Last year, YOU were Time Magazine’s person of the year — thanks largely to the social computing revolution brought to you by Web 2.0 tools. This year, Time Magazine have put the iPhone on their front page and heralded to the four corners of the earth that it’s the best thing since sliced bread. But is it really?
I thought about buying one a while ago, but realised that, without voice-dial and a few other bits, I’d be better off just replacing the battery on my Motorola Razr. Even Time agree that the iPhone has some shortcomings:
“The thing is hard to type on. It’s too slow. It’s too big. It doesn’t have instant messaging. It’s too expensive. (Or, no, wait, it’s too cheap!) It doesn’t support my work e-mail. It’s locked to AT&T in the USA.” – Time Magazine
But the iPhone’s features list (or lack of them) isn’t the point of Time’s article. The importance of the success of the iPhone is that it shows that Joe Public is ready for real mobile computing — for agile web applications that can be used any where, any time, not just behind a desk, and not just online.
Nokia and Microsoft are sitting up and taking notice. And Apple lovers, don’t get too upset if they’re copying because Jobs shamelessly does it as well. Hopefully, maybe, Apple has just kicked the mobile phone market in the butt and we’ll soon see a new generation of truly mobile devices. Maybe then I will buy a smarter phone (with voice dial) 
M
17 November, 2007 at 1:57 pm |
Timely Matt as Google is looking set to bid on the 700 mhz spectrum for the entire US http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071116-its-official-google-planning-700mhz-bid.html
The reserve price is $10 Billion Dollars! =| http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070820-fcc-sets-10-billion-reserve-price-for-700mhz-auction.html?rel
With another $10 Billion in infrastructure likely to be sunk into it, it’s no wonder Google along with the Open Handset Alliance (http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/) are already offering developers their free Android SDK (http://code.google.com/android/) with a rebuilt Java VM front end (not sun’s) mobile apps development could take some giant leaps in the coming years. Along with being Always Online on the 700Mhz spectrum. This is beggining to sound like a shameless plug for google but good on them! Google has also embraced the facebook philosophy of replacable applications (without penalty) where by the user can say well the google photo app that comes with my phone does the job but I use flicr online and they have a photo app that is free also and connects to my flicr account. The user replaces the application and all the calls for a photo application are now made to the flicr app (much like replacing the Wall app in facebook with SuperWall or Poke with SuperPoke!)
-JC