Welcome to iPhone article number 154,000,001 and counting.

Actually, this is not just about the iPhone, but about some interesting recent developments in the mobile space.

I’ve been using the iPhone for about three months now, as have 3 other Reactive staff. It is without a doubt the coolest consumer electronics device ever made, people who say otherwise are just jealous (let the debate begin).

Ok, so the iPhone is not perfect, but as far as I can tell the only real problems are; lack of Flash support in Safari; the poor email support (for business users) and no 3G. Other than that, it’s clearly superior to other phones in all other aspects. If this is Apple’s first attempt at a mobile communications device, after say 2 years of development, then one can only imagine how awesome they’re going to be in another 2 years.

A 3G iPhone is just around the corner with analysts predicting a release by mid-2008, as I’m sure is Flash support. Flash is processor intensive, so Adobe will either release a Flash ‘light’ version or Apple will simply implement better mobile chips – both are likely to happen.

Interestingly, Nokia is getting ‘multimedia’ support with the recent announcement that Silverlight is coming to the Symbian OS. So that means that you’ll also be seeing more integrated .NET 3.5 / Windows Live applications getting pushed by Microsoft and their partners to mobile platforms.

We at Reactive are excited about the imminent iPhone SDK (software developer kit) which will allow developers to build their own applications to run on the iPhone. Until now the only ‘applications’ you could develop were Web-apps, but even the best ones are pretty lame. So developers will be able to build cool applications like the iTunes mobile store, which is a light version of the iTunes store. The iTunes mobile store makes it so easy to preview and purchase songs, and so well integrated (syncing purchased music over to your desktop computer when you plug your phone in) that this application alone offers a clear view into the future of mobile eCommerce, and a good lesson in how to make this business model work through robust development and ease of use. It won’t be long before we see other iPhone eCommerce applications, like eBay or Amazon jumping on-board.


Developing iPhone versions of websites is also cool, and pretty easy if you follow the developer documentation provided by Apple. We’re working on a couple at the moment at Reactive for our clients. Essentially customising existing websites so they look and feel really nice on the iPhone. It doesn’t have to mean a massive investment for our clients, especially if the original website is developed properly in the first place, according to web-standards and user-centric design principles.

It’s been my experience that the iPhone can actually replace a laptop in the home, I recently sold my laptop intending to upgrade to the MacBook Air, but because I have my iPhone, I don’t actually find that I need a laptop anymore. I can check the news, weather, buy stuff and check email (both Gmail and Exchange) all through the iPhone.

It also integrates seamlessly with Outlook at work, so I can easily sync up my address book and calendar. In fact it’s way better at this than my Nokia E65 (Symbian).

Google have Android, Microsoft have Windows Mobile, Nokia/Sony Ericsson have Symbian and Apple have the iPhone/OSX. It’s going to be an interesting 10 years as these players battle it out for mobile operating system supremacy. My prediction is this: Android will become the Linux of the mobile world (i.e. for scientists and Über-geeks), Symbian will fade away, Apple will grow its market share through the successful delivery of seamless hardware/software integration, whilst Microsoft will continue to do what it does best and provide productivity software to those of us that just need to ‘get stuff done’.

As a side note, I got it to work by following the instructions on this site:
http://www.hackint0sh.org/


So bring on the iPhone, it’s definitely the mobile consumer product of the future


Carl Panczak, General Manager Sydney

Labels: Technology, Web Culture and Trends