No iPhone
No, I’m not buying an iPhone. Apple won’t let any third-party applications onto the device. In other words, it’s not hackable, and I’m not gonna drop $600 on a computer I can’t mess around with. Apple’s current line on third-party applications is, “if you want the iPhone to do something that it doesn’t do, build a website that does it.” I want to play Ogg Vorbis files, run an NES emulator, SSH into my web server, record lectures, act as a remote control for my PowerBook via bluetooth, and make VoIP calls. None of that can be implemented as a website (at least, not without flash).
I don’t care if the applications that do those things aren’t as shiny as native iPhone apps — I need to be able to decide for myself whether installing a program is worth it or not. Apple didn’t design the thing for people with my priorities, and that’s fine, because that’s what Nokia is for. I got a Nokia E70 a few days ago (the iPhone is driving down prices of other smartphones on the secondhand market), and since then I’ve been a gleeful little nerd.
July 19th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
Drupal. Nokia E70 over an iPhone. That explains a lot.
Do you have a mullet haircut?
July 19th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
You definitely did the right thing if those are the things you want to do with your phone.
After the iPhone introduction, I noticed that some people saw the iPhone as a tiny Mac, and some people saw it as a huge iPod. It is definitely the latter, it’s a satellite of a Mac/PC just like the iPod and it’s hackable by the user in the same way as the iPod: you set up your iTunes/Mail/Bookmarks/Contacts/Photos how you want them on your Mac/PC and iPhone mirrors all of that in one go so it always seems like you’re taking a piece of your computer with you.
However the iPhone is very hackable in its own way. If you are a Web developer the iPhone is the only hackable phone. Your work shows up as it really looks, your styles and layout and scripts all just work. What other phones do to Web sites is very unpleasant, translating them in various ways and also leaving so much out. The iPhone is like a little jewelry box that runs today’s actual Web in there, and it attaches right to your Wi-Fi to get at your development server and all the work on there just runs, that is very hackable. Web developers are used to working on one machine and running the code on others. The iPhone is hackable just by being a legitimate Web client. At some point they will put Google Gears in there and we get offline storage with auto-updates.
If you make music or movies or photos it’s the same, the iPhone just knows how to play your work, you don’t have to be a computer science guy to hack the music player or movie player in iPhone, it plays the same files as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, not the same files from MS Windows or Linux. QuickTime has iPhone export presets for video people and for audio people every editor can mix out to iTunes and both options result in ISO media that plays in all consumer devices, not just on Windows or just on Linux. So it is one step from Final Cut or Avid or Logic Pro or Performer to an iPhone, that is very hackable. It’s also one step from iMovie and Garage Band and iPhoto, that is hackable for so many people.
July 19th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Fred: I agree completely with paragraphs 1 and 3, but I’m going to quibble with the notion that the iPhone is the only phone with a real web browser. My E70 has a browser based on Webkit. It renders pages perfectly, and it has wifi.
Also, it does cut-copy-paste, so nyah nyah!
But really, I’m a special case and I know it. The interface on the E70 is pretty bad. I impress my friends by telling them my phone plays Megaman 2 and then embarrass myself by fumbling through the menus to find it. I spent years with Gentoo Linux, so I can live with unfriendly interfaces. All my CDs are ripped to Ogg Vorbis, so an iPod is useless to me. And I spend most of my time in Canada, where there’s no carrier for it yet.
(On a surface level, I also find it ironic that so many developers are bending over backwards to make iPhone-specific versions of their sites, when the inclusion of Safari is supposed to negate the need to do that. I know the situation is more nuanced than that — it’s mostly web app developers who want to mimic the phone interface — but it’s still funny.)