iPhone 4: Is Apple Changing or Just Playing the Game?

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Steve Jobs rolled out Apple’s iPhone 4 Monday at the WWDC 2010 Keynote in San Francisco, calling his company’s “new baby” a device that “changes everything. Again.”

But does it?

When Apple introduced the original iPhone in 2007, it altered the entire mobile phone market by emerging into a near vacuum, creating need and desire in millions of consumers who had no idea they needed or desired what the iPhone had to offer.

Today, some believe the iPhone has become passe based solely on its relative ubiquity across the landscape it both created and has managed to dominate for three years.

Others believe competitors such as Google, Palm and Blackberry have in the meantime produced equally effective, if not superior products that will, over time, equalize the distribution of market share among Apple and its rivals.

Below we’ve got a handy chart comparing the specs of the iPhone 4 and those of a few phones widely considered current rivals for “Best in Class” designation in the smartphone sector of the vast mobile phone market.

Only time — and hard sales numbers — will eventually tell the story, but based purely on technical indicia, the iPhone 4 is by no means clearly superior to its rivals. Then again, Apple’s success has always hinged on something much harder to define than the clear technical superiority of its products.

Many believe that no matter what kind of hardware specs an Apple phone may boast, it will always leave money on the table until the company’s exclusive service contract with AT&T ends. Others contend that no matter what its rivals produce, they will forever be a year — or more — behind Apple — because the engineers and designers in Cupertino continue to set the standard and continue to define what is and ought to be possible with a handheld device.

What it comes down to after all is said and done, aside from the amazing momentum Apple has cultivated in the global public mind over the past several years, is how the iPhone 4 feels, how it works and what it does, once people get it in their hands. And that verdict remains weeks away yet.

Perhaps we’ll have a better idea of the iPhone 4’s prospects when the first people begin camping out in front of Apple retail outlets in advance of the June 24 launch.

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