Phone features

So1 I’m in a corporate strategy exercise. A fellow participant was searching for an analogy to make his point, and took the iPhone as an example. So far so normal - the iPhone is now deeply embedded in the enterprise, to the point that there was only a single BlackBerry holdout in the room.  

The interesting thing is that my colleague went on to list ten features of the iPhone - and did not include voice calling! POTS2 is no longer the most important feature of these devices, or even the most frequently used one. I know I use Phone.app an order of magnitude less than Skype and Lync even for voice communications. FaceTime still lags slightly, because I mainly use that for video calls and those are not always appropriate.  

When is a phone… not a phone?

  1. Don’t you hate people who begin stories with “So…”? I know I do. ↩

  2. Plain Old Telephone Service, in case you didn’t know - because you hardly ever use it any more. ↩