iPhone Not a Smartphone?
A smartphone, as is defined as a "cellular handset using an open, commercial operating system that supports third-party applications" says ABI Research. As such the iPhone being unveiled as a closed phone to third party developers does not truly qualify as a smartphone.
This is ridiculous. Perhaps the folks deciding what makes a phone "smart" should make those definitions based on usability and capability regardless of who controls the reins on releasing new software for the device.
With OS X running on the iPhone it is incredible to me to find "experts" portraying the phone as something less than a smartphone. The expectation is that third party developers of lesser phones somehow make better software than what a single source (in this case Apple) is capable of.
Wake up! Nobody has multi-touch gesturing except Apple and you can bet the farm the single source software provider will be pushing the envelope beyond what others have been able to do for the competing devices. With visual voicemail, Safari and widgets to start I find it surprising the "experts" might not want to take a closer look at what "smart" means.
This is ridiculous. Perhaps the folks deciding what makes a phone "smart" should make those definitions based on usability and capability regardless of who controls the reins on releasing new software for the device.
With OS X running on the iPhone it is incredible to me to find "experts" portraying the phone as something less than a smartphone. The expectation is that third party developers of lesser phones somehow make better software than what a single source (in this case Apple) is capable of.
Wake up! Nobody has multi-touch gesturing except Apple and you can bet the farm the single source software provider will be pushing the envelope beyond what others have been able to do for the competing devices. With visual voicemail, Safari and widgets to start I find it surprising the "experts" might not want to take a closer look at what "smart" means.
Labels: OS X, smartphone
This entry was posted by e, on
Friday, January 26, 2007.
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March 20, 2007 4:04 AM
The definition of "smartphone" that some analysts are trying to push is a severe stretch. To say the cut-down basic smartphone operating systems like Symbian, Palm and Windows Mobile which are crammed into a measly handful of megabytes are “smarter” than the full version of Mac OS X which takes up close to 500MBs on the iPhone is disingenuous at best and downright dishonest at worst. It begs the question what threatened vested interests are they trying to protect?
Comparing Symbian or Microsoft Windows Mobile (WinCE) to the full version of Mac OS X built into the iPhone is like comparing Windows 3.11 to Vista. Windows Mobile 2003 SE on my O2 XDA IIs PDA is about as stable as Windows ME or 95 (very unstable in other words) and lacks the pre-emptive multi-tasking and memory protection of a modern operating system. It may be called Windows, but it is definitely not Windows XP.
Symbian UIQ on my Sony Ericsson P900 is a better phone/PDA OS than Windows Mobile, but a far simpler, basic general purpose OS which also falls over way too often not to mention the incompatibilities between S60 and UIQ. Palm OS can’t even properly multi-task and is being passed over in favour of Windows Mobile even by Palm themselves in their latest Treo models!
As far as the user interface is concerned, they are all abominable. In the case of Windows Mobile, forcing the Start-menu paradigm down onto a small screen makes it impossibly difficult to use without 3rd party hacks to place icons on the main screen. Accessing SMS texting took me ages to figure out and requires dozens of finicky clicks on tiny targets.
We also don’t yet know nearly enough about the development opportunities on the iPhone to start writing it off at this stage. Will the HTML-based widget-like mini-apps be open for development while the more complex OS X apps be licensed out under a more strictly controlled licensing model? Until Apple ships the beastie, the analysts really need to shut up or face severe embarrassment when the rubber hits the road. But then of course, their job is probably to try and dampen enthusiasm for the iPhone so their clients smartphones aren’t totally swamped by iPhone fever.
If the existing contenders in the smartphone market are called smart, then colour me dumb – I’ll take the elegant, robust, friendly, powerful OS X on the “closed” iPhone any day!
See the following for more detailed comparisons:
Symbian vs iPhone:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/855E5843-AF47-47B7-B363-3C1FD2636F43.html
Windows Mobile vs iPhone:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/C866B1E6-BF99-43D4-A719-3AC4D347667A.html
-Mart