Like many others, I did a post about the iPhone after the Macworld Keynote. Why? Because I was excited about the possibilities a device like the iPhone could bring, particularly when coming from a company I share so many values with, Apple. After reading through everything that’s been said and written, however, I’m not as excited as I was, the reasons being outlined below.

Provider lock-down

If you want to buy an iPhone in the US, you’ll have to deal with Cingular. I’m not saying their service is good or bad, as I have no experience with it, but this forced contract doesn’t appeal to me as a consumer. I want to have the best combination of device and operator, not the combination forced upon me by one of these parties.

There’s also no word from Apple on how the device is going to market in Europe or Asia. We’ll have to wait, but I’m assuming we’ll see similar contract lock-downs to providers, or a dramatic price increase.

Feature lock-down

One of the first things Jobs mentioned in the Keynote was that the iPhone runs OSX - I find that to be a gross exaggeration and clearly one for the eyes and ears of the press (it did get the crowd to cheer). The iPhone runs its own platform (sure, they can call it OSX as well), bearing little resemblance with Apple’s operating system.

The iPhone is a walled garden. It has what seem to be great applications and services, but Jobs himself said no third party would be allowed to develop for the phone in an interview with the NYT:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

This is a grave oversight. Jobs announced the product as a revolution but fails in not realizing that the real value of the product is as a platform to build upon. Steve, we don’t want it to be like a PC, but we do want it to be like an Apple computer.

Ironically, Nokia seems to be going in the opposite direction - that being a good thing -, with their N700 (and now N800) mobile devices which anyone can develop apps for as they’ve made all the necessary tools available, free of charge.

The bottom line on this point is that without openness in the iPhone platform, it will just be another good looking device. You can just imagine the possibilities if your favorite developers could create applications for your new phone.

In conclusion

I must start by saying it’s still a remarkable device. It innovates in several aspects, and for those who need a phone that “looks good, works well”, you’ve got it. For those of us who were looking for a device we could work on and develop for to become an extension of our businesses, well… We’ll just have to keep on looking.

All this post, written on an iMac, wrapped up in a Macbook Pro, playing music from an iPod. I’m clearly a fan - but Apple doesn’t seem to listen to fans that often.

Photos by Niall Kennedy, released under a CC non-commercial license.

Related reading

Dave Winer has a very good post on this very same issue, as does Mathew Ingram.

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You’d have to be under a rock or away from a connected computer not to read or hear about how people are excited about the Apple iPhone - I know I am. The truth is, if things are as good as they seem, they’ve done it again, and I may have found what I was looking for.

Why Apple read my mind

I have been looking for the smart smartphone for a long time, and the reason why I didn’t buy one before was because all existing solutions presented me with a scary mix of bad interface and frustrating feature/pricing combinations. The iPhone seems to deal with both just fine.

Now, this doesn’t mean the iPhone is cheap (it isn’t), and it sure isn’t going to be for everyone, but for $499 (or $599, depending on your storage requirements) you get a pretty compelling solution to be connected. And you get the fantastic user experience Apple’s gotten us used to to boot. In fact, I highly recommend looking at the phone demos just to get a taste of what Interaction Design really means.

Wishes and concerns

As I said in my “ultimate connected device” post a while ago - where I hinted on the real need we have for something like this -, a phone like this can become a platform for just about anything if developers are given the right tools. From what I’ve seen in the iPhone demos, the phone will support widgets like the OSX dashboard already does.

But I’d love it if Apple took the next step of allowing people to actually build fully functional applications based on the software and hardware platform they built. Widgets are fine, but if there’s direct access to the full capabilities of the phone the possibilities become virtually endless.

All this being said, I only have one concern about the phone - the battery life. I would need to have real test data to confirm my worries, but 5 hours of active use may be a little too short for some people. Ah, we’ll see. Truth is, I’m excited as hell about this product - Apple’s designers and engineering teams need a round of applause.

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I’ve been looking at Apollo, Adobe’s new technology for the development and deployment of Rich Internet Applications, and I can say I’m pretty excited about the possibilities - and honestly, it’s good to see Adobe isn’t screwing up with Apollo as much as with the Creative Suite icons (which I talked about yesterday).

According to the people at Adobe themselves on their wiki, “Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s”.

There’s already a few companies working on Apollo based applications, bringing the connectivity of the web and the richness of the desktop together. One of such companies is eBay, who’s working on a client for their service using Apollo (read about it here). We’ll most likely think about doing something similar for some of our own projects.

Fact is, RIAs are going to be all the rage next year, and Adobe seems to be pushing things in the right direction with this innitiative. I guess we’ll see just how much when I can get my hands on it, but I have grown high expectations since I built a client for Goplan’s ticket management system in under one hour using our API and Adobe’s Flex - oh, if only Flex Builder wasn’t that expensive.

Some Apollo resources

Looking around for some information on the technology, I found a few good resources. First, a video with Christian Cantrell of Adobe, demonstrating what Apollo is, and showing some of the applications built with it. There’s also a breeze demo with Luis Polanco and Mike Chambers that provides some background information on the platform.

And finally, Mike did a podcast with Kevin Lynch over at Talkcrunch that highlights the new capabilities Apollo brings to RIA developers, as well as some background information as to where Adobe wants to go with the Apollo effort.

John Nack, Senior Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop, unveiled the new icons for the upcoming series of Adobe Products - and boy, can I be any more disappointed. The new icon for photoshop is below - Yup, it’s the ugly blue square.

The planned set of icons for Adobe’s CS3 is confusing and maybe overly minimalist (and I’m the minimalist type). Thinking about it, it may be the huge difference that’s shocking me, but I don’t really see a reason for the huge change from the old set of icons to this new one, whose differences are based on lettering and background color alone.

It seems like Jason agrees with my opinion, and Veerle seems to side with the new design and includes an interview with Ryan Hicks, Sr. Experience Designer at Adobe with some insight into the process.

I’m just wondering about the creative process behind the decision to use these new icons. Can two letters and color substitute iconography? I personally don’t think so, but in this case, taste prevails. Have an opinion? Leave it in the comments.