In an open letter to Apple Inc., Tomi T Ahonen highlighted that the killer app on the iPhone, voice calls, that Steve Jobs have been touting at Macworld 2007, is not really the killer app. Instead, SMS-text messaging is.

Here’s an excerpt:

There is only one killer application in current (2.5G/3G) mobile phones. It is not voice calls. It is not music. It is not the camera function. The only killer app is SMS text messaging. Ever since Nokia first released its global messaging survey in 2001, to operator studies from the UK and France in 2002, to customer surveys in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia in 2003, onto South Korea and Japan; to the university study of phone addiction by the Catholic University of Leuwen in Belgium; and even now proven by the first American survey of SMS usage by ComScore Media Metrix - every scientific survey on the topic verifies that SMS text messaging is addictive. And that heavy users of SMS prefer text messaging to voice calls. Already more than half of British total population prefer communicating via SMS than voice on their mobile phones.

According to him, the fact that iPhone has no physical keypad, would actually put many people off. I sort of agree with him. Read the article and decide for yourselves, quite an insightful read.

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