IPhone accessory market set for slow start

By Scott Hillis

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Owners of Apple Inc.'s (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) iPod love to trick out the music players with cases, speakers and other accessories and its upcoming wireless iPhone promises to be no different.

But the iPhone accessory market looks like it will get off to a slow start when the device goes on sale this Friday due to the tight grip Apple kept to prevent information leaking to the market about its most anticipated product in years.

"Apart from measurement purposes, developers haven't been given access to the iPhone. Nobody's really been able to test it electronically with anything," said Jeremy Horwitz, editor- in-chief of iLounge, a top Apple news Web site. "The reality is that they want to have a tighter grip on accessories this go around."

While many accessories will be $10 or $20 afterthoughts to a purchase that will run $500 or $600, all those screen protectors and car chargers eventually add up to big money.

Every year, consumers spend at least $1 billion on iPod accessories and about 30 times that on phone accessories. The iPhone is poised to tap both markets.

"We're anticipating that the iPhone will do well and that the market for accessories will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars," said Shane Igo, a product manager for Belkin, one of the biggest accessory makers.

But with little information to go on, accessory makers such as Belkin and Griffin Technology, both privately held, are initially rolling out only the basics: protective cases and charging cables.

Gadgets such as FM transmitters that need to work closely with the iPhone's innards will have to wait until developers can get their hands on fully operational handsets.