Inside The "Smartphone" Wars

(CBS)  Apple just revealed the next generation of its popular iPhone.

As CBS News Science and Technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg reports, the latest unveiling came on the heels of one from Palm, and with Research in Motion still going strong.

Could the competition hit Apple at its core?

It all amounts to a newly-rekindled "war" among "smartphone" makers.

Apple's latest iPhone is the 3G S.

"The 'S' simply stands for speed," Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller, told the company's developers' conference in San Francisco, "because this is the most powerful, fastest iPhone we've ever made."

Its biggest new features are voice-control and a built-in video camera, Sieberg points out.

The new iPhone will sell for $199, starting June 19, but apple isn't alone in its quest for your gadget dollars, Sieberg notes.

The latest device to give the iPhone a run for its money is Palm's Pre, released this past weekend.

"It actually feels like a phone," said one satisfied Sprint customer, "as opposed to the iPhone, which is kind of a little bit more of a brickish-type thing."

The Pre only works with Sprint and the iPhone with AT&T. And both have to survive competition from RIM's BlackBerry, among others.

"There's no doubt there's a smartphone war on this summer," industry analyst Michael Gartenberg, of the Interpret market-research firm Interpret, told Sieberg, "and they're all chasing after the same consumers and the same developers."

In other words, sums up Sieberg, the smartphone battle has only just begun.

[aka_KJB]

My new phone comes out in a couple of weeks, the HTC TouchPro II. That's a killer phone. Has a slideout keyboard (I hate the on screen only keyboards) but I can also use the old Palm-style writing box for text, which I love. Full touch screen, a set of fantastic media functions out of the box and, oh yeah, it can actually make a phone call. One of the things I'm really looking forward is with the slideout keyboard - you can slide it just a bit further and the screen will tilt up at a nice angle which lets you watch video easily by setting it on a table in widescreen mode. Also has the best speaker phone I've ever heard, cell phone or regular phone that also has great MP3 playback. Add some brilliant 3rd part applications that you don't have to go through the company store to acquire and load onto your phone and this is the best smartphone to hit the market. The Pre is okay but I'll wait a bit for the new Palm OS to work out some of its bugs. WinMo may have some image issues but those are easily taken care of by the aforementioned 3rd party apps and if you aren't doing anything stupid, it's rock solid (and I say this having owned and loved my Palm based Kyocera 7135 for years and utterly despising my WinMo Nextel phone when I was forced to use that).
The iPhone is mostly hype. I hated every minute I've used one. I test drove one for a couple of months when they first came out, test drove the last model for 3 months when it was released and actually have the S model in hand and am completely unimpressed.

[slapppy]

"My BlackBerry Bold Already Had !
I Love my CrackBerry 9000"

Cool I didn't know you had Open GL/ES 2.0 there with a dedicated 3D chip or dock connector SDK to enhance app which is around 50K right now. Maybe your talking about the "Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating" or the multiple languages support. Didn't know BB had that already.

[trueblueusa]

All those things that the new iphone now has

My BlackBerry Bold Already Had !
I Love my CrackBerry 9000

[jameskatt]

What this story left out is that Apple has lowered the price of the iPhone 3G to only $99 !!!!!!

At this price point, Apple will kill the Palm Pre ($299) and the Blackberries.

Apple has just stuck a huge sword into its rivals.

[hypermark]

I like to think of Apple?s maneuvers around iPhone as a ?block the kick? strategy; namely by relentlessly raising the bar, and now, lowering the floor price-wise, they are preventing the competition from finding its footing, something that I blogged about in:

Apple WWDC Keynote Analysis: Punishing the Wizard, Part Two
(http://******/2lC3yC)

Check it out if interested.

Mark

[slapppy]

"The latest device to give the iPhone a run for its money is Palm's Pre, released this past weekend."

For about a weekend, yes. After that, its back to the drawing board for Palm.