“Welcome to Macintosh,” sort of…
Well, it is now official: I have bitten the bullet and purchased my first Apple Mac computer. Or, more precisely, I now own my first computing device running Apple’s OS X. Namely, an iPhone. Yes, that’s right, an iPhone, Apple’s wildly-hyped “revolutionary phone,” “breakthrough internet communicator,” and “best iPod ever,” which just happens to run on a slimmed down and tweaked version of Apple’s ever growing operating system, OS X. And I, a long-time IBM DOS/Windows PC user and guru bought one, completing my transition to the dark- (or light-, depending on your perspective) side.
This came down about a month ago. Now, let me explain. A few months ago I came to the realization that my pre-paid Virgin Mobile cell phone service, as affordable and decent as it has been for the last few years, had become limiting and less cost effective for me than it had been. While one is only required to “Top Up” a Virgin Mobile account once every 90 days at a minimum of $20 in that timeframe, yielding a per-month cost of just $6.67, that only buys one a very limited level of usage. And I had been finding myself needing to top up at least once a month in recent months as my cell use had grown over the past year or so. Add to that the limited functionality available in the basic youth-oriented phones offered by Virgin Mobile – not a “smartphone” in the bunch – and I was ready for a new more fully-featured phone and full service.
Having been a Palm PDA user since 2000 – with first a Palm III, then a Tungsten E, and finally a LifeDrive – the logical first choice for me to look towards as a new and more advanced cell phone would have been a Palm Treo. And it was, for awhile. But that was not my purchasing choice, though it came very close.
I strongly considered getting a Palm Treo 755p (or even the then rumored, now available Palm Centro) on Sprint’s network as my new “smartphone.” I wanted a phone that had better contact management that could sync to my computer, had better calendar and planning capability, and had good e-mail and web access. Having used a Palm LifeDrive with WiFi for the past two years, a Treo seemed like a natural choice. So why didn’t that make the cut, especially given the comparative price of the iPhone and a Treo?
Well, in the end I decided that the iPhone, running OS X, is the mobile platform of the future, whereas the Treo, as much as I like Palm overall, is a platform of the past. Palm’s failure to significantly upgrade and advance its mobile OS over the past few years, coupled with Apple’s string of successes with the iMac, iPod, OS X, and now the iPhone, pointed to Apple as the new smart-play innovator in the mobile space. But while I had been wowed and interested in the iPhone from the very day it was first announced, the $599 price tag was a dealbreaker at the time. When Apple unexpectedly dropped the price by a whopping $200 at the beginning of September, the Treo dropped out of the picture quickly.
Don’t get me wrong, there are blemishes in the iPhone’s aura and there have been some bumps on the road in my early experience with the device. The EDGE data network from AT&T is slow, to be sure. And the not-inexpensive service contract commitment with AT&T is definitely a tough pill to swallow as well. And my faith in Apple’s commitment to the iPhone as a mobile “computing” platform was shaken by all the reports surrounding the changes wrought in the late-September release of their firmware 1.1.1 release. That release locked down so much of the iPhone’s system that it appeared 3rd party development was almost dead and Apple was out to thwart “hackers” after all.
Then last week my faith in the iPhone as the mobile platform of the future was reassured when Steve Jobs himself, the love-him or hate-him leader-prophet CEO of Apple, wrote on the Apple Hot News page that Apple would release a true Software Development Kit for native iPhone applications in February. Third Party applications will now truly be coming to the iPhone. And when they do, many of the abilities that Apple overlooked with the included applications will likely find themselves available from enterprising and creative developers. The iPhone development situation now looks, hopefully, to develop similarly to the way third party developers flourished and created innumerable useful applications for the Palm platform in that platform’s early days and even to this day. And that is what will make the iPhone, and its future iterations, the “it” mobile platform of the future.
posted by Steve @ 4:39 PM
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