Greener Desktop

It has long been a dream of mine and many others that one day the web experience on your mobile is exactly the same as on your desktop. Albeit on a smaller screen.

Imagine going to youtube and watching videos with the same experience as the full website or yahoo  mail  with all its ajaxy bling and instant messenger built right in.

In many ways we’re almost there and I have to say Apple and the iphone deserve some credit. The experience is good but its not all there yet. Try going to youtube and playing a video … Oops you can’t. But why is it that with my nokia, windows mobile etc smartphone and the built in browser or Skyfire I can? Because my browser has an important plugin – called flash. Ubiquitous on the desktop but strangely missing on the iphone.

Right about now I hear the  unified screams of the iphone fanboys yelling ‘but we have an app to do that!’ this is true but I am talking about convergence here. Parity. I as a developer doesn’t want to have to write a separate codebase for every mobile phone out there but because of the iphone’s  popularity and lack of a key feature. I have to.

Adobe just announced flash 10 will be coming to pretty much every smartphone out there bar one the iphone. Why? Not because Adobe doesn’t want to provide it. They have gone so far as to actually having written Flash for the iphone already, it’s Apple and their typical closed door approach.

Apple, please open up your platform. You’re slowing down the future. Remember when you used to accuse Microsoft of doing the same. Stop the hypocrisy.

You were waiting for something profound weren’t you. Well before that comes, here’s one of the runners up for the supidest iPhone app ever.  The iSnort.

Rather than buying an iPhone and paying $5 for a virtual cocaine app. I’d rather spend the $500 or so and buy a good quantity of cocaine. It has the same sort of user experience – big, loud, noisy, stupid and clunky but the fun lasts a lot longer. I found the iPhone’s entertainment factor lasted about five minutes. $500 of cocaine would probably get you at least a week’s worth.

Anyway on to the epiphany. I just realised something. Whereas the out of the box the iPhone experience is rather limited. A good smart phone will give you things like a decent email experience, office apps, voice recorders etc. Apple in their brilliant mindedness have encouraged developers to add the features that other smart phone users have come to expect as standard in dribs and drabs. For example on the Nokia you have a fully featured Twitter client called Gravity, whereas on the iPhone you have about two hundred different apps. One will read your friends tweets, one for composing your tweets another for sending them and so on. Just to get the same type of experience you do on other phones you need to buy at least ten applications!

Apple are ingenious. They give you what is basically the poorer cousin of a 1990s analogue mobile (or cell) phone but with a pretty screen and you as the sucker who bought one go out and waste thousands of dollars on trying to compete with those people who own a smart phone like the Blackberry, Symbian or Windows Mobile line. Those people who bought an iPhone are basically coke heads. They need to buy more and more to make themselves feel adequate.

Apple please send me an iPhone. I hate them and everything they stand for. That is why you need to send me one.

I’ve written many articles about what pisses me off about iPhones, iPhone users and all the features the iPhone is missing. I’d say I’m pretty much in the minority as far as bloggers who talk about the iphone so negatively.

With that being said I can see the positives behind the platform and especially the huge following it has generated in just a couple of years. I’ve even written about how Nokia, the mobile phone giant might find itself outsmarted by Apple and all the great marketing.

Apple – Imagine if you could convert me. I write so much about how I hate the iPhone and what it’s missing. If you could turn me around and bring me into the fold, that passion could be directed towards talking about how much I love the iPhone and even into positive debate about how it could be improved. If I could then, in turn convert just a few of my readers to your platform then that phone would have paid itself off in full, many times. Who knows, I might even end up buying a Mac.

During my trial I would give the iPhone exactly one week which is a long time to decide whether you like something or not. If in that time I miss all the wonderful features of my Nokia E71 too much then you will have failed to convert me. I will send it back. If I am converted and absolutely must have an iPhone with me at all times then I get to keep the phone. For free! Either way, I will write about my experience. If Apple fail to answer my call to give me an iPhone then I will continue to write about it in a objective way having not used one for long enough to forgive its shortcomings in favour of its advantages over other smart phones.

So Apple, please send me an iPhone so I can fall in love with it. It would be a great marketing move. I’ll blog and twitter about my conversion experience daily.

This week Apple released a teaser list of what new features we’ll see in the iPhone/iPod 3.0 firmware. While the list certainly looks impressive and I’m sure many of them will be invaluable for iPhone users the list is mainly functionality that should have been released in the initial firmware. There are still a lot missing many of them downright obvious (like video recording) others impossible without the release of new phone hardware (video calling, higher resolution camera, replaceable batteries).

So what I’ll present in this article is an abbreviated list of the most important updates along with commentary covering why they’re so crucial to the success of the phone and even questioning why they weren’t present in the the earlier revisions of the phone. I’ll then wrap up the article with some of the commentary I’ve heard  from various users about what’s still needed to bring the phone up to scratch. Only then can you iPhone users look down on us smart phone users.

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