Why basing the iPhone on GPRS/Edge is a good call

Looking back on the iPhone frenzy, it’s clear that Steve Jobs has got it pretty much right. What he got right was to keep things simple.

The iPhone isn’t the first attempt to produce an iTunes phone. Before, there was the joint venture with Motorola to produce the ill-fated ROKR phone. This failed because at the time the market was only interested in an iPod, not a phone with access to Apple music.

Apple now believes people are ready for an iPod that makes phone calls, and thought that all it had to do was innovate on a tiny scale: take an iPod and add a next-generation user interface and comms.

It quite rightly opted to use GPRS with Edge, because launching a 3G iPhone, right at the start, would have been a real mistake.

The 3G iPhone will appear. We’ve known that since October last year when Apple laid out its road map for the iPod. But a 3G iPhone won’t work all around the world, it will be greedy for battery power and it’s still the case, sadly, that a lot of places have very poor 3G coverage. By launching a 2.5G phone, and then upgrading it if successful, Apple has done it exactly right. The device has to succeed as an iPod first, and a phone second.

The crucial fact is that iTunes is far more important to Apple than any deal it does with any phone network operator. iTunes is Apple’s ticket to controlling the commercial channel for music, along the lines of Amazon’s near-monopoly on books and physical media.

The actual digital channel chosen is irrelevant. Most downloads will be over the ADSL internet, some will be triggered by supermarket offers, others by web links. It hardly matters whether you occasionally order, or even download, music over the air. The all-important detail is that you use iTunes, and iTunes content management, to organise, share, and most vitally, control your spending of music and other streamed media.

All the iPhone has to do is keep iTunes in the public eye, and provide a cool upgrade path for iPod users. Complaints about the slowness of 2.5G downloads and web browsing, and even the price of the iPhone, can all be addressed individually.

They will be.