...hello Apple cell phone rumors, hopes? Jobs thinks the PDA is on it's way out, but seems awfully interested in the next generation cell phone market. He spoke about it in the financial conference call. During the Q&A session Steve is asked about emergence of the iPod and iSynch, and how the PDA may fit into this plan. Though he says the cell phone industry was something they didn't want to tackle three years ago, he never says they might not do it in the future. You can tell in hearing him that Apple has done some market research in the area of next-gen phones. The following is a complete transcript from the PDA/cell phone discussion by SJ.
Jobs:
"Well, I think the PDA is going to go away...replaced by new generation cell phones. See you're going to be able get all, you're going to be able to view all the information on a cell phone that you can on a PDA. The PDA will allow you to enter information, modify information somewhat, and that will fall into a few camps. One will be modifying phone numbers which is quite reasonable to do on a phone. One will be modifying calendars which is not reasonable to do on a phone. And another will be other kinds of things: taking notes, what have you, that are not reasonable to do on a phone. The question is what percent of people want to do those three things. We think it's fairly small. We think the large number of people want to have their information viewable on the phone, to enter new phone numbers on the phone, but the number of people who want to run applications, custom applications or vertical applications, or enter calendar information or scheduling information or other kinds of more sophisticated information is a fairly small number. And since everyone's gotta carry a phone anyway, as the phone gets much better, that creates a greater and greater threshold that the handheld organizers have to cross before you carry a second device. And we're not seeing and I personally don't know what's going to happen there, but I think the phones are going to win...By the way, let me say one other thing...we have the best customers in the world. They are wonderful. They love to tell us what we are doing wrong, and they love to tell us what we're missing. Actually, we love that. We all read a lot of e-mails everyday from people we don't know telling us what we ought to be doing. And we love it. Some of them are right. We just have to sort the wheat from the chaff. And one of the things we've gotten for the last four years is you oughtta make a handheld. You oughtta make a PDA. We spoke a lot about this. We're not capricious about these things, and we decided three years ago that the projectory of the handheld was to get subsumed into future generation of cell phones. That's why we didn't get into that business. Because we decided that getting into that business is getting into the cell phone business, and that wasn't something we were ready to tackle. An we see it happening now. This new generation of cell phones is pretty incredible. So some of the PDA manufacturers may morph into phone manufacturers. I'm not suggesting that they are going away. I'm suggesting that the PDA is going to have a dramatically smaller market as the cell phone takes a big hunk of people are using PDAs for now...(Asked if iPod might develop phone features) We gotta be careful here. I don't want my television to make toast. I really like those to be separate devices. iPod is primarily a digital music device, and it has a lot of things in it that you wouldn't put in a phone. A phone has a lot of things in it you wouldn't put in a digital music device. You have to make sure one plus one doesn't equal one and a half. Which you can easily do.
---
Something to chew on.
d8n_two
Jobs:
"Well, I think the PDA is going to go away...replaced by new generation cell phones. See you're going to be able get all, you're going to be able to view all the information on a cell phone that you can on a PDA. The PDA will allow you to enter information, modify information somewhat, and that will fall into a few camps. One will be modifying phone numbers which is quite reasonable to do on a phone. One will be modifying calendars which is not reasonable to do on a phone. And another will be other kinds of things: taking notes, what have you, that are not reasonable to do on a phone. The question is what percent of people want to do those three things. We think it's fairly small. We think the large number of people want to have their information viewable on the phone, to enter new phone numbers on the phone, but the number of people who want to run applications, custom applications or vertical applications, or enter calendar information or scheduling information or other kinds of more sophisticated information is a fairly small number. And since everyone's gotta carry a phone anyway, as the phone gets much better, that creates a greater and greater threshold that the handheld organizers have to cross before you carry a second device. And we're not seeing and I personally don't know what's going to happen there, but I think the phones are going to win...By the way, let me say one other thing...we have the best customers in the world. They are wonderful. They love to tell us what we are doing wrong, and they love to tell us what we're missing. Actually, we love that. We all read a lot of e-mails everyday from people we don't know telling us what we ought to be doing. And we love it. Some of them are right. We just have to sort the wheat from the chaff. And one of the things we've gotten for the last four years is you oughtta make a handheld. You oughtta make a PDA. We spoke a lot about this. We're not capricious about these things, and we decided three years ago that the projectory of the handheld was to get subsumed into future generation of cell phones. That's why we didn't get into that business. Because we decided that getting into that business is getting into the cell phone business, and that wasn't something we were ready to tackle. An we see it happening now. This new generation of cell phones is pretty incredible. So some of the PDA manufacturers may morph into phone manufacturers. I'm not suggesting that they are going away. I'm suggesting that the PDA is going to have a dramatically smaller market as the cell phone takes a big hunk of people are using PDAs for now...(Asked if iPod might develop phone features) We gotta be careful here. I don't want my television to make toast. I really like those to be separate devices. iPod is primarily a digital music device, and it has a lot of things in it that you wouldn't put in a phone. A phone has a lot of things in it you wouldn't put in a digital music device. You have to make sure one plus one doesn't equal one and a half. Which you can easily do.
---
Something to chew on.
d8n_two
