Apple's servers are melting down due to the overwhelming demand for activating the 3G iPhone and installing the OS 2.0 upgrade.

Apparently Apple failed to anticipate this demand, or load test the infrastructure.

New iPhones are failing to activate, and the unfortunate customers who have attempted to upgrade their existing phones are having them left in an unusable limbo state when the final stage of the upgrade fails to complete.

Apple has managed to brick (make completely unusable) thousands of phones, including mine.

My phone completed the upgrade to OS 2.0, but before it will restore my data or even make a non-emergency call, it needs to be re-activated by Apple's iTunes server.

Which is down. And which has been down for hours now.

So for the time being, my phone is dead. I can not even receive incoming calls.

Thanks Apple.

The Apple discussion thread on the issue is here, and the mainstream media is starting to pick up the story too.

Why is there such a frenzy over a phone?

The Mercury News article linked above interviewed one customer, asking why he had spent the night outside an Apple store waiting to buy an iPhone.

His answer: "Chicks dig the iPhone."

Yeah, but only when it works!

*grrrr*

UPDATE: As of 3:30pm, my iPhone is live and full of OS 2.0 goodness. The App Store so totally rocks - this is what the on device application experience is meant to be. I've downloaded the iTunes Remote app, and I am loving having remote control of my music via WiFi. And the weather radar feature in Weather Bug is also impressing me.

Yay!

We were not ambitious enough to head out before dawn, but serolynne and I did head to the Melbourne, FL AT&T store around 10am this morning to look into getting Cherie an iPhone 3G.

We were hoping to get in and out with maybe an hour's wait.

Hah!

The line looked as if Rolling Stones or U2 tickets were about to go on sale!



The unmoving line stretched around the front of the building, and down the side. The folks in front looked like they had been there already for ages, and some of them even had lawn furniture.

It looked like it might take all day waiting in the hot FL sun to get an iPhone. Assuming that the store did not run out of stock first, which I am guessing is exceedingly likely.

I guess we will have to try again once the mad initial rush has passed. We have way too much to do in our final days in FL to spend too much time waiting in line for a phone.

Meanwhile, my iPhone 2G is in the process of downloading and installing the 2.0 OS update. And that to me is much more exciting than the faster radio and built in GPS that the iPhone 3G hardware adds.

But while I get the new toys, Cherie is stuck with her Razr for at least a bit longer.

Poor girl...

In just a few hours, the 3G iPhone will be going on sale. serolynne and I will probably be heading to the local AT&T store early to try and get her one - she is dying to get off of her Razr and onto something smarter, and her iPhone envy has gotten so bad lately that I don't think she can last another day without one.

Much more exciting to me than the 3G iPhone is the iPhone OS 2.0 software (and accompanying App Store), which will be released tomorrow as a free upgrade for all current iPhones.

The App Store is the key - and watching Apple deliver this has had me reminiscing around "what might have been" had I only been able to push my visions through at Palm and PalmSource.


What might have been...
From 2000 thru summer 2005 I was the Director of Competitive Analysis for Palm and then PalmSource (the OS spinoff company). And throughout my tenure, I had two consistent recommendations on what to focus on to maximize the success and competitive differentiation of Palm hardware and the Palm platform.

1) Build a great touchscreen phone with a 320x480 screen.
2) More importantly - build a great on-device application purchase experience, and provide the infrastructure to make it as easy as possible for both large and small developers to get rich.


Hardware: I lobbied endlessly for a phone built into the formfactor of Palm's ultimate PDA - the Tungsten X. A Tungsten X phone would have had a 320x480 touch screen, a slim case with minimal buttons, bluetooth, WiFi, great multimedia, and more.

In other words, it would have looked a LOT like an iPhone. Only years sooner.

But... Every Palm licensee was convinced that no one would want a phone without a number pad or a keyboard.

Now, everyone in the universe if falling all over themselves to make touch screen phones that rip off the iPhone's form. No one else besides Apple had the courage to try and do something different first.

*sigh*


The App Store: Even more important to me than the hardware, I knew that the most compelling and sustainable competitive advantage that the Palm OS possessed was the vast wealth of amazing applications that existed for the platform. But the process of getting at these applications was vastly too complicated for most users, particularly as typical usage switched from pairing and syncing with a desktop PC towards cellular network connected devices. For all of these applications to matter, users would need a trivially easy "zen of Palm" way to find, download, install, and ultimately purchase them - all without ever leaving their mobile device.

And developers would need a fair and affordable way to publish their applications to the full potential audience of users, without needing to jump through different hoops for each device maker and cellular network operator.

I launched a project within PalmSource to try and solve these problems, and I managed to get my roadmap approved and the first stages funded. The PalmSource Installer was a great first step, but we only managed to get to stop 1.5 on a roadmap that had at least seven major technology and business iterations planned out.

If PalmSource hadn't changed strategic direction (veering off towards oblivion it seems), by now every PalmOS device would be capable of easy one click download, installation, and purchase of thousands of apps.

The experience would have been very similar to the iPhone App Store, which is launching around the world today. But it would have been live years ago, and it would have actually done a lot more. For example, the roadmap that I was crafting would have not created a single monopoly store like Apple has launched, but rather it would have provided an enabling technology to allow a vast array of stores to operate.

And there would have been support for trial application, paid upgrades, and much more that Apple has not even contemplated for the iPhone. We even had plans to support a "tip jar" option to enable donationware.

All of this infrastructure and technology would have been baked into the OS (Palm OS 6.1 - which never shipped), and provided as a free upgrade supporting almost every Palm OS device that had at least Palm OS 3.5. No desktop computer would be required, but desktop support for Windows, Mac, and even Linux was planned as well.

You would even be able to download an app directly to your device wirelessly, and have the desktop components and conduits automatically install the next time you return to your desk. (This was actually possible with the Installer 1.5 that we did release...)

If this vision had panned out, there would have been a target market for developers of millions of devices, and users would have had access to thousands or even tens of thousands of applications, all just a click or two away from purchase. The market potential was huge!


This is what I was working on five years ago. In a few hours, Apple will finally show the mobile industry a taste of where things should have been years ago.

And now all the analysts and journalists around the world are writing gushing articles about how "the future of phones will be touchscreens and apps"...

I guess I am just a bit ahead of my time. Ah, but what might have been!

I wrote the following in 2004, when I announced internally at PalmSource that I was leaving behind Competitive Analysis and Strategy to focus on the application installer / store roadmap full time:

One bright star on the horizon has always captivated me more than any other – and that has been the potential for the Palm Economy to really blossom into an amazing ecosystem where it is easy for users to find the perfect applications to make their devices truly their own; and for developers to be able to easily profit from the joy they bring into the lives of users.

This is truly the place where Palm OS has the potential to rise above all of our competitors. We still have more developers and better apps than any other mobile platform. But what we need to do now is make it vastly easier to get applications into the hands of users, and potentially even more important – we need to make it easier to get money into the pockets of developers.

If we do this right, I see the potential for a supernova in the Palm Economy that will leave Symbian and Microsoft and all the proprietary “smart” platforms in the dust.

The supernove looks set to explode in just a few hours, but instead of the Palm ecosystem blossoming it will be Apple's iPhone.

It is bittersweet to think about what might have been had Palm(Source) managed to do it right years ago, but at least someone has ended up doing it. The doldrums that have paralyzed the mobile application universe are now about to be over.

At last!

I cut away from Photoshop World for a while yesterday afternoon to head over to the Orlando Millennia Apple Store for a Genius appointment, to try and persuade Apple to replace my fried iPhone.

No problem.

The tech spent ten minutes trying to get my iPhone to wake up, he used a little scope to peek up the headphone jack to make sure the moisture sensor was still white (it turns pink if the iPhone gets wet, voiding the warranty), and then he declared my old iPhone officially dead. He then did a little bit of paperwork and handed over a shiny refurb unit.

Yay!

I also decided to switch my service over to AT&T from T-Mobile while I was in the process of reactivating the iPhone today, avoiding the need to hack and unlock the new one.

(Hacking the iPhone has gotten trivially easy BTW - look here for details...)

Why AT&T now, after holding out for so long on T-Mobile??

I initially stuck with T-Mobile because I initially viewed the iPhone as an experiment - I didn't expect that it would fully win me over. It actually literally WAS an experiment at first, since a client was paying us to do some UI evaluation and research.

But the iPhone UI won me over. My biggest complaint was the lack of third party application support, but the new iPhone SDK has brought more developer enthusiasm to the iPhone than exists on any other mobile platform. Even on various PalmOS developer mailing lists, the main topic of conversation lately has been the iPhone. I expect that as soon as the iPhone 2.0 OS ships this June, there will be a plethora of amazing software released.

My other major complaint was the lack of 3G speed. That will almost certainly be solved by June with a major iPhone hardware refresh, and based upon how AT&T and Apple handled the 16GB iPhone model - upgrading will NOT require a contract extension.

AT&T will give me vastly better coverage than T-Mobile, and slightly faster mobile data speeds. My monthly bill will drop a trivial amount, and the one downside is that my monthly minutes will be cut from 1000 to 450. But seeing as I actually only use 300 or so minutes a month, that really isn't a loss.

AT&T has won me over. Now hurry out with 3G!!!

My iPhone has died.

*grrr*

Over the weekend the battery had gotten dangerously low (10% warning) - and the iPhone was on the verge of shutting down while we needed it to try and navigate towards Wrestlemania. Greg and Betty realized that they had an iPod car-charger onboard, so I borrowed it and plugged in.

A moment after I did so, the iPhone reset and rebooted twice - and then gave me a kernel panic and the screen filled with text. It was actually pretty cool to watch, though disturbing.

I picked up the iPhone, and the back of the case was shockingly hot to touch. Yikes!

I unplugged, and forced the iPhone to reboot by holding down the front and top buttons for ten seconds, and when it returned to life I put it into "Airplane Mode", guessing that the wireless radio combined with the charge current for the critically low battery had overwhelmed the charging circuit. Once in Airplane mode, the iPhone seemed to charge fine for the remaining 15 minutes of our drive.

Once inside the Citrus Bowl, I was able to use my iPhone to snap and email pictures, and place a few phone calls. The battery was still in the red, but the phone was working fine. After emailing a final picture off to my folks, I stuck the phone into my pocket.

About an hour later, I felt a brief vibration. I think that was my iPhone's dying gasp.

Later in the night, the iPhone was dead to the world. Nothing I could do would make it reset or wake up - the screen was hopelessly black. Once home, I plugged into both my laptop and the wall charger - but neither would bring the iPhone back to life. Even leaving it plugged in overnight did nothing.

Googling around, I've found reports of the iPhone charge circuitry sometimes failing and frying. I think that is what happened to me.

In theory, I should be able to take advantage of the 1yr Apple warranty - but since I have never activated on AT&T this may be tough. I will have to convince a Genius at an Apple store to swap my dead phone for a live one. But one catch - every Apple store in the state of FL is sold out of iPhones. There is a mysterious nationwide shortage going on right now. Even the Apple online store is out of stock..

The next generation 3G iPhone is due sometime between now and June. I was planning to buy that as soon as it is released. Now I am faced with the dilemma - do I limp along with my backup broken down Treo until then? Should I sell my dead iPhone on Ebay for parts (potentially worth up to $300)? Should I wait until the Orlando Apple store gets more equivalent iPhones in stock and try and sweet talk a warranty swap? Or...

I could even dissect my iPhone, order a new logic board for $200, and with some careful work, likely resurrect it.

I've gotten so used to having my email, web access, photo albums, and music with me all the time. It feels miserable to be without. Fortunately, I still have a Treo to fall back upon. But it does feel positively stone-age to use it.

*grrrr*

I am watching the video stream of today's iPhone SDK announcement, and I have been completely blown away.

If you are at all interested in gaming, check out Apple's tech demo Touch Fighter 41 minutes into the video, Spore from Electronic Arts 45 minutes in, and best of all - Sega's Super Monkey Ball at the one hour mark.

These developers were given just two weeks with the SDK, and they had to work on site at Apple. And in just two weeks, this is what they were able to crank out.

I am blown away at what was possible in such a short time with a beta SDK. This is amazingly cool stuff. And it bodes very well for the future of iPhone gaming. Using the 3-axis accelerometer for interaction is going to revolutionize mobile gaming in the same way that the Wii revolutionized the living room console experience.

MultiTouch has some pretty revolutionary implications too. Check out the Touch FX photo manipulation demo 39 minutes into the video for a taste of what is possible.

Good job Apple!

I just finished a five-mile sprint on an exercise bike with my iPhone for company. Surfing the web while rocking out to music sure makes the time fly by. :-)

I've always gotten bored on exercise machines... Music alone helps a lot, but not enough. The big-screened web browser of the iPhone though worked wonderfully to keep me distracted while the miles blew past. I like it. :-)

I am actually looking forward to working out again tomorrow morning. :-)

(BTW - I actually used to use my Tablet PC while working out before - but it always felt WAY too precarious...)

I've been fantasizing the past few weeks about using my media relations and muck-racking skills to organize an online boycott of Mac OS X Leopard as a response to Apple's hostile stance against hackers and developers who are working to extend the iPhone. The goal - that Apple announce an intention and a timeframe for releasing a supported iPhone SDK.

It's not that I think Apple has any sort of moral or business obligation to do so - I just hate watching them fumble this issue so badly, and I know they are missing a huge opportunity. Besides, as someone I shared my plans with pointed out - it would be fun to torture Apple a bit.

And indeed it would have been a fun exercise in media manipulation, and I bet I could have gotten plenty of press coverage and 1000's of disgruntled iPhone owners committing to delay their Leopard upgrades by a month.

But it would have also been a lot of work - more than it would be worth to me.

Thankfully, Apple has changed course - and saved me the trouble.

Steve Jobs posted this morning:

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers. ... We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.

Nice.

The situation had been turning into a PR nightmare such that every article about the iPhone felt compelled to mention the "Apple versus its own developers and best customers" angle to the story.

But now Steve has flipped things completely around, silencing most critics, and making sure the press angle has shifted to "and you'll be able to do even more with the iPhone in February when..." -- all without actually announcing any specifics, or giving away any technical or business details.

What a way to dodge a bullet.

I think Apple has intended the iPhone to be "open" in some fashion from the very beginning - and looking under the hood certainly reveals plenty of hints that this is the case. But there is also a lot that just isn't ready for third parties yet - particularly the security infrastructure.
(Everything running as root? Egads!)

Apple should have announced their open intentions from the start, but I don't think they expected this level of developer and mainstream interest in iPhone apps so they never realized how much of a blunder it would be not to. It is rare to see Apple caught off guard and stumbling, but I am pleased to see they seem able to recover.

Meanwhile - I've got some iPhone native apps to start planning... Knowing Palm OS, Symbian, and Windows Mobile way too intimately - there really is a huge need for something better.

Is Mac OS X on the iPhone "the best mobile platform ever for developers"? Perhaps.

I'm just glad we'll soon have a chance to find out.

In sharp contrast to the frustratingly closed stance Apple is taking, Google is calling for new wireless spectrum to be auctioned with a mandate for both open devices and an open network.

From Google's Public Policy Blog:

However, if we do end up bidding and ultimately win the spectrum in question, we would ensure that consumers have the right to decide which devices and applications they want to use on our network. We would also encourage third party software applications -- even those that compete directly with our own services -- on the theory that users deserve the right to pick and choose the programs they want to use online.

We think the Internet offers the optimal model for what best serves the interests of all consumers. To that end, we hope the FCC sticks to its guns as it tries to introduce the open ethos of the 'Net to a small segment of the closed wireless world.

Sure they have selfish reasons for fighting Verizon on this, but this is a good thing for consumers. I sure hope the FCC does not cave in to Verizon.

Bring on the G-Phone! :-)

The iPhone is the most amazing, innovative, and truly inspiring mobile device to come along since the birth of the Palm Pilot. And I should know - I've played with pretty much every mobile gadget there is. Apple did a great job reinventing the phone - and this reinvention is long overdue.

Rather than innovating, Palm has spent the last five+ years chasing after "carrier requirements", ignoring end users, neglecting its once thriving ecosystem, and bandaging an increasingly obsolete operating system.

And Microsoft's Windows Mobile never even figured out what a mobile user experience is all about...

So it is little wonder that once the iPhone was hacked to allow for third party application development, there was an unprecedented flood of excitement and enthusiasm. Over the past two months, there has been more developer activity on the "officially closed" iPhone than on the "open" PalmOS. Some great stuff was starting to emerge - with immense possibilities for the future.

Apple was at first officially "neutral" on the concept - saying they would do nothing to guarantee that future iPhone OS updates wouldn't break iPhone applications, but they would do nothing "malicious" to stop developers either.

Fair enough.

But Apple has stopped playing fair, and has gotten VERY malicious.

The new iPhone 1.1.1 update locks down the iPhone so strongly that even if developers find a new way in, it is now clear that Apple's "neutral" stance is long gone - and every new update will slam the door hard shut yet again.

Where there was once unprecedented enthusiasm, there is now emerging a huge backlash of disgust. I don't think Apple realizes how much damage they have done - it is never wise to piss off your most enthusiastic fans, developers, and influencers. Conservative estimates show that fully 10% of the one million iPhone's sold so far have been "hacked" to install third party applications. The now stillborn Navizon soft-GPS program alone had been downloaded and installed 80k times.

The anti-Apple backlash is making news - it has been a top story on Google News all week. Gizmodo has revised its iPhone review to "Don't Buy" in response, Wired is writing about all the thing you can do with the iPhone 1.0.2 that you can't after "downgrading" to the new 1.1.1, and even the New York Times is taking a real critical look at how Apple has attacked its "most ardent fans".

Apple is certainly taking a hard-line - even a MacWorld editor was told his only recourse after bricking his iPhone by upgrading to 1.1.1 was that he was "screwed" and needed to buy a new one. Egads!

This video really nails the situation by turning Apple's own words against it - taking the audio from the classic "Think Different" campaign and overlaying it on top of a scrolling catalog of the iPhone applications that have emerged:

Apple has forgotten its own advertising - Apple has stopped "Thinking Different" and turned into 1984's Big Brother.

It is rare to see Apple stumble so badly.

And it is interesting to see Nokia trying to take advantage of the stumble - with new posters appearing saying "Phones should be open to anything. The best devices have no limits" and launching an "Open to Anything" marketing campaign.

If only Nokia had a phone even half as exciting as the iPhone...

Thanks to some very useful tutorials and websites, with a few hours work this evening I've managed to bypass AT&T!

My shiny new iPhone is now using my old T-Mobile SIM and data plan, and it is working great. I was able to skip over entirely needing to register with AT&T or set up a two year contract.

Woohoo!

I just love having a phone I can ssh IN to. *grin*

One thing that is really blowing me away is how developers have already converged on a package format for easy one-click over-the-air application installation, including an automatically updated catalog, and even wireless application updates.

I struggled for years to try and get this sort of functionality adopted in the Palm OS world.

It would be a real shame if Apple starts throwing up roadblocks against all of this amazing developer enthusiasm. Apple has "corrected" their initial "neutral" stance to now say that upcoming software updates "WILL most likely break" third party application support.

Stick with neutral, Apple. Only a fool would shoot such rabidly enthusiastic developers in the face.

Or - how about actually officially embracing developers? Please???

You have the potential to build an ecosystem here. Don't hide in a walled garden!

Apple puts more thought into their packaging than many companies put into their entire products.

The iPhone I picked up this evening came in a beautiful small simple box, with the iPhone on display like a piece of jewelry upon opening. No big manuals. No CD's to install. No cumbersome legal notices. No inserts or special offers.

Nothing extraneous other than two simple Apple stickers.

Here is how Microsoft would have gone about designing the box:


This video has been around for a few years. Cherie saw it years ago:
"It is that video that had me start to turn the corner from hating Apple to actually starting to have some tolerance for them..."

Indeed.

Attention to detail, elegance, and simplicity matter. A lot.

Some of the biggest issues that have kept me from getting an iPhone were the following:

• It is a closed device, with no support for developers or applications.
• It is locked to AT&T - with a two year contract.
• It is expensive.
• It isn't 3G.

Times are changing...

Last week Apple dropped the price by $200 to an extremely attractive $399.
This week the first open source tools to break the AT&T SIM lock have emerged.
And - despite being an officially closed platform - the iPhone has already been cracked wide open.  There seems to be more software development happening lately on the "closed" iPhone than on the "open" Treo.

The iPhone is an amazing piece of hardware running Unix / Apple OS X under the hood.  No walls Apple could ever build would be able to keep hackers and developers away from such a tempting platform.  PalmOS and Windows Mobile look old and musty by comparison.

So...  I am off to the Apple store to pick up an iPhone this afternoon.  I plan to skip the AT&T contract, and use the hacks so that I can keep my current T-Mobile plan.

Now if only it came with 3G data speeds.  *sigh*

My uncle sent me this article a few day ago, and I am both amused and disgusted.

The lawyer who made millions suing Arista records for marketing the lip-sync sensation Milli Vanilli in the early 90's has a new target - Apple's iPhone.

Trujillo's complaint alleges that Apple and AT&T "purposefully omitted, misrepresented, and/or fraudulently concealed the durability of the iPhone battery," as well as the terms and conditions of the replacement program.

The lawsuit calls the defendants' conduct "unfair, immoral, unethical, oppressive, and unscrupulous… Absent the defendants' fraud, the plaintiff and the class would have never purchased the iPhone from defendants or transacted business with defendants."

The complaint expressly seeks less than $75,000 for each plaintiff....

Oppressive?!??

As much as I would have preferred a removable battery, Apple has never made any secret about the iPhone battery being internal and not user replaceable. Just like every single iPod ever sold.

And $75,000 damages for each person who bought an iPhone?!? Egads - what a great investment. You buy a $600 phone, don't notice that the battery is not removable, fail to take it back in the first 14 days, and then live in constant regret of your decision to buy such a horribly designed phone - at least until the $75k check arrives in the mail...

(Or rather - $50 in iTunes credit after legal fees have been paid, I am sure...)

Cherie and I just ran out to grab some dinner at a Taqueria in San Leandro, and on the way saw the line of people camped outside the Cingular store, waiting for the iPhone to go on sale tomorrow evening.

Egads.

I'm not sure I've ever seen such excitement, hope, and hype around a new product. Apple's marketeers have outdone themselves - masterly generating unprecedented anticipation. Kudos to them.

But - I wonder if they will be able to avoid a backlash if the iPhone fails to live up the lofty expectations that so many have for it.

I know that I've increasingly become disillusioned with the iPhone. My first response when it was announced was "Must... Have... NOW!" - but now that it is less than 24hrs from shipping, I have all but lost interest.

Here are a few of the reasons:

1) You can't use it as a modem to get your laptop online. *grrrr*

2) It is 2G and not 3G. Opening the New York Times web page takes reportedly nearly a minute. That is NOT an acceptable user experience. Apple should have either built a proxy server architecture to speed things up, or should have taken another six months to get 3G speeds baked in.

3) It is a closed platform. If it was open, developers would flock to it with unprecedented excitement and creativity, and would unleash a wave of incredible applications. Now - all we get are the meager basic apps Apple has chosen to build in.

4) It has only rudimentary PIM capabilities. You can't have multiple calendars, or categories of people. You can't cut-and-paste text. You can't even SEARCH?!?!

5) It is NOT an iPod replacement. My iPod holds 30GB of music, and that is barely enough. Even the more expensive iPhone only holds 8GB. And the memory isn't even expandable.

6) It has built in Google maps, but it does NOT know where you are. It would have rocked if the iPhone had integrated mapping with a GPS.

7) It only works with bare fingers. No stylus support. No hope of ever being able to do anything more precise than finger-paint level precision manipulation of the screen. And it won't even work if you have gloves on!

And so on...

*sigh*

It annoys me to see so many reviewers gushing over the "amazing" high-resolution screen on the iPhone. I had a Sony Clie PDA with that same 320x480 resolution YEARS ago, and I only just recently retired my Palm Tungsten T3. Palm could have (should have!) come out with a Tungsten-X form-factor 320x480 phone years ago. I'd take that over the iPhone any day. But instead, all we get is the same old Treo over and over again with only the meagerest of improvements. The Treo still doesn't even have WiFi, or a decent web browser! Gads!

I could make a list of major flaws just as long for the Treo as I have for the iPhone, though I think on balance the Treo is actually overall a better choice than the iPhone.

But - no one ANYWHERE is making a decent data-centric phone. And that makes me sad.

And incredibly frustrated.

In defending his decision to make the iPhone a closed device, Steve Jobs said this to Newsweek:

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 doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

Steve - you are being absolutely ridiculous and beyond foolish now. Are we supposed to believe that the cell phone networks of the world teeter on the brink of collapse every time a Treo crashes? How far disconnected from reality are you?

No - there are plenty of fully open smartphones out there. In fact, that is often a key part of the definition of just what a "smartphone" is.

Michael Mace has posted his analysis, postulating that this is an attempt by Apple to control iPhone users by locking them in so thoroughly that no future competitive device will be able to lure them away.

But before you lock users in, you have to get them on board first - and I think Apple may be shooting themselves in the foot here. If they had heralded the iPhone as "the next great platform for developers", very nearly every mobile developer and tech enthusiast on earth would be lining up to buy one to experiment with. Within six months of the iPhone's launch there would be hundreds of innovative applications available, and behind all of those applications would be developers evangelizing the iPhone to potential customers.

Not even the mighty Apple marketing machine would be able to equal the sort of grass roots push that would emerge.

Instead - mobile enthusiasts and developers are starting to become vocal critics of the iPhone, instead of fans.

I love this comment I read today on SlashDot in reference to the way Steve Jobs is locking down the iPhone:
"The word "irony" is way overused, but these words, coming from a guy who started his company with money earned by selling blue boxes to defraud the phone company, belong in irony's fucking dictionary entry."

Indeed.

In the Newsweek article, Steve goes on to say:
“[The iPhone] is five years ahead of what everybody else has got,” he gushes. “If we didn’t do one more thing, we’d be set for five years!”

In some ways he may be right. The iPhone certainly is a big step forward in a lot of ways, and it is incredibly refreshing to see some actual UI innovation in phones at long last.

But - open and extensible smartphones have been around for about five years now.... And in that regard, I'd say that the iPhone may just be five years BEHIND. *gargh*

My biggest unanswered question concerning the iPhone seems to have been answered:

Mr. Jobs is moving in that direction, too, but it appears that he wants to control his device much more closely than his competitors.

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

[NY Times]

Egads - what is Apple thinking?!?! At the very least it seems like it would be a no-brainer to allow for an open user-installable widget architecture. You could do that without ANY risk to the stability of the phone.

Apple made a big deal during the iPhone launch about how the iPhone is running OS X - but they now tell us that they have all that power locked away out of reach. This is such a cruel tease... Apple now has the best mobile hardware and software platform out there - and if they were to let developers on it amazingly innovative things would emerge from big and small developers alike. But by making it a completely walled garden, they are throwing all that potential out the window.

Macintosh fanatics are NOT happy, and an anti-iPhone backlash is starting to emerge now that the launch euphoria is fading.

Having the iPhone be a locked down device is probably the one thing that will keep me from standing in line to buy one the day it comes out.

I am NOT happy about this. *grrrrr*

The iPhone announcement today ended up being even cooler than I had hoped it would be.



Michael Mace and I were chatting online as we watched the coverage of the keynote - and this afternoon he turned our chat log into a blog post in his most-excellent Mobile Opportunity blog covering the mobile industry.

Reading the chat transcript is interesting - you can see just how excited two jaded mobile industry geeks who have seen it all can get when fully under the influence of Steve Job's reality distortion field.

(If you care about understanding the mobile space at all, you should be reading Michael's blog btw...)

I also spent a lot of time "sparring" this afternoon with roadriverrail in response to this post of his calling the iPhone "crappy". We both share a lot of good thoughts and commentary - this is a good thread to read.

Though I am pretty sure that I want the iPhone to be my next phone, there are a few problems with it:

1) It is not 3G - only EDGE.
2) It is locked to Cingular - potentially for "multiple years".
3) It is not going to be out until JUNE! *argh!*

And then there are the unanswered questions:
1) Will it work as a modem for getting my laptop online?
2) Is the software development platform open? How open? Full API's? Just Widgets?
3) Is Google Maps location aware or not? Is the potential there for real-time driving directions?

I really wish I was in San Francisco right now so that I could dig for details at MacWorld. Waiting until June to get a closer look is going to suck...

Apple is at this very instant unveiling the iPhone.

I am "watching" the live blog at Mac Rumors Live.

WOW.

Total geekly lust is presently being ignited to the extreme.

Must... have... NOW!