iPhone probably not going to change the world… yet
Last night, I was amused to find a frantic email sitting in my inbox from a former co-worker, begging for a list of reasons for why he shouldn’t run out and impulsively purchase the much coveted gadget of this year, the IPhone. My initial reaction was to remind him of the Apple purchasing mantra - “never buy 1st gen”, something that has served me well over the years with the various Ipod releases.
His email made me think about the IPhone in a different way - as a developer, I’ve been stuck pondering the development possibilities and limitations mobile development inherently presents. But for someone much like my friend, who is a self-proclaimed gadget fiend, I had to think about things a bit differently to stop him from jumping on the Apple love bandwagon.
As for my friend - he lives and loves his gadgets and the integration of his gadgets to create the most unified seamless experience as possible. If there is something that will allow one of his many technological accessories to interact with another, he’s all over it. In many ways, he’s what people proclaim web 2.0 to be, personified - he not only consumes, but generates and contributes - he texts more than he emails, captures video and sends it straight to youtube, shares pictures, has 4 or more IM clients, uses Twitter, Pownce, and now proclaims Facebook to be more than just a platform but a way of life.
So what does the IPhone have to offer him? And my answer is, I don’t think too much at this point. Part of me says this because of the development limitations with the IPhone ensure that the type of application that a power user such as my friend would use and love, cannot happen. And part of me thinks that the unique touch screen interaction won’t be enough to make it the best thing since sliced bread.
Touch screen aside, the feature set that Apple has put forth to market, doesn’t necessarily appear to be exactly innovative. So you can synch contacts, save memos, share pictures and watch YouTube videos. But can you record video and have a click publish like my friend has with his current phone? So it has internet capabilities - yet the way you interact with that experience is once again limited and has been often reported to be painfully slow. The unique touchscreen UI means that users now have to relearn how to navigate a site - and means that because of the nature of touchscreen, many sites/applications will have to be specificially designed and created for the IPhone to take advantage of that - much like the bunch of sites that were designed and created for the Wii specification. It seems to be moving away from standards, to a degree, rather than embracing them. But perhaps its their chance to forge new standards for development and deployment, something that is sorely lacking for a variety of reasons in the mobile development community.
So, to my friend. Buy second generation. By then, Apple usually has ironed out all the issues - both strategically and technologically like the outstanding security and business implications/issues of doing what a bunch of developers want to see - and thats access to the OS.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 8:30 am and is filed under Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 25th
2007 at 10:24 am
‘Buy second generation’ … that’s how I do all my major purchases
July 25th
2007 at 3:40 pm
Stacey - the mere fact that companies are now developing and launching iPhone products should indicate that it has changed the world work, right?
July 26th
2007 at 8:48 am
Dave -
I agree with you, its changing the mobile market entirely, but I think that power users will be a bit disappointed in terms of sharing and accessing content they are used to doing daily amongst other things. Those people are growing in number as the barrier to entry for many of these social media applications is lowered.
Seamless connectivity comes to mind, especially for the household of the future. You can say the same thing for the Nintendo Wii - people started building applications/ sites just for those specs,and the Wii has changed the game console market significantly by increasing the target audience. So perhaps I should take that back - its changing the world for sure and mobile development , but I still think its got a ways to go in terms of the growing market of power users.
July 26th
2007 at 8:28 pm
It may not change the world per se, but it probably raises the bar for all other competing companies. Isn’t that what they did with OSX? OSX has its flaws and will never capture certain markets, but it made Microsoft sit up and listen. Seamless is probably the key word here; I imagine we’re getting to the point where the actual computing device can be really small, but the required input/output interfaces are holding us back. Which is where the iPhone comes in. Even if the name is somewhat predictable!
I don’t own one and never will.
August 1st
2007 at 8:48 am
I agree that the iPhone was a major advancement in terms of UI and integration, but I also agree with Stacey’s point that if it had been opened up to technologies like Flash, and other development tools, the community could have made iPhone much more. Maybe Apple will allow more user-development as the device stabilizes over time, but even as someone who wants an iPhone slightly less than he wants oxygen, I was pretty disappointed to read how closed it was.
August 8th
2007 at 2:12 pm
Closed == Apple, does it not? Though I agree that maybe it should be more open in time.