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iPhone 4 – Behold the master at work

I finally got the chance to watch the Apple WWDC keynote last night in my living room on the Apple TV, now that statement qualifies me as an Apple fanboy in itself.  I have seen many stevenotes over the year, even one in person at a Macworld in New York a few years ago, but his performance at this years WWDC was quite brilliant.

So for anyone who makes presentations what tips can we learn from the master.

1 ) Steve always begins his presentation by setting the context, framing the market for the new product announcement. This he does by quoting some very carefully chosen and very selective statistics..so for example iPhone has 28% US smartphone share, compared to windows at 19% ? and Android at 9%, the next slide however drops Windows and compares mobile browser usage with iPhone having  a massive 58.2% compared to Androids 22.7% – I wonder what happened to all those windows smartphone users ?

2) Steve is the master salesman his description of the iPhone 4 is a work of genius, “a quarter thinner for something you did not think could get any thinner”, the retina display so high resolution your eyes cannot see the pixels anymore – quite brilliant.

3) When things go wrong Steve keeps his cool because he knows his stuff, this keynote will be remembered as the one when the wifi broke. There has been much debate as to why, but the end result was that Steve’s demos did no work very well. Rather than panic Steve unlike many CEO’s was able to diagnose the issue on stage and explain it, and then later on make a joke of it asking people to switch off their own wifi devices so he could continue with the demo.

4) Make people believe something is new by selling it better, so Facetime offers the ability to carry out a 1 to 1 video conference using two iPhones 4’s on wifi, "we have been waiting a long time to make this happen", eh no.. I remember calling my wife over the vodafone 3G network using a pair of different Sony Ericsson phones five years ago. Video calling did not really take off, the technology and the public was not really ready for it.

To make the public ready it needs to be sold not on the basis of technology, which the early vodafone live very much was, but the emotional strength of human communication. Compare the vodafone PR shot here with a still from the Facetime video ..

A lonely businessman away from his baby, stuck in a hotel room –  now that’s a market..

There are two really significant technology advancements that are of note and that may not have got as much attention as facetime or the retina display..

Firstly the iPhone 4 is the first quad band iPhone supporting the 900Mhz HSDPA band used extensively in the UK but not previously supported on iPhones. Wonder why your iPhone 3G coverage was often worse than other smartphones ?

Secondly supplementing the digital compass the 3-axis gyro will allow devlopes o crate much better augmented reality applications, potentially solving many of the pose problems suffered by the current generation of smartphones. In the future who knows maybe some clever software will turn the iPhone into a simple Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) which could allow indoor navigation applications ?

So once again the great snakeoil salesman has got me and I will be taking delivery of an iPhone 4 of thursday as my home phone to sit alongside by Nexus One work phone.

Now which network….

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

2 replies on “iPhone 4 – Behold the master at work”

Good assesement Ed. People realy do need to learn to present well, and Steve is a master. Even I have watched this stuff, and I am no Mac man – simply to learn you have to look at the best.

Is there an app for when you touch the antenna and your reception drops to nothing, to hear Steve’s voice telling you you’re “holding it wrong”?

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