Engadget has raised an interesting question. They point out that since the advent of the phone, at least since its mass adoption, other industries have and continue to suffer (watches, cordless phones, pagers, etc).

Will the iPhone begin to kill off other industries? Well let’s look at the current industries that the iPhone invades:

GPS
Video Cameras
Music Players
Mobile Gaming
Everything there’s an App for

If I were to guess, the next iPod Touch will probably have a built-in camera. YouTube has already seen a 400% rise in uploads thanks to the iPhone 3GS. Apply that type of growth to the other industries (except music players, Apple already rules it) and we’ve got Flip video cameras and other small cam corders becoming irrelevant, GPS devices going obsolete, etc.

The idea isn’t really that crazy. A device that has an App “for just about anything” can become your everything device; the device of the future that everyone dreams of. That’s really the genius of the App store. The truth is that when the iPhone was first released Apple had no idea what it had in its hands; a gold mine. They didn’t supply developers with an SDK for a long time, and at first claimed that web Apps were the way to go. Obviously inaccurate.

As Apple improves on the iPhone (rumor has it the next one will have multi-cores), it will become faster, better, amazing features will be added, and perhaps that long awaited tablet will be released. In my opinion, if they ever do, it will run the iPhone OS (probably version 4, 5, or something even closer to a full OS X) and be closer to a computer than anything else. ANYWAY, my point being that yes, as the iPhone grows, as its OS is improved, as more Apps get made, the iPhone has the potential to make many electronics industries obsolete.

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Tags: Electronics, Future Tech, iPhone, OS X