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Editorial

Editorial - iPhone Creates More Panic in Small-ville

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 4:55 PM - by

Now that the Apple iPhone has full enterprise support and an amazing business model that developers will flock to, those with feet of clay and small minds are dragging out every possible excuse to avoid one core idea: the iPhone is the best smartphone on the planet, and it's going to become a major force in the mobile phone world.

It's like watching kids squirm when they don't want to take a bath before bedtime. Here are just some of the current arguments from C|Net (1,2) and the WSJ (3,4,5) [Subscription may be required.]

1. Apple wants too much control. Any company that wants to control the security of their product is evil and monopolistic.

2. The prohibition on VOIP over EDGE violates net neutrality. (Got that?) Never mind the fact that VOIP is designed to send voice over a packet switching network, and embedding VOIP inside an IP protocol sent over a digital voice network like EDGE is technical lunacy when the iPhone already has Wi-Fi built in.

3. Apple announced support for Microsoft Exchange. That's unfortunate because it excludes Lotus Notes and Novell systems.

4. The iPhone only works on the AT&T network, one of the largest GSM networks on the planet. Those companies that insist on using Sprint and Qwest will just be out of luck. Shucks.

5. Businesses that have selected the BlackBerry will be reluctant to switch. Change is awfully upsetting.

Actually, what's upsetting to many is seeing Apple outmaneuver, outthink, and outmarket the competition. For a long time now, it's been the custom to point out that Macs are (finally, grudgingly) really cool, but when it comes to market share, the fact is, Apple is still a small time player. What's being noticed now is that Apple is winning big and that the iPhone, thanks to the technology and business model, is poised to become the next major mobile computing platform, and there is apparently nothing any other company can do about it.

Perhaps the Federal Government will step in and put a stop to this Apple madness. Heaven knows who else will.

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BurmaYank said:

member since 22 Oct 2003 with 27 posts, unranked , send him a message or view his profile

Tue Mar 11, 2008 5:04 pm

But, will the iPhone SDK prohibit application multi-tasking?

This news looks pretty bad to me! (I wish I understood it better) Is this guy wrong in his conclusions?:

Quote:

"Apple restricts 3rd party developers with lack of multi-tasking on the iPhone" - Matthew Miller, ZDNet, 9 Mar 08, http://blogs.zdnet.com/mobile-gadgeteer/?p=934&tag=nl.e622

... However, after reading more about the iPhone SDK ... the news of lack of multi-tasking took me back to 2002 (launch of Palm OS 5 and hopes of multi-tasking).

We know that the iPhone can obviously multi-task now with the Apple applications, and even with jailbreaked apps, since you can perform tasks such as initiating an email download and then bounce over and surf the web and then bounce over and check stocks. Buried in the 100-page iPhone Human Interface Guidelines of the SDK documentation is the following statement:

	Quote:
	Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. (p. 16) ( http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/07/iphone-sdk-some-of-the-details-arent-great/ )

Wow, there goes all the plans for those great Instant Messaging applications that would provide you with notification and keep you logged in while you use your device with other applications. Something like an IM application would work if you only used Appleâ€™s applications in conjunction with it, but with what I imagine will be a large selection of 3rd party applications there would be no way to manage how people use their devices.

One of the main reasons I rarely use Palm OS devices is their lack of true multi-tasking. There are some Palm applications that developers wrote to multi-task as best as they can, but you canâ€™t surf the web, leave the browser and go do something else and then come back and expect to be just where you were in the browser again. Windows Mobile and S60 have multi-tasking support on their devices and these operating systems manage running applications pretty well. Based on how the iPhone has performed for me over the last year, I think Apple does an even better job at managing their multi-tasking in iPhone native applications and it is a shame that 3rd party developers will be limited with their applications.

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daemon said:

member since 17 May 2007 with 344 posts, unranked , send him a message or view his profile

Tue Mar 11, 2008 8:32 pm

This is one insulting editorial.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Mar 11, 2008 8:42 pm

"This is one insulting editorial."

Who is it insulting to? All the usual naysaying "experts" and "analysts" who have been dumping on the SDK, while real developers who overloaded Apples servers downloading the SDK and have already started working on the next cool app? To the usual suspects who spewed all the negative blather before the iPhone was released, who told us why the iPod would fail, who (I'm talking to you Dvorak, you poseur) told us the Mac would fail beacuse no serious person would ever us a mouse?

You mean those wankers?

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