Posts Tagged ‘apple’
This is the week that we saw Google Voice pulled from Apple’s app store concerning the industry sufficiently for the FCC to investigate.
Google Voice scares AT&T (and probably other operators) as it provides an alternative way for users to make calls as well as making it easy for user to switch between operators whilst keeping the same number (think roaming – pop in a local PAYG SIM).
I look back at my twitter stream from the week and I see a pattern of activity. We wait with baited breath to see if Apple will approve Spotify – an alternative to getting music from iTunes. We also see a pattern of rejections from Apple for PhoneGap apps. PhoneGap is an innovative service that makes it easy for web developers – with HTML, Javascript skills – to create iPhone apps … and Android apps … and Blackberry apps … and soon support for Palm WebOS, Nokia Symbian and Windows Mobile apps.
What is made clearly apparent is that an app store owner has control over what they choose to let there users install. Control is good – we don’t want apps to introduce vulnerability and stability risks to our phones and we probably want to avoid some of the shady sides of the industry – but who is to decide where to draw this line? When phone owners only have one place that they can go to get apps we are subject to problems of monopolisation control.
Apple cannot maintain strict control of application delivery to iPhones without seeing a backlash of people looking at alternative platforms with their alternative app stores. Apple have the user experience advantage at the moment – no where else is it so easy for user to get their hands on a rich set of applications – but as alternatives rise which have decent user experience and provide killer functionality missing from the iPhones, iPhone lovers may start to look elsewhere.
Michael Arrington (Techcrunch) quits the iPhone and Steven Frank (Co-founder, Panic) is “Not buying any future iPhone OS based devices” until the situation improves.
Apple, the iPhone and their app store have lifted the mobile industry in the past couple of years. I pray that Apple relax a few of their constraints, as I want Nokia, Palm and the Google Clan to have beat Apple by improving their user experience – not because Apple gives away the customers.
Update:
- Frustrating transcript of a call between Riverturn (provider of Voice Central one of the apps that Apple pulled) and apple highlighting some the challenges that app developers face
- Who refunds all those people who can’t now get support for the app they’ve downloaded and previously paid for
In response to Why iPhone users won’t flock to the Palm Pre come June
“I fancy my bets on Blackberry and Symbian enterprise users defecting to the Palm Pre. That’s where the big delta in user experience lies and if Palm get their marketing and partnerships right the Palm will go down a storm. I got my hands on a Palm Pre at Barcelona MWC and I was sold, but I don’t have an iPhone and I suspect iPhone users won’t see it as anything better if they already know and love their iPhone.”
In the end, and after my much deliberation, I went for the Nokia E61i as my new phone. I always liked the Nokia E61 which was my main phone for most of last year and once you’ve got over the form factor well the E61i is a natural upgrade path. I did ponder over the iPhone, but �269 is just a little too much as an inital payment, when I can get better hardware for “free”. Oh but the UI is so sweet. A colleague got me interested in the Samsung F700, but thankfully I didn’t since the same colleague took the phone back after a few days, as it was pretty deficient in several ways (such as poor PC synchronisation, bad use of the big screen and poor support from Samsung). Maybe Samsung’s software issues will go away when they start building on top of the Android platform. This is not too far in distance since Android is leaving the virtual world and becoming a reality as EU Edge demonstrate with a deployment of Android on a Sharp Zaurus SL-C760. The $10million purse for the best mobile apps should also help things along. I’ll find out more at Google’s Android day in London this Thursday.
So why the the Nokia E61i then?
The Wifi support is great. I would love to see better wifi hoping functionality, such as utilising the access point groups to define my preferred access points in order and better support across all the apps. I seem to spend a bit of time in each app switching between access points, but at least connection is pretty solid once set up. Wifi usage does help reduce my Vodafone data usage which is capped at a less than attractive 120Mb per month.
With the E61i, the synchronisation of email, contacts and calendaring is pretty seamless. I’ve got it hooked up to our Zimbra server using the Nokia’s Mail for Exchange client (which you can clearly use for Exchange if you have that). I went for syncing my contacts via my mac with iSync because (i) I was playing around with iSync at the time and (ii) it lets me sync my contacts without an internet connection (e.g. when I’m travelling abroad). You’ll need to download the iSync plugin for the E61i since it isn’t provided by default. With the E61i I really can have my email, contacts and calendaring kept in sync between my phone, mac and zimbra effortlessly.
The E61i has also thrown in a camera which is a nice addition over the E61. Don’t expect too much from the camera, but it’s enough for my purposes which are general taking photos of whiteboards and quick photos on business trips to send back to my wife.
The UI is intuitive and quick – the ability to configure the shortcut buttons allows me to get to what I want to quickly. The screen and keyboard are fantastic – I can easily read my inbox and write messages whilst in queues and on the move. Of course the mobile browsing can pretty much read anything out there and do a reasonable job on it, whether I’m using the default browser or opera mini.
So all in all a pretty handy device whilst I’m out and about (or even at home but don’t want to flip out my computer to read my mails). And with a bluetooth headset I don’t have to put the brick that it is to my ear.