It seems that the biggest competitor to the popular Apple iPhone may be… the Apple iPod Touch.
With the release of the Apple sales figures for the holiday period this week, it showed that iPods were up 3% over the same period last year, but iPhone sales were down from 6.9 million units in the third quarter, to 4.4 million in the fourth. While that is still a respectable number of units to move, it didn’t meet expectations from Wall Street.
While Apple doesn’t break iPod sales figures down by the various units, web traffic for the mobile version of Safari, the built-in browser, tripled on Christmas day. There was also a 100% increase in downloads from the App Store, that, again, serves both the iPhone and iPod Touch users. While these numbers aren’t concrete since we do not have explicit iPod Touch sales figures, it does leave one to wonder if this device is cannibalizing some of the sales from its bigger brother.
The iPod Touch is lacking two things that the iPhone offers: a built-in phone and an exclusive contract with AT&T.
The phone part has partially been solved by the second generation of Touches having the ability to use a microphone/headset combination. Because of this new feature, you can now use various VoIP apps to make and receive phone calls with it whenever you are near an open Wi-Fi network. That is one major hurdle overcome.
As for the AT&T contract, well, while iPhones may appear cheaper in the short term, when you add in the service plans they require you to buy to make your device work, the Touch is an absolute steal at $399 for the 32GB version.
We here at StarterTech are huge fans of the iPod Touch, even to the point that our very first post was about the device. While we would love it even more if we had a fully functioning phone, and didn’t have to rely on Wi-Fi, we also are not big fans of AT&T service. For now we carry our first generation Touches and BlackBerrys, and are quite happy we don’t need to deal with AT&T. We are not alone in this feeling as it was also stated by CNet News.
The iPod Touch: everything great about the iPhone, minus AT&T.
That pretty much sums up how we feel too, and it also appears to be how a lot of consumers are beginning to also feel.
