I'm not really a neutral observer on this--my employer has just closed a big development deal with Palm--but I would have thought it a no-brainer that a company selling a smartphone platform would want to let their user community go ahead and develop software for it.  There's not only a bunch of boring business crap that your boss wants you to have, but you can also put on a bunch of pretty cool free and open software apps that no company would ever bother trying to make and sell.  My Treo is cool because it has a tide estimator for surfing, a fuel logger for my car, a 32-in-one solitaire program, a pocket planetarium for locating planets and other stars, a graphing calculator, and a LISP interpreter.  Broken-in-upgrade my ass, some of those programs were written for the Palm OS before anyone outside Palm really knew the Treo was coming.  Windows, Symbian OS and other random handheld devices also let their users do similar things.

When is all that going to come out for the iPhone?  By everything that's right, the answer should be "it already has", since the thing runs OS X and it shouldn't be that hard for developers to port existing OS X apps over to it.  But no, users are given a bunch of pompous drivel about how opening up the platform would lead to blundering developers crashing the phone and ruining the "experience", or maybe turning it into a toy with their frivolous freeware.  Apple's acting like the same control freak it was 15 years ago, when the PC's flexibility for customization and easy software development turned me away from Macs.

I'm not too baffled about the issues with AT&T.  When I've worked on cell phones, my observation has been that the handset maker has always been much more open to innovation than the cell phone provider.  Twice I've seen proposed cost-meter features dropped from a phone in development because the carrier freaked out at the ability of people to see how much money they were burning at the moment.  In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Apple's closed-platform position is due to something they signed with AT&T--maybe part of their deal was to be as smothering with their customers as the carrier was.

On the price cut--from the fact that the cheaper phone has a bigger memory chip, I'm guessing that one of their suppliers came through with a delivery that wasn't expected when Apple was rolling out the launch.  I bet that the boards inside the $400 phone already look significantly different than the release models*.  Someone at Apple probably redid the math, saw that the $400 price point would get more revenue than $600, and suggested a price drop without anticipating the response of existing users.

* This is all totally guessing.  I know that people have opened up the phone and taken pictures of the circuit boards.  Does anyone knew where I can find a site where there are a lot of such pictures, to compare recent vs old crackings?

(is 3fingerspointback)

And it was OK.  It was the last in a long line of Palm-based smartphones that I had, starting with Handsprings.  But, when I switched phones, I went for a device that really did everything I wanted and had a larger community that any other smartphone, I got a Blackberry.

And, I have to say, it's the best smart phone I've ever had.   It does everything I want pretty much perfectly and some things I didn't even know I wanted very well (like satellite navigation).  Ok, it doesn't have a camera, which kinda sucks, but Bluetooth actually works, unlike the Treo.

It's also got a couple of other nifty features I like, such as:

• GPS enabled navigation with traffic alerts (in my pocket, how cool is that)
  
• Phone as modem with high-speed access (2.5 mb/sec in the best case)
  
• I can actually stick it in my pocked with out it, er, sticking me....

Basically, it just works, which is what I wanted.  I've owned my fair share of touchscreen based phones and there is NOTHING I hate more than having to dial phone numbers on them.   I've used the iPhone a fair amount (borrowed friends, been given demo phones to carry around at events, etc.) and there are a couple of things I dislike about it:

• No buttons - sorry, a pet peeve of mine.  Sometimes tactile feedback is good
  
• Predictive typing - try it in another language and see how annoying that is
  
• Face grease - no comment
  
• No GPS - Why, oh, why?  It's pretty useless for nav until it gets a GPS
  
• Edge - plz. I gave up dialup 12 years ago...
  
• Too long - maybe it's just me, but the length, er, sticks me when I sit down....
  
• ATT - enough said....

Price, etc, are not really an issue for me as I paid far more for a high-end BB last fall.  I use mine pretty intensively (10+ hours a day, sometime with 2+ hours of emailing, 3 hours of calls and an hour of navigation...), it's fallen off the roof of my car twice @ 40mph, been dropped 6ft onto concrete a dozen times, had metal dust blown all over it more times than I can count and it still works.  If only BB would add a camera, it would be perfect.  

Chris.

I've recently had a love-hate relationship with Apple. I used to be firmly anti-Mac, back in the 90s, when they were acting much more the big bully than Microsoft (i.e. the fiasco where they allowed other companies to license their hardware, then they didn't, also the point in time where MS was practically encouraging people to pirate Windows while Apple seemed much more anal-retentive about getting every dime out of their product). Since the Return of the Jobs, Apple has generally come across as more appealing. OSX is a superior operating system to Windows, and on some issues (such as the iTunes music store) Apple has come across as more or less an advocate of consumer rights.

Still, despite the image of a consumer friendly, edgy, hip company that Apple tries to project, the follow-through just doesn't seem to be there. If you scratch the surface, it's pretty obvious that Apple has been "on the side of the consumer" with iTunes more out of a sense of business-savvy than for any principled reason (anything you buy through ITMS is crippled by being formatted in Apple's proprietary coded, making it difficult / impossible to play on anything other than Apple hardware). Apple's hardware has had numerous quality control issues, from the battery fiasco of the early generation iPods to faulty laptop designs (the awful clamshell iBook powercords, the many issues with the early MacBooks, and just my own general feeling that for what you pay for them, Apple notebooks tends not to be terribly durable).

Now we have the iPhone, which on the surface appears revolutionary, but when it comes to function is heavily crippled by Apple's insistence on controlling the device. I would expect such from one of those heavily subsidized $10 with a $10 mail-in-rebate beginning phones you get with a low-end plan, but I'm shocked that anyone would shell out $400+ for hardware that's so heavily crippled. If the phone had actually followed through, I would have gladly paid that price, but considering that I could get the same functionality (if not the "cool" factor) in any number of other PDA cell phones, most of which are more open to independent developers and also cost less, I just don't see the value-added.

1. Lack of corporate mail support (Exchange). I realize that Apple probably made a concious decision not to go after the business market (i.e. Blackberries turf) but that one issue makes devices like the Treo/Blackberries far superior for people who would be willing to pay an even high rate plan. I say poor planning/engineering.

2. Lack of understanding of the European market. The iPhone launched recently in the UK to a somewhat underwhelming reception. People here are used to unlocked phones OR carriers giving away the phone for free in order to sign a contract. The lack of high speed network coverage in the iPhone (UK market doesn't have EDGE) means that much of whiz-bang features (maps etc) simply are more theoretical than not. Additionally (this goes back to the business users thing), people here travel to other countries quite often -- Belgium, France, Amsterdam...all a couple hours away. The design of the phone is configured to give you a horrendous data rate bill as it checks email.

Bottomline: I'd buy it for a kid in school if it weren't tied to a contract...as it stands however, its a high priced toy which locks you into its use for the next 2 years. Do we really think that the iPhone will be a best-of-breed phone 6 months from now much less 2 years?

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

It's a sign of the success of the platform that the bulk of the criticisms about the phone itself have been minor.

I'm not so sure...A shotgun marriage with AT+T*, jerking around first adopters, system upgrades wiping out independent software, lack of useful software in general.  This seem a bit more than minor.  And yes, requiring AT+T for a service provider is not really platform related, it seems like a big problem though.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

Questions:

Regarding the device's WiFi capabilities:

Is the WiFi connection functionality easy to operate and seamless, the way it is with Windows XP and Vista? That is, does it,

1. Automatically notify you when WiFi networks are available?
   
2. Allow for easy setup of the security (e.g., passphrases)?
   
3. Support WAP encryption?
   
4. Remember previously used networks and settings, and have easily-configurable options to seamlessly connect?

Does it do anything new, such as,

5. Sync contacts, emails, etc. wirelessly and automatically?
   
6. Sync iTunes files wirelessly?

Are there any sort of VPN/SSH / other secure tunneling capabilities,

7. Does it have any means to use websites on public WiFi networks while preventing someone with a sniffer from taking your logins or cookies?

I'm being both vague and polite here as AT&T slipped something new into their terms of service: AT&T reserves the right to terminate your service if you defame AT&T.

It's only defamation if it's not true.

In regione caecorum, rex est luscus.

    I was at the gym when the news came across the TV: a firm in California has filed a class action lawsuit (or what they hope will be one) over the concerns mentioned here. I have no dog in this fight one way or another- haven't even stepped up to a regular cell phone yet- but thought it was worth noting. Lawyers fishing for dollars? The market correcting itself by other means? And for the conspiracy theory minded, would you be surprised to find Bill Gates behind this somewhere?

Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras