Indispensable, invidious, or just in vogue? That iPhone is here

IT WAS the moment that technology geeks the world over had been waiting for.

Apple last night unveiled its latest must-have gadget – the fifth incarnation of the iPhone in just four years. It will be released in Britain next Friday.

Behind the gasps of excitement over how thin it is, how small and how fast, was the sound of retailers’ tills ringing in anticipation of the queues of consumers ready to part with large sums of cash that have become an integral part of any new Apple product launch.

There may be a few customers who use the launch as a catalyst to move into the smartphone market for the first time. The majority will be buyers who, if not already owners of a previous iPhone, are already users of a competitor, merely wanting to upgrade to the latest incarnation.

Once a sector that was purely the domain of computer nerds, the gadget market has moved firmly into the mainstream in recent years.

A massive 20.3 million iPhones were sold in just the three months to June – a 142 per cent increase on the previous year – while its larger sibling the iPad racked up 9.25m sales over the same period. About half the iPhones sold are the current latest model – the iPhone 4.

And it is not just Apple products that generate a public furore around a launch. At the headquarters of online retailer Amazon, sales figures leaked yesterday suggested that in the first five days of pre-orders of the company’s new tablet Kindle Fire, 250,000 were snapped up – an average of more ethan 2,000 every hour. If that trend continues it will outstrip the iPad.

Leigh Sparks, professor of retail studies at Stirling University, said fans of new technology gadgets fall into two camps.

“There are those who want the new product because of functionality and when it comes to Apple products, you get things that are well designed and make life easier for consumers, which is why they are popular,” he said. “However, there are also those who may queue up to buy the new iPhone, but already have an iPhone 3 or 4 – they fall into the category of people who see phones as a status symbol.”

Journalists and technology experts in London and California were last night invited to a closed-doors event, with a card saying only: “Let’s talk iPhone”.

The new product, unveiled in San Francisco by new Apple chief executive Tim Cook – and piped by video link to a shop with blacked out windows in Covent Garden – revealed the iPhone 4S – an updated model, with faster graphics, better call quality, extended battery life, an improved camera and much quicker internet. It is also a “world phone”, meaning the company will not need to issue different models for different mobile operating systems globally. It will have a voice recognition feature – called Siri – which will answer questions about the weather and remind users to phone relatives before leaving work.

Economics professor Michael Waterson of Warwick University said he expected the new iPhone would sell for significantly above the recommended retail price due to “unprecedented” consumer demand.

“There are so many rumours about the improved specifications of the new iPhone and there is so much kudos attached to being one of the first people to own one of these coveted handsets,” said Professor Waterston, who has carried out a study into the prices paid for previous incarnations of the phone, finding that people paid between £600 and £1,500 for the handsets on auction website eBay in the first six weeks after the launch – almost triple the normal retail price of £499 to £599. “I think we will see prices in some cases rising to an unprecedented level,” he said.

“For those people who wanted to upgrade, but were put off, we are expecting this to be a much better phone,” said Luke Peters, editor of technology magazine T3. “Therefore, those people may be much more tempted to get an iPhone this time around.”

He added: “There are people who just have to have the latest phone to be in the club. It is a measure of who you are as a person – for some people, it is as important as the clothes you wear.”

Apple led the way in the smartphone market explosion with the launch of its first iPhone in 2007. Its touch-screen and tilting technology revolutionised the market.

“A lot of the features you find on many smartphones now stemmed from that first iPhone,” said Ernest Doku, technology expert at uSwitch.com.

“The popularity has only increased,” he said. “More and more people want the cutting edge gadget.”