iPhone 4S: a catastrophe in the making :)

The iPhone 4S will surely be a success for Apple but it will be a disaster for everybody else:

Fact: The typical iPhone (and other Apple product) owner feels the need to flaunt their new and shiny device to all and sundry.

Fact: The new iPhone 4S looks identical to the old iPhone 4, so waving it around has lost its cachet (you might be a pretender simply waving your old phone around). How lame is that?

Fact: The one way to distinguish old and new is the Siri Voice Assistant.

Sad Fact 1: It will be necessary for iPhone 4S owners to continually ask their phones about the time and the weather, etc. etc. whenever they are at Starbucks, on the train or in the subway.

Sad Fact 2: Deprived iPhone 4 owners will need to obtain voice recognition apps like Voice Assistant or Vlingo so that they can talk to their phones too!

Sad Fact 3: Not to be outdone, Android phone people will start using Android’s voice recognition capablities in public too.

A cacophonous catastrophe in the making.

Photo Attribution: Witer

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Apple Rejecting Google Voice a diversion?

Perhaps Apple was right in stating that the Google Voice app implemented functionality already in the iPhone…  iPhone 3.1 !

Google and Apple could be cooperating to make Google Voice a native app, with all the advantages to Google: seamless operation of a native app, and available on every iPhone that come with or is upgraded to 3.1.

I think Google is eying the market penetration of the iPhone and would like to get its apps on every single one of these phones. And a Google Voice web app could not provide quite the user experience of a native app.

• Google Voice considered a cool app. Hard to believe that Apple would such an app on their phone, making it a less desirable product. And Apple’s strategy has always been to sell hardware.
• Google seems less annoyed about this that one might expect (perhaps Google is not ready for the onslaught of users from the iPhone user base…yet!).
• Google and Apple are natural allies against each have something to fear from Microsoft: Google search only has market share to lose to Bing, especially with the Yahoo deal. And the immanent release of Windows 7 must concern Apple.
• Google has cooperated with Apple before on Google maps and YouTube videos.
• Google Voice could come out of invite-mode simultaneously with the next Apple announcement. The timing seems right.
• MobileMe has been a PR disaster for Apple. Wouldn’t it make sense to somehow integrate MobileMe with Google or Google Docs? Perhaps the new iTablet could come with built-in support for Google Gears/Google Docs as an office app strategy.
• Less emphasis by Google on Android with the introduction of Google Chrome OS, which is much more of a threat to Microsoft than to Apple.
• Perhaps all this banning-Google-Latitude/rejecting-Google-Voice/Schmidt-stepping-down-from-the-board is just a smokescreen to heighten the surprise of this Google/Apple cooperation (check Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin travel plans on the day of the Apple fall announcement).

All fantasy or could any of this come to pass. What do you think?