Janko in a Jar

Archive for the 'rant' Category

Why iPhone will be irrelevant!

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

I wanted to write a long elaborate rant about this, but realized only idiot would want to write an essays about an irrelevant thing . So I’ll just shoot out some bullet points and be done with it.

I recently went to phone-shop and bought myself a little noname Nokia for 20€ (ultra-cheapest phones were 5-10€, this was second level where I often buy). I only request from the seller to give me something with a web-browser.

Little did I know that I will be comparing it to iPhone few weeks later…

My little Nokia has a web-browser with Javascript/Ajax (which was a big surprise to me).
iPhone also has a web-browser, with Javascript/Ajax. And probably it’s more capable than mine, otherwise both are webkit-s.

My little Nokia has Flash Lite. I went to a page with embedded youtube player, pressed play and video played – on that page. I went to a page with a flash game I made in HaXe and I could play it on my mobile!
As you know iPhone doesn’t have Flash. Because it’s too slow for it’s poor cpu and burns batteries or something.

My little Nokia (like every shitty phone from stoneage) has Java. I played Java games, tried mobile processing apps, wrote my own app in it and ran it.
As you know iPhone doesn’t have Java. Because you know Java is slow! And eats RAM, so it get’s fat and it can bend that nice (patented) multitouch screen!

My little Nokia runs on SymbianOS. Which is, you know, Open Sourced! Go to it’s dev page and you see “There is code, bug-tracking, a wiki and forums.” and “Membership of the Symbian Foundation is open to everyone.” and more…
I suppose it’s better now but a while ago a colleague that got the permission from apple to develop for iPhone couldn’t tell me much about it because he had to sign a NDA…

With my little Nokia I could go to some webpage of some guy that made some-thing cool, downloaded his mobile app and ran it. I can also make my app right now, and put it on my fracken web page, what an unusual thing!
For non-jail-braked iPhone (correct me if I am wrong because I still can’t fully believe this) the only source of apps on the whole wide web is the AppStore. And I can’t even see the basic information of an iPhone app from any AppStore link because I need to have (bloated) iTunes installed to see the description and a screen shot. Web-browsers just aren’t capable of displaying that you know! Should I even mention the notorious AppStir reviewing process?

These features themselves have nothing to do with why iPhone will be irrelevant. But the taste they give has. Artificial limitations, extreme closeness — if Apple would be a person it would be the biggest control freak ever seen.

But this is reverse to where computer world evolved into, this is the the IBM 1982 mentality. Everything else is opening up, wikipedia, open source, creative commons, easy entry, removing bureaucracy, big corps opening up their API-s…

Mobile was still a very closed environment not long ago and this was one of rare spaces where Apple could pull this off, but game is changing fast.

And I don’t think iPhone is technologically superior to what others – can – make.

Apple has made a well polished walled castle and it was cool, but out-there is a BIG OPEN WORLD which is shitty and chaotic right now, but it evolves in the right direction and soon kings and queens will be simply left behind.