The iPhone's potential downfall: Lack of mechanical keyboard
If there’s a potential disaster awaiting Apple’s iPhone, it’s that the smart cellphone lacks a mechanical keyboard.
It forces users to use a touch-screen keyboard, something that may throw of millions of young people accustomed to texting quickly on basic phones and, for that matter, also older professionals used to typing slowly on a full keyboard offered by a Palm or Blackberry.
There’s a story about this “billion-dollar gamble” in the NYT today.
Also, check out the experience of the Taiwanese company HTC, which recently released a new model, the HTC Touch. Its “TouchFLO” technology, which enables the owners to swipe up, down, and diagonally across the screen to navigate, has been billed by some as a direct challenge to the iPhone’s new approach (however, we caution here because this piece is written by the same author who wrote yesterday’s Times story about Facebook, which was inaccurate). Indeed, there are less hyped reports that reveal the HTC just isn’t working.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
