A Sustainable Train of Thought

Last night I had a conversation with some friends about the iPhone and whether it will have as big an effect on the cell phone market as everyone else seems to think.

Sure, it’s got a cool UI and the touch screen doesn’t hurt either, but I wasn’t so sure there was really that much more to make it stand out from the competition. The ability to play music has made its way into a number of other phones, so that’s not a differentiator. And the Prada phone shows that others can quickly ape the same look-and-feel. The only real difference is that the iPhone is running Leopard, a computer operating system.

Then it occurred to me: the most valuable thing for people that exists on a mobile phone is their address book. And .Mac has had address book synching for years. Connect the dots and you no longer need an on-device address book.

Well, perhaps that’s a bit extreme. How does this sound: keep the address book local to the device, but synchronize it every so often with .Mac. Lose your phone and you’d still have your friends’ numbers (even if you’re out a couple of hundred dollars). I’d bet that kind of functionality would attract a lot of attention.

Like most ideas, this is not a new one (as a little research this evening revealed) but I think Apple has the opportunity to provide a level of integration between handset and software which really isn’t present in other phones.

I can synch my Sony Ericsson phone to my Powerbook with a couple of clicks and a bluetooth pairing, but what if all this was managed over the air, pushed from my iPhone and synched with my computer, all without me having to push any buttons? I personally think that would be pretty cool….

What other kinds of integration do you think .Mac might enable with the iPhone?

I always forget this, so I’m recording it here for future reference and for the benefit of any other lost souls who are looking for this particular key combination. It’s too late for me, but hopefully it will save someone else from wasting several minutes of their life looking for this information….

To get a line break within a cell in Excel X for the Mac, use the following key combination:

Apple-Option-Enter

You’re welcome….