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Few top­ics have inspired as much ani­mated con­ver­sa­tion within the agency recently as the launch of the iPhone. There are even rumours – which I can nei­ther con­firm nor deny – that two senior Ban­ner exec­u­tives have staked a rea­son­ably hefty sum of money on whether or not Apple will still be in the mobile phone busi­ness in three years’ time.

Atti­tudes so far seem to fall into three main camps:

• Apple has a new shiny prod­uct and I want one. It’s a mobile phone? It doesn’t mat­ter, I want one anyway.

• The iPhone is offer­ing some rad­i­cally new ideas (e.g. the touch-screen inter­face) that will shake up the industry.

• The iPhone is a niche offer­ing that isn’t going to keep Nokia awake at night.

I think there are ques­tions about the scale of Apple’s ulti­mate ambi­tion. And I sus­pect it will slowly dawn on the world through this year what a mas­sively pow­er­ful and resource­ful global dis­tri­b­u­tion machine Nokia has built – with an con­comi­tant acknowl­edge­ment of what an under-appreciated asset this machine is.

I also think there’ll be a rue­ful admis­sion from Apple that, yes, the mobile busi­ness has turned out to be alto­gether trick­ier than we antic­i­pated. In the short term it’s going to be very inter­est­ing to see how the Apple-Cingular (or should that now be Apple-AT&T?) rela­tion­ship plays out.

In the long-term – in the unlikely event that any­one is inter­ested — my per­sonal hunch is that the iPhone is the last huz­zah of the old order. It’s an old-fashioned way of doing things i.e. a walled gar­den hermetically-sealed black-box approach.

When the iPhone was announced, some­one at Ban­ner sent an excitable email sug­gest­ing that this should become the agency’s stan­dard mobile device. To which our esteemed Finan­cial Direc­tor sent a tart reply: “On your bike.”

In con­clu­sion, there­fore, I have to say, firstly, I think our Finan­cial Direc­tor is bang-on. Sec­ondly, I’d be very inter­ested in see­ing the Apple iBike. Now that could really be some­thing and, as we all know, Apple is no longer just a com­puter company.

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