January 12, 2007
The iPhone is NOT a platform
Ok, I was wrong.
Looks like they will be fighting us every step of the way.
*shrug*
Steve just lost my willingness to give him $599 and put my balls in a vice grip with his carrier (which I otherwise would have done gladly, just to play in the new sandbox).
I will, however, continue to write webapps that incidentally work well on his phone, safe in the knowledge they'll no longer have to be crippled to be mobile.
Posted by Josh Staiger at 03:51 AM
Comments
Posted by: Patrick Mueller January 12, 2007 12:25 PM | Permanent link
I told you so :-)
Cheers
Posted by: Dionysis January 12, 2007 05:34 PM | Permanent link
I'm not sure why anyone was suprised by this. This is the standard fare for the carriers. Every cell phone is born programmable, either MIDP and/or BREW and/or Symbian. The carriers lock 'em down to make it as hard as possible to get new function there, by making you rent your programs by the month. And sadly, customers pay. Pay out the a$$.
Yes, exactly like the console business, at least until MS opened a bit of a hole in the X-box 360. That may be an interesting wedge.
I was really hoping Steve would show some kahunas by sending the carriers a wake up call. By not locking into a single carrier, forcing the SIM card story into the US market, and opening the device up as a platform.
The "we need to keep the phone safe" business is nonsense. The phone processing does in fact need to be sandboxed, for technical reasons - if your app eats 100% of the CPU, how's the phone going to respond to incoming calls - and regulartory issues - FCC rules. So what you need is two separate hardware and software stacks here; one for the apps, one for the phone, with a very contrained interface between the two.