Follow along this letter faxed and emailed by the writer to Apple on June 1st, 26 days before the iPhone was to be released in the U.S. The most important parts are in bold for those that want to breeze through it.
The iPhone is a great amalgamation of a post-modern mobile phone, the most popular music device in history and all of the features that the two could possibly share. The most interesting of which to me is that this makes the iPod Wi-Fi enabled for the first time. Surely with access to the iTunes music store from any hot spot there will no doubt be some measurable increase in media sales. The infrastructure is in place around the world at airports, hotels, coffee shops and Apple stores I'm sure, though living in Western Canada I have never had the enjoyment of being in one, so I may be wrong about that last one. These are all very populated places that are not frequented too often by the same people. Furthermore they are not locations that a person tends to listen to music at. For this reason, I believe you have a huge sales opportunity that would not require a partnership with the mobile carrier slugs.
Nation-wide millions of people are using public transit to go to and from work. Some major metropolitan areas, like your SF Bay Area have more than a million tickets sold per day, and even the smaller cities like Vancouver can see a few hundred thousand daily riders. This is also a very common time for them to be using their iPod it seems to me. In fact with the exception of working out at the gym, the only time I see people in public listening to their iPod is during their commute. Creating a way for those who will buy the iPhone to download a new album to listen to or the latest TV episode on the way home from a stressful day may prove to be the most profitable catalyst your media store can receive. I observe that people are more inclined to buying new content at the moment they want to use it, rather than before and after the fact and that is so crucial in this idea. A high-speed digital vending machine that serves its content via Wi-Fi may just be the ticket to collect on a missed sales opportunity. For the purposes of this letter I will refer to it as the iStation, an Apple branded hot spot located at train stations and bus loops to sell media and perhaps software while a customer is waiting for their ride. You can expand this kind of service to providing games for sale, and allow RSS feeds to be updated automatically as a rider comes within range of the iStation signal. How great would it be to read your morning news on that beautiful display ?
This approach is much more cost effective than the antiquated technology mobile carriers are using to deliver content, and is more practical than using a "Milan" type gadget, or giant iPhone screens as I like to call them, to transfer files to portable devices. You already have a billing structure setup with iTunes accounts and pre-paid cards from shops so there wouldn't be any need to amend purchases to cellular bills. It would also be an incredibly simple thing to market since you are already purchasing advertising at these locations, and you can make the phone alert its user that an iStation is available to connect to. Most importantly, by distancing this service from AT&T this can be a stepping stone for the next generation of iPods if they are Wi-Fi enabled too. Certainly your phone sales will be large, but the iPod as a stand alone media tool will always out-sell it in my opinion.
June 26 rolls around and the iPhone is released with Wi-Fi but no way to access the iTunes store directly from it. Maybe my suggestion wasn't worth the paper it was written on, but two months down the road out comes the iPod Touch and it shows off something that the iPhone does not have (until firmware upgrades are released); the new iPod has a wireless version of the iTunes store.
They've also signed on with Starbucks to give people out of home/office access to it. I guess public transit is too difficult a domain for Apple to step into.
A sudden addition to their product line within two months is odd enough, especially considering the popularity of the iPhone, but the fact that in those two months the new feature of the wireless iTunes store is thrown in the new iPod is fairly suspect.
