Head of KPN, Ad Scheepbouwer, was recently interviewed by the Financial Times and this is what he had to say about the iPhone.
“I had one and I thought it was a pretty useless phone, to be quite honest,” he told the Financial Times. “The battery ran out in no time. I didn’t like the touch screen.
“We’d be more than happy to sell it,” he added. “We have half the market in the Netherlands and we hope we will be the party of choice.”
He’s also not impressed by the 70k units that were sold in Germany by E-Plus, the German arm of KPN. In the fourth quarter, E-Plus gained 700k new customers.
A relative of mine who has worked as an executive in the cellphone industry for quite some time (no one famous or super-important, but who I doubt would want me identifying him in a blog comment) and I were talking about the iPhone at thanksgiving this last November.
He had tried one out and absolutely hated it — but from what I found out it was completely because of the input method for text (via the touch screen). He was so accustomed to the Blackberry keyboard, and does so much e-mail via his phone, that the iPhone wasn’t the right fit for him.
What he didn’t understand is that the average user who hasn’t been using “smart phones,” Treos, Blackberries, etc. for the last nine years not only doesn’t need to send the volume of e-mails via their phone that he does, but that this interface is much easier for them as they haven’t been trained into the old one.
I suspect it’s the same perspective bleeding in with the KPN CEO as well.
That’s a very good point, Trae.
Just a not from the Netherlands: KPN is famous for being utterly clueless about anything else but pure telecom. This is the same clown that though the crappy NEC phones with the crippled walled garden iMode were a great invention.
Read: KPN was NOT selected by Apple as the exclusive seller of the iPhone — prince Scheepbouwer (love the picture) was not told officially but the rumors from the competing telco had reached him.