|
Got me an iPod Touch 2G recently. That's an iPhone without the phone, the camera, and the integrated microphone. Been playing with it a bit and I must admit it's more revolutionary than I expected it to be, from what I'd read about it. For starters, it is eminently usable for even complex tasks with just one hand. That in itself is a giant leap for mankind - or cyborgkind.
The touch based UI is brilliant - innovative, polished, consistent. The built in apps are some of the best mobile apps I've ever used. The built in mail app supports SSL IMAP and SMTP, works smoothly, and presents a very usable interface, thanks to the iPhone's great UI design. I still love my N810 and use it for most serious work, but the iPod Touch is far ahead in usability, and the polish of apps available for it. The N810 has superior screen resolution and a fully open OS, but the iPhone leverages UI excellence to overcome the screen resolution issue for now. And in the future it's sure to get a higher res screen anyway. The closed OS is a bigger issue, but again this may just be temporary. Originally it wasn't possible to officially write 3rd party code for iPhone at all. Then Apple released the SDK and the platform was open for business, though still fundamentally locked down and controlled by Apple. In theory. In practice, iPhones and the iPod Touch can be 'jailbroken' - granting the device's owner complete control over the device, permitting the installation of apps that Apple doesn't authorize, including apps that can work in the background, and interpreted languages like Perl and Ruby - both banned by Apple's official rules. While it's a great coup on Apple's part to set itself up as the sole sale point for iPhone apps, this approach does have very serious problems. It sets Apple in an adversarial position wrt many of the greatest developers and technologies in the market. And it is ultimately a losing battle for Apple. The devices will be jailbroken, and any models that can't be (like the iPod Touch 2G at the moment) will be avoided by customers in proportion to how popular unauthorized apps are. However, the App Store model would still work fine without all the lock down. So another motive for this would seem to be security. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out. But there's no denying the fact that with Cocoa Touch and the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple has once again revolutionized the user interface.
|
