Recently in Apple Category
iPhones are taking the masses by a rave. Try search for in on the Internet and you see everyone is talking(i.e. blogging) about it. why not, its such a neat piece of technology. It is indeed is really cool. I personally think it has a very good potential to take the market by storm. I do believe the the price is a bit high for a phone but apple products have generally been above the standard price range compared to competitors. So to some extend, most of us had expected this.
Generally everyone of us seems to be happy with the iPhones, except some of our kind. I mean developers. There rant: "Its not OPEN". These people (yes, I am not one of them for this one) believe this move of apple (frankly, not quite surprising) can work against them. I think not. I can see it would be really cool to develop apps for iPhones. Think of all new fancy stuff you can put in and with the loads of technology comes built-in possibilities are endless. What does Steve Jobs has to say about it:
"These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them"To me it seems fare enough. Reasons listed below:
- Softwares are going to be buggy. Not that Apple's software won't but in that case, if software team doesn't fix the problem atleast Steve has an option of firing them, which is ,of course, not possible for third party softwares.
- Apple is all about UIs. UI to Apple Softwares (and hardware) is like a fashion to the urbanites. Things have to look good. And not everyone can make great looking UIs. Look what happened to Konfabulator. It is a pickup project of the mac widgets (or otherwise). Most of widgets are as ugly as they can get. They do have utility value but come on atleast work some on the display. Steve's thought, I cannot give out my beautiful piece of tech to these geeks who don't know shit about user experience.
- I am almost very keen to think there main reason for not making it open, multi-touch interface. Either they just love it too much to give it out in the wild or they are still working on an API to abstract it enough from the developers. That makes sense, as there is a lot of buzz around multi-touchy things.
- As far as its marketability is concerned, iPhone not being open, won't hurt it. I don't think people outside the tech community really care if the phone is open or not. Heck ! Most people don't even know what open mean in this context. I can bet apple will preload the phones with the enough goodies and apps which a normal PDA-class user will need. Frankly, what else you need apart from calendar, browser, maps, contacts, email, music and ofcourse the ability to call someone. For large part of the consumers this is quite techy already. I understand our (geeks) urge always do a bit more. But you don't have choice in everything. Not everything can be OPEN.
