Apple iPhone… under the surface
The iPhone looks brilliant. We don’t have a lot of firm details, and typically these things disappoint slightly after the initial sales pitch.
However there are a couple of assumptions I think may hold, which are not immediately obvious but could have a truly massive impact on the
iPhone market and user experience, both positive and negative.
Upgradability
There is a serious usability deficit in normal mobile phones – they are effectively “frozen” with the operating system they come on, and my experience in mobile game development shows that there are ALWAYS bad bugs there, as if trapped in amber, never to be repaired in your phone.
With all the talk of OTA provisioning in mobile, I haven’t seen anybody provide effective over the air operating system patches.
iPhone’s a market killer in this respect. It will almost certainly just be like any other iPod and will do automatic firmware upgrades via iTunes.
This is pretty profound because it means you may, provided there is enough ROM or a clever Flash RAM patching system, mean that Apple will continue to provide OS upgrades for iPhone users well into the future, as they do with desktop OS X
Absence of content purchasing
Apparently you cannot purchase content on the iPhone itself. This may not be a limitation but a deliberate act. Both Apple TV and iPhone are just clients of iTunes. iTunes requires a PC… or more likely as market share and number of apple consumer devices in the home increases, a Mac.
Absence of 3G
Apparently there’s no 3G so data transfer is slow over mobile networks. The wifi is there however, so it looks like they’re gambling that the decent telcos they work with will be rolling out top-notch wi-fi soon. You’re never far from Wi-fi these days anyway, so its a moot concern for many.
Is there MMS/EMS?
I have a hunch that, while GSM and SMS were demo’d, that there won’t be MMS. I wouldn’t put it in, it sucks. Compatibility issues are huge. Sending people a rich email with a photo in is infinitely better.
Limited support for operator/aggregator supplied content
They made it pretty clear that Apple own this, and they will choose their operator. This probably means little if any operator re-branding as done by many mass market handsets.
They also said no WAP. That probably means no WAP Push, one of the primary ways to push paid-for content to devices. This might be worked around depending on the integration of Safari with the phone’s wallpaper, tones and (speculated) ability to download new applications such as games (assuming J2ME makes it on there).
On the latter point, there is a fundamental issue. How to you write, let alone play, games that are anything but puzzle games when your input device is your fingers? It could be interesting, but it will probably suck!
I don’t care really, as mobile phone games generally do suck, but the operators may not be too pleased. It looks like the only revenue stream might be from bandwidth tariffs. It could be a BIG one though.
