t matter if the entire faux-messaging fad is gone from the face of the earth in six months. What does matter is that plenty of BlackBerry holdouts will switch to the iPhone 5 in the mean time, because for that brief moment, faux-messaging was all that mattered to them.

4G hoedown: 4G is a joke in 2011, with the two largest carriers proudly promoting the 4G LTE networks they haven’t even built yet, and the two smallest carriers boasting of their nationwide 4G networks which aren’t actually 4G. But because most consumers don’t even know what 4G is or does, only that they’re supposed to have it on their phone, Apple must include a 4G antenna in the iPhone 5. Nevermind that having a “4G” phone will do you no good if you live in a place in which a real 4G network doesn’t exist (and that’s nearly all of you reading this, regardless of carrier). Most consumers mistakenly believe that having a “4G phone” means they’re using 4G (“whatever that might be,” they’re thinking). The iPhone 5 must be one of them. Otherwise, carriers everywhere will tell people to steer clear of the iPhone 5 because it “doesn’t have 4G” and consumers will be naive enough to believe it.

[Thanks: http://www.beatweek.com]

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