Mark Pesce on the iPhone

• In: Uncategorized
• By:John
• January 11, 2007
• Leave a response

It should come as no sur­prise to any­one who heard Mark Pesce speak at Web Direc­tions that he’d be excited by the iPhone. The real­ity, peo­ple who have been­dead for sev­eral years are excited by the iPhone. Any­way, Mark is one of the web’s deep thinkers, and excel­lent writ­ers, and gner­ally makes me ashamed of my puerile rant­i­ngs when I read his eru­dite pieces.

Mark con­cludes

While the iPhone both excites and daz­zles me with its inge­nu­ity, design and inven­tive­ness, I am not com­pletely sat­is­fied with it. It is still a phone, an iPod, and an “inter­net com­mu­ni­ca­tor” rolled into one. It is not, in any true sense, wholly inte­grated. There is no way for my friends in San Fran­cisco, with their iPhones, to know what my favorite songs are, or what I’m lis­ten­ing to at the moment, or what I’m read­ing on the web, or who I’m tex­ting. It is halfway to the social device which I see as the inevitable end point. But the rest is just soft­ware. The hard­ware plat­form is there, ready and wait­ing, and will be dis­rupted by a dozen inno­va­tions that no one can yet predict

Check out the whole piece, and lis­ten to his related clos­ing keynote at Web Direc­tions South 2006, Youbiq­uity (along with slides, and related resources).

By con­trast, my puerile piece can be found here.

John

[tags]iPhone[/tags]

3 responses to “Mark Pesce on the iPhone”:

1. • By:Mark
   • January 11th, 2007
   

   Pshaw, John, such flat­tery. Seri­ously, while I am excited by iPhone, it seems to become increas­ingly appar­ent that this is a “closed” plat­form. Apple — as far as any­one can tell, 24 hours into the iPhone era — sim­ply doesn’t want third-​​party devel­op­ers. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they think they can own the whole thing. Maybe they want to charge for every Wid­get you down­load. And maybe they think they can dream up every pos­si­ble appli­ca­tion for iPhone.

   Then again, maybe they’re just smok­ing crack.

2. • By:John
   • January 11th, 2007
   

   I agree Mark — espe­cially as there are 50K devel­op­ers rar­ing to go. PSP lost the oppor­tu­nity to be this device by lock­ing the sucka down so hard that play­ing a new game forces firmware upgrades which break home­brew stuff. Insane.

   I can see why they kept the iPod closed to an extent — the cost and effort of putting together a devel­oper pro­gram, tools etc for the plat­form, the fast mov­ing field, where new fea­tures, chipsets, etc come all the time. But iPhone is dif­fer­ent. Surely they could get xCode to com­pile for it almost triv­ially. n+1 plat­forms for n>1 is easy, its the sec­ond one which is hard, and they have PPC plus i86 now.

   Surely at least they’ll allow widgets?

   I actu­ally think they should dump the (GSM) phone bit and go straight to voip over wifi and REALLY rede­fine tele­phony. What was that quote from Gret­sky Jobs used about being where the puck will be? Wifi is where tele­phony will be (and not too far off). So why the GSM?

   j

3. • By:Mark
   • January 12th, 2007
   

   Cring­ley had some excel­lent com­men­tary today on his web­site about why it’s only GPRS/​EDGE. Basi­cally, Cin­gu­lar is locked into RealMeda for their 3G sys­tem, while Apple would insist on H.264. Com­pro­mise? It’s a non-​​3G device. Addi­tion­ally, 3G net­works are a lot less com­mon in the US than in mobile-​​crazy Aus­tralia. Some are sug­gest­ing that 3G is sim­ply a firmware upgrade. While I doubt that, I also doubt it’s a major change to the hard­ware. We’ll see a 3G iPhone in 2008, which is still six months before any Aus­tralian release.

   As for Wid­get devel­op­ment, yes, I do think Apple will allow that — and we’ll be using iTunes to send Wid­gets to the phone, just as we send MP3s and AACs to the iPod today. But that’s not nearly enough. Wid­gets, while they are a nice mix­ture of HTML and Javascript, don’t give you any mean­ing­ful access to the device. I want to *know* what my SMS mes­sages are, who I’ve called recently, etc. I *need* that infor­ma­tion to do any suc­cess­ful social net­work mod­el­ing. I doubt that infor­ma­tion would be exposed to a Wid­get. (Caveat: It is con­ceiv­able, if read file access is granted to a Wid­get, that you could get the data from the iPhone. But Apple would need to make all of those data struc­tures public.

   I have some hopes that at WWDC this year they’ll release a full iPhone devel­op­ment kit. But it’s just a hope, and utterly unsup­ported by any evidence.

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