It’s more than mildly disturbing, it’s pure idiocy, verging on outright
suicide on Apple’s part. When you make your phone into a full-featured
computer capable of attracting the attention of platform development tools
such as SDL, you need to stop thinking of it as a phone and
start thinking of it as a computer. Ditch the “carrier” altogether, market
it as a VOIP-enabled pocket computer, and let buyers pick up ISPs as their
carriers and make their phone calls over a VOIP program. Then open the SDK
up and let all the developers get their hands on it and build things for
their “iPhone computer platform,” which will draw users. Not doing that is
how Apple lost out on the PC market despite their products being superior to
the Wintel alternative in literally every other way. Now they’re making the
same mistake again. It’s kinda sad, no?
Cough
Drugs much ?
The iPhone is a phone. It has PHONE in it’s name for God’s sake. Sure,
it’s got beefy hardware and beefy OS. So do other smart phones. They’re
still phones.
You might have a possible argument with the iTouch needing to be treated as
more like a tiny PC. Sure, turn it into a UMPC then charge the extra $700
simply because it’s being marketed as such. Have fun with that :).
Drop the carrier ? It’s a phone. Okay, hypothetically say we not be
bundled specifically with a given carrier in a given region. The carrier is
going to request custom firmware for the phone to be sold/marketed for their
own network. I imagine again the carrier is going to limit what’s allowed.
Then you’ll undoubtedly need the carrier to setup an app repository for
approved applications.
Do it VOIP ? For the iTouch, maybe. But I’d really rather not have my
phone only work as long as there’s an accessible wifi spot available. In
some metro areas, there may nearly always be 2 open wifi networks available
everywhere… but not here in Omaha, and certainly not along the highway or
friend’s house who is computer iliterate. Oh, maybe drop the voice features
of the carrier and strictly use it as a data service ? Have fun working out
the billing on that one. And blanket/city-wide wifi ISP’s are hit and miss
depending on your region.
In regard to podcaster (or whatever it’s name is), the ‘duplication of
functionality’ seems flakey. But Apple is notorious for lacking details. A
’bandwidth abuse’ rejection followed by a ‘make it only pull pod casts via
wifi’ resolution makes alot more sense. From my understanding it downloaded
pod casts to the phone. There might be some legal/agreement issue with this
(laws, regulations, licensing regarding audio is extremely anal here in the
US). Aside from any of the legal/licensing/agreement issues – lets look at
it a bit more technically. iTunes doesn’t allow music purchases via the
cell network - you have to be on a wifi connection. My understanding is
also that large apps can’t be brought down via the cell network either.
podcaster may have allowed bringing down pod casts (which could be on the
order of hundreds of mb’s) via the cell network. The app devel agreement
states in general terms that ya shouldn’t do such things. It’ll be
interesting to see if there’s ever more details pushed on why the app was
turned down.
-Will