With iPhone 3G introduced, can Apple be stopped?

Popular Mechanics online released a fantastic article on Tuesday of this week detailing what might be next in line for the future of cell phones.  The basic premise of the article is that, if someone (like say, Google?) doesn’t come along quickly with a cheaper or more effective challenger to the iPhone, that Apple will do to the cell phone market what they already did to the mobile media player market – render all other competitors ineffective.

The biggest point raised throughout the article is that while other cell phone makers (Samsung, Motorola, LG, etc.) are spending time trying to add more features like cameras, speakerphone, and colors (ooooh look – twelve shades of pink!), Apple has realized that the key to consumers’ hearts is better and more useful software.

Listen, unless you’re sitting on the can or wasting time in an 8am calculus lecture, you’re probably not playing games on your phone.  So we can just about eliminate that from the “features” package.  And you’re probably not too worried about how to take pictures of that weird looking kid sleeping two rows in front of you while the professor drones on about integrals and factorials and all the other big math words I’ve tried to erase from my memory.  But what most consumers – whether they’re high school/college kids, young adults, or older Americans just getting introduced to the wide world of touchscreen smartphones by Apple – are looking for is something “new” and something useful.

GPS is useful.  Visual voicemail is useful.  Better text messaging programs are useful.  QWERTY keyboards for typing are useful.  Pocket programs like Word, Excel and Media Players are extremely useful.  But none of these are worth the price unless they work and they work consistently.

That’s where other cell phone makers have fallen short.  They’ve reinvented the slim flip-phone eleventy-billion times, but they’ve yet to realize that what we really want isn’t a smaller phone with the same features as the last seven models, but a phone that can do everything we want and still fit in our pocket.

Apple has figured this out (and on the second try, no less!).  And unless Google’s Android OS is at the very least comparable to the iPhone – and more importantly, has a solid interface to work with other applications – then the iPhone is going to be the gold standard in cell phones for a very long time.  Sorry Corey.