Guest Author - Guido Deboeck

With so many cellphones already in use, how can there still be a cellphone revolution? I don’t know whether there will be one, but I am anxious to find out. This coming Friday the iPhone of Apple goes on sale. To be exact, the iPhone will be in Apple and AT&T stores starting at 6 p.m. Some people will camp in front of the stores; expectations are that over a million iPhones will be sold in the first couple of months after its release. If you have not yet taken “the guided tour”, just click on the link below this article to watch the video. A lot has already been written about both the pros and cons of the iPhone, so there is no need to repeat that here. However what has not been put in proper perspective is just how much innovation Apple has come up with over the years.

Traveling back in time, I recall starting with a home-build computer in the late seventies. All my friends wondered in those early years "why anyone needed a computer at home". Some even told me that not everyone could type or was inclined to do their own spreadsheets. It was still Visicalc in those days not Excel. A good friend of mine even said “he had a research assistant at work" (implying who could do all of that for him. Times changed; few still reply on secretaries to pull their e-mail or have research assistants to do their spreadsheets.

While the first computers were “usable”, they were far from “user-friendly”. Then in 1984 the Mac was introduced. Our kids were small in those days and had never tried to use "the dinosaur compute" I had at home. The Mac changed all that; they immediately loved it. Our four year old at that time – who last week defended his PhD dissertation – could not get away from the Mac screen.

Fast forward to the week that the iPhone will be introduced. Will Apple do it again? The idea of entirely changing "the paradigm about mobile phones" is very attractive. Will it catch on? Sometimes we only have to look abroad and in particular to Japan and Korea to find out.

David Cantor wrote: “Cellphone cameras are kind of an afterthought in the U.S., fun for snapping off a picture of Great Uncle Harold blowing out the candles at his 93rd birthday party, or occasionally handy for a few seconds of grainy Zapruderesque amateur news video. But that’s hardly the case in Japan, where cell cameras are like an extra appendage used for a host of applications not available in the West. You can translate English words you photograph into Japanese characters, instantly buy any practically item for sale that you see anywhere, or, with breathlessly-covered QR code technology, get a huge amount of information about any product or service you point your lens at, just like you were clicking a hyperlink to find material on the Internet.”

The use of the cell camera on cellphones has indeed been limited; I have used my cell camera very little because as an amateur photographer I prefer to use a digital camera with decent amount of pixels.

There are other applications on the horizon that few of us expect. Cantor suggests that “weight-conscious cell jockeys in Japan are even putting their phones to work to help them shed pounds. The premise is pretty simple: Take pictures of the meals you eat, send the picture to a professional nutritionist, and receive tips on how to improve your diet. Heath officials are hopeful it could help stem the increase in weight-related diseases the country has seen recently. Maybe it’s something we should explore here in the U.S. as well.”

Five days before the release of the iPhone it may be worth having a look at Apple Inc, which is no longer labeled Apple Computer Inc because selling music, videos, iPods and iPhones may taken over selling computers.

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