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Friday, January 12, 2007
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 Friday, January 12, 2007
started 1/12/2007; 11:14:28 AM - last post 1/12/2007; 12:20:02 PM
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Doc Searls - Friday, January 12, 2007 
1/12/2007; 3:14:28 PM (reads: 5341, responses: 1)
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whyPhone 
| | My own first question was "Where's the GPS?" Absence of that would be a deal-killer for me. But then at CES I talked with Garmin folks about the universal connected utility of bluetooth GPS receivers. The iPhone does bluetooth. Nothing to stop anybody from making the iPhone display and otherwise add value to information from a bluetooth GPS receiver. |
| | And will Apple prevent customers from using Skype to talk over wi-fi or EDGE? Not if Apple wants to make good on Steve's description of the iPhone as " a breakthrough Internet communications device". |
| | Knock what's closed about the iPhone all you want; it's still a computer with a mike, a screen, a speaker and a pile of other input and output openings that invite developments of many kinds. That's why I think iPhone is going make the cell phone market a lot bigger. It will encourage participation by developers and customers that have until now been forced to cope with far less than they've wanted from the cell phone industry. And that includes all the legacy cell phone players with which Apple now partners or competes. |
| | Think of the Big Brother Apple add from 1984. I think this is just as big a hammer as the one that woman in the red pants threw at a screen 23 years ago. The phone business ain't gonna be the same any more. |
| | But it's not like the walled garden has gone away. "You don't want your phone to be an open platform," meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. "You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn¹t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up." |
| | I'm with Michael Gartenberg, who asks, |
| | Really? What about other smartphones that run on Cingular's network (and that Cingular sells) like the Cingular 3125 or Blackjack, (Both are Windows Mobile phones) or the Treo 680 (based on Palm OS)? Those are all open platforms that anyone can develop applications for and any user can purchase and install those applications without any issues from the carrier. |
| | Apparently Cingular isn't worried about any of those applications or platform bringing down their West Coast network. |
| | Well, it's good either way. Because a closed iPhone is a market opening for Nokia, Motorola and the rest of them. |
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Doesn't the "revolutionariness" of this device at least to some extent depend on how Apple is able to treat/relegate the carrier to being a content-agnostic "dumb pipe"? I tend to think that the semi-revolutionary mobile UI is a step in that direction - and yes iPhone being a "computer with a mike, a screen, a speaker and a pile of other input and output openings" does tend to reinforce the "intelligence at the edge of the network" meme.
But a couple aspects still concern me. One is the Cingular-exclusivity (I'd never consider this device regardless of price point until at least one other carrier and preferably T-Mobile since they work better nearly everywhere I seem to use a mobile device). Another is Apple's perceived closed-to-outside-development platform (think they'll release some form of iPhone SDK?) and silo'd iTunes vertical content distribution and rights management business model. Sync everything on this device through iTunes, huh?
That said, I guess I don't really mind that Cingular is adding some of the value to iPhone in the form of the random-access voicemail selection service (seems to be a reasonable place for carriers to compete and differentiate with each other), and I'm encouraged that the embedded Safari browser ought to at least allow client-side JavaScript mashup development. So I guess I agree with Doc that allowing/preventing Skype is a good test case, which is just a specific example of the general principle of allowing any other application or service to more-or-less seamlessly move between GSM and WiFi connectivity to the internet.
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