It is not often that you find the head of a company admitting that his company’s flagship product has lost steam. So you can bet that our ears pricked up when Nintendo’s President, Santoro Iwata, admitted that the Wii – the console that had so famously rubbed the noses of PS3 and XBox 360 in the dirt -had stalled. "Games of high demand could not be continuously released and the good mood has chilled,” Iwata told Japan's Mainichi Newspaper in an interview that has been doing the rounds of the gaming circuit. And he certainly needs to be commended for being realistic – after the initial euphoria surrounding its amazing motion-sensing gaming concept, the Wii came up short in the department that matters most for many gamers – gaming titles. And with both Microsoft and Sony promising motion sensing gameplay in the coming months, the Wii literally ran out of steam.
There are many in the tech world who believe that there are parallels between the Wii and the iPhone. The iPhone just like the Wii beat better specced rivals mainly on the basis of its innovative touchscreen interface and its App Store. With other cellphone manufacturers upping the ante with larger, equally response touchscreens and launching app stores of their own, it is only a matter of time, say these gents and ladies, before the iPhone gets off its cloud. While this line of reasoning does have its appeal, it is a trifle over-simplistic. The iPhone will not stall like the Wii – at least, not yet – and the main reason for it is the massive lead it has picked up on the App Store front. With Apple confirming that there are more than 1,00,000 applications on its App Store, an iPhone user will have more app options than a Win Mo, Symbian S60, BlackBerry, Palm Web OS or Android user. In fact, the App Store right now has more apps than its rivals put together!
It is this software edge that is likely to keep the iPhone going for quite a while. Even if the competition does manage to catch up in number of apps, the fact that there are so many devices and that not every app will work with each one will tie down the rivals. Android, with its one-store-for-all-devices policy, is the only one that comes close to mimicking the Apple App Store in this regard. Nokia’s Ovi Store and Microsoft’s Windows Market Place have some excellent apps but many of these are restricted to certain devices, unlike the App Store where most apps run on all generations of the iPhone (although that is slowly changing).
The Wii’s users gave up because they could not get the games and software they wanted on their console. The iPhone’s users are not likely to face that situation soon. Which is why the iPhone will not go the Wii way. Not yet.
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