I have read a lot of blog posts about iPhone sightings in the United States and, in some cases, those are presented as exceptional events.

I run a quick Technorati search a few minutes before and got 117 result for the search iphone+sighthings. Quite funny.

I have to say that working for a mobile operator gives you a little insight of how things work when you are going to release a new handset to the market. Radio interoperability testing, application testing, usability testing and so on.

The fact that you may be able to see a non yet commercial handset in the hands of some user is not new at all. This happens for every new handset that is going to be launched.

iPhone is not different from any other mobile phone from this point of view.

Even the fact that Apple is trying to hide any details of the technical specifications of the handset is not new in the market.

Every operator has tight non disclosure agreements with handsets manufacturers the handle this stuff in the same way.

So, from a marketing standpoint, what is Apple and AT&T doing different here?

They are simply selling normal operations between an operator and an handset manufacturer as the biggest event for the mobile market in the last decade.

As some of my French friend would say: “Chapeau”.

Why do I blog this? Well, this is really unconventional innovation, isn’t it? Actually Apple has been doing this from a long time ago.