Gizmodo Reviews Opera Mini 4.2 Beta for Android

Doesn’t sound fully baked. And using the Android hardware Back button this way sounds like it’s completely against the Android interface guidelines. Something like this wouldn’t fly on the iPhone. (Opera Mini is the cross-platform mobile-optimized version of Opera that I wrote about a few weeks ago.) �★�

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★ Regarding Opera Mini and the App Store

I’ve done some digging on this “Opera Mini was rejected from the App Store” story, and the truth appears to be very different than what has been reported and assumed. It all started with this paragraph from Saul Hansell on the NY Times Bits weblog, regarding Opera CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner: Mr. von Tetzchner said that Opera’s engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won’t let the company release it because it competes with Apple’s own Safari browser. Note, though, that this is not a quote from von Tetzchner — he’s being paraphrased by Hansell. My understanding, based on information from informed sources who do not wish to be identified because they were not authorized by their employers, is that Opera has developed an iPhone version of Opera Mini — but they haven’t even submitted it to Apple, let alone had it be rejected. One thing I hadn’t realized before is that Opera has two different mobile browsers: Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. Opera Mobile is pretty much a traditional, regular web browser. It’s Opera, but stripped down and optimized for mobile platforms. Opera Mini, though, is something else. Rather than a web browser that interacts with web sites directly, Opera Mini goes through proxy servers run by Opera. In a nut, it works like this: You request a URL in Opera Mini. Opera Mini makes the request to a proxy server run by Opera. Opera’s proxy server connects to the web server hosting the requested URL, and renders the page into an image. This image is then transmitted (in a proprietary format called OBML — Opera Binary Markup Language) to the Opera Mini client. Opera Mini displays the rendered image on screen. This may sound convoluted, but apparently the result is very effective — it’s faster to transmit, because only OBML (a compressed binary format) is transmitted to the mobile device over the phone network, and far faster to render on slow mobile processors. It is Opera Mini, not Opera Mobile, that Hansell indicated that Apple rejected. So, my speculation that it was rejected from the App Store for running its own JavaScript interpreter was wrong — Opera Mini is really only a thin client that knows how to display OBML. It doesn’t even render HTML, let alone contain a full JavaScript interpreter. (Chris Mills wrote a piece on the Opera developer weblog last year regarding Opera Mini and JavaScript.) OBML is more like PDF than HTML. So in theory, I think a version of Opera Mini that complies with the iPhone SDK Agreement could be developed. However, the version that Opera has developed for the iPhone is problematic in other ways. The cross-platform code base for the Opera Mini client software is written in Java. The assumption being that it should run on any mobile phone with a Java ME virtual machine. The iPhone, of course, doesn’t support Java in any form. On the Opera Labs web site in April, Chris Mills described how they ported Opera Mini to Android. Android uses the Java programming language for development, but doesn’t use a standard Java virtual machine; instead, for Android, Google has developed their own virtual machine called Dalvik. Here’s Mills’s description of how Opera ported it for Android: We decided to use the existing Opera Mini code base (even the binary package) instead of creating a separate port, to save on resources. We created a special wrapper that translates Java ME (mostly MIDP) API calls into Android API calls. The tool used was MicroEmulator — this is an open source (LGPL) implementation of Java ME that runs on top of Java SE. The lead Opera Mini Android developer is also the lead developer of MicroEmulator, so it was an inspired choice! The Android platform is similar to Java SE, with the exception of several libraries normally included in Java SE (like AWT/Swing — these are excluded because they would likely be too heavy to fit into the embedded environment.) It is therefore fairly simple to port MicroEmulator to run inside Android environment. The only major task was to replace the AWT/Swing graphics backend of MicroEmulator with Android specific APIs. So in short, they’ve written their own bridge to run Java ME bytecode on Android. If what they’ve done for the iPhone is along the same lines — that they’ve gotten a Java ME runtime running on the iPhone — it’s clearly outside the bounds of the iPhone SDK Agreement. The guideline in question is rule 3.3.2, which reads: 3.3.2 — An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s). My somewhat informed hunch is that the iPhone version of Opera Mini that von Tetzchner alluded to in his interview with Hansell is running only on jailbroken iPhones. If it’s using APIs only available on jailbroken iPhones, it might not even run as it stands today on a standard iPhone using only the official APIs. What Opera would need to do to have a version of Opera Mini they could submit to the App Store would be to port the entire client software to the C and Objective-C APIs officially supported on the iPhone. It could well be that even then, Apple would reject it from the App Store on anti-competitive grounds — but contrary to this week’s speculation, that has not happened. And I hope it wouldn’t, because Opera Mini sounds like a very cool app.
★ This Apple-HTC Patent Thing

There are two aspects surrounding Apple’s patent litigation against HTC that demand further consideration. First, the severe problems with the U.S. patent system as a whole, particularly with regard to software patents. Second, the strategic implications of Apple’s decision to file suit. Smart writers with first-hand experience with software patents have written much over the past few years on the system itself. Tim Bray, in particular, has written extensively on them, including his own experience obtaining them. I’ll quote here from one of his early pieces on the subject: Are Software Patents a Broken Idea? — I really don’t know. One of my brothers, an Industrial Designer, has his name on a patent for a device for mixing gases that’s used in chromatographs. When he showed me the filing, with the drawings and schematics and so on, I was impressed; these guys had cooked up a new arrangement of valves and geometries that did a practical task in an elegant and new way. It felt much more rigorous than the way we go about inventing new technology in the software space; but maybe that’s just because I’m way too close to the software world and can see all the warts on its underbelly. I’m inclined to think there’s a spectrum of reasonability in software patents. “One-click ordering” seems like a grievous error, simply because if you said those three words to any web-savvy ecommerce-savvy programmer, they’d say “OK” and build it for you and it would work; which doesn’t seem to meet a high enough bar to qualify as an invention. But consider the basic PGP setup by Phil Zimmerman, it’s just immensely clever and elegant. I have the feeling that that really does qualify as an invention in totally the same sense as my brother’s gas-mixing apparatus. Obviously I think the things I filed are closer to PGP than one-click ordering. In a later follow-up, Bray wrote: Does this mean that I’ve concluded that software patents are just fine, thank you, and the current rat’s-nest of litigation is good business practice? No; while I generally agree with Jonathan that the software-patent idea is not inherently broken (and thus disagree with Richard Stallman), the fact is that it’s almost impossible for rational people to have a rational discussion about software patents. The reason is the insanely-dysfunctional behavior of the US Patent and Trademark Office, whose idiotic willingness to grant patents on anything without regard for prior art or the obviousness test has totally poisoned the waters of this discussion. The result, as I’ve argued before, is that the net effect of the software-patent system is to serve as a parasitic tax by lawyers on businesspeople. Where I disagree with Jonathan is on what’s known as “business-method” patents: one-click ordering, per-employee pricing. I’m having trouble seeing the benefit to society in granting patents on something that could never possibly be done secretly. I also think that to get a patent, an invention should include innovation both in conception and implementation. The emphasis in the last sentence quoted above is mine. I’ve quoted extensively here from Bray because, having re-read his patent-related essays, I find myself in nearly complete agreement with him. I’m not opposed to idea of the patent system on general principal (as Stallman, and many others, are). And I think in many fields, the system has and continues to work well. But for software the system, in practice, is undeniably broken. There’s an argument to be made that software is inherently different than other field of invention, different in such a way that patents should not apply — or, should apply for a significantly shorter period of time before expiring. You can’t (or at least shouldn’t) be able to patent mathematics, and there are good arguments that programming is a branch of mathematics. But because software patents are granted, concede at least for the moment that certain kinds of software innovations ought to be patentable. Even with that in mind, clearly the U.S. Patent Office is and has granted patents for things which ought not be patentable. Not just silly frivolous things, but patents that have been granted for concepts alone, rather than specific innovative implementations of said concepts. Ideas in the abstract, rather than implementations of ideas. Paul Graham, who has also been awarded software patents, has written well on the subject, too: We, as hackers, know the USPTO is letting people patent the knives and forks of our world. The problem is, the USPTO are not hackers. They’re probably good at judging new inventions for casting steel or grinding lenses, but they don’t understand software yet. And: There’s nothing special about physical embodiments of control systems that should make them patentable, and the software equivalent not. Unfortunately, patent law is inconsistent on this point. Patent law in most countries says that algorithms aren’t patentable. This rule is left over from a time when “algorithm” meant something like the Sieve of Eratosthenes. In 1800, people could not see as readily as we can that a great many patents on mechanical objects were really patents on the algorithms they embodied. Patent lawyers still have to pretend that’s what they’re doing when they patent algorithms. You must not use the word “algorithm” in the title of a patent application, just as you must not use the word “essays” in the title of a book. If you want to patent an algorithm, you have to frame it as a computer system executing that algorithm. Then it’s mechanical; phew. The default euphemism for algorithm is “system and method.” Try a patent search for that phrase and see how many results you get. These arcane rules lead to patents being described in an obfuscated manner. That they are patenting algorithms but must pretend they’re patenting something else is the definition of a broken system. To me, “user interface” patents are hand-in-hand with “business method patents” as examples of things which, no matter how innovative or original, ought not be patentable. They’re idea patents. Adobe, to take one example, has a patent on tabbed palettes. If you’ve used Adobe apps like Photoshop, InDesign, or Illustrator in the past decade, you know what they are. Design applications have been using floating on-screen palettes all the way back to the original MacPaint in 1984. Unlike dialog boxes, they weren’t modal and “floated” over the document window. Unlike menus, they remained visible. They’re ubiquitous in design apps. One shortcoming, however, was that if you opened too many of them, you cluttered your screen — the more palettes you have open, the less room you have for displaying the document itself. Adobe came up with a great feature: they allowed you to dock multiple palettes together as tabs within a single palette window, and you could drag individual tabs between windows or drag them out into their own window. (Similar, at the palette level, to tabbed web browser windows.) Adobe patented the idea, and when Macromedia implemented a version of it, Adobe sued (and won — a measly $2.8 million). To me, that’s exactly the sort of patent litigation that is aimed at stifling innovation rather than rewarding it. Building on the ideas of others is fundamental to competition. No one company can or should be expected to change the entire U.S. patent system. Like any entrenched system with powerful entities who seek to maintain the status quo, we’re likely stuck with it. And so the way the computer industry has dealt with it is detente. Companies obtain as many patents as they can, written as broadly as they can get away with. And since everyone (where by “everyone” I mean all large tech corporations) has a large patent portfolio, and nearly every idea under the sun has been patented by someone to some degree, most of them are inert. Company A doesn’t sue Company B for infringing upon patents held by A because A’s own products almost certainly infringe upon some patents held by B. This why pure patent troll companies such as Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures are so despised. They’re immune from the threat of counter-suit because they have no products or services. Their only business is extorting patent licensing fees. The analogy to nuclear weapons is overwrought when considered literally, but in terms of strategy it’s quite apt. Paul Graham, on Amazon’s notorious “one-click” patent: Where Amazon went over to the dark side was not in applying for the patent, but in enforcing it. A lot of companies (Microsoft, for example) have been granted large numbers of preposterously over-broad patents, but they keep them mainly for defensive purposes. Like nuclear weapons, the main role of big companies’ patent portfolios is to threaten anyone who attacks them with a counter-suit. Amazon’s suit against Barnes & Noble was thus the equivalent of a nuclear first strike. That suit probably hurt Amazon more than it helped them. Barnes & Noble was a lame site; Amazon would have crushed them anyway. To attack a rival they could have ignored, Amazon put a lasting black mark on their own reputation. Even now I think if you asked hackers to free-associate about Amazon, the one-click patent would turn up in the first ten topics. Which brings us to Apple and HTC. Regardless of the merits of all 20 of the patents Apple accuses HTC of violating, strategy-wise the comparison to Amazon and Barnes and Noble seems apt: Apple has the clearly superior product and is winning handily in the marketplace. Whatever benefit in the market Apple hopes to achieve by this suit to me seems likely to be worth far less than the loss of good will and prestige Apple will suffer if they vigorously pursue this case (let alone if they initiate more such suits). Wil Shipley, in an open letter to Steve Jobs regarding the HTC litigation: You’ve famously taken and built on ideas from your competitors, as have I, as we should, as great artists do. Why is what HTC has done worse? Whether an idea was patented doesn’t change the morality of copying it, it only changes the ability to sue. […] If Apple becomes a company that uses its might to quash competition instead of using its brains, it’s going to find the brainiest people will slowly stop working there. You know this, you watched it happen at Microsoft. Copying ideas is how progress is made. It’s copying implementations that is wrong (and illegal). Admittedly there are gray areas, and reasonable people can disagree about whether some specific instances cross that line. But HTC’s phones are not copies of the iPhone. The Nexus One is without question highly influenced by the iPhone, both in terms of physical form factor and the Android software from Google. But it is also without question not a clone. My favorite theory thus far regarding why Apple is suing HTC is expressed entirely in this tweet from John Siracusa: To me, the Apple patent suit smells like nothing more than a manifestation of Jobs’s own sense of injustice. I.e., Jobs is offended by HTC’s products, not worried about them. I can understand the indignation, or at least imagine that I can. Apple’s press releases tend to be remarkably terse and plainspoken, at least by the standards of modern corporate communication. And when Jobs is quoted in them, the words are carefully chosen and meaningful, worthy of being carefully parsed1 — not at all like the bromides attributed to CEOs from most companies in most PRs. The PR announcing these suits against HTC is no exception: “We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.” That’s not the language of a licensing dispute or the beginning of a polite negotiation. That’s the language of a man aggrieved. During Jobs’s iPhone introduction keynote address in January 2007, before showing what the iPhone looked like, Jobs put up this slide showing four of the then-leading smartphones on the market: the Motorola Q, a BlackBerry, a Palm Treo, and the Nokia E62. Those pre-iPhone smartphones Jobs displayed all shared the same fundamental design: half-screen, half keyboard, and an up/down/left/right navigation controller. Now look at this prototype Android phone Gizmodo spotted in December 2007 — 11 months after the iPhone introduction. Android was conceived of that same old model — the prototype Gizmodo found in December 2007 would have fit perfectly alongside the other four phones in Jobs’s keynote slide. The gaping chasm between that Treo-ish/BlackBerry-ish prototype Android device and the HTC G1 that went on sale a year later (let alone the Nexus One today) was bridged by ideas from the iPhone. The iPhone introduced a new model. A true great leap forward in the state of the art. Not a small screen that shows you things which you manipulate indirectly using buttons and trackballs occupying half the device’s surface area, but instead a touchscreen that occupies almost the entirety of the surface area, showing things you manipulate directly. Android is a far better platform today than it would have been if Apple had never created the iPhone. That, in some sense, is not fair. I think Siracusa is exactly right that Jobs has a particularly acute sensitivity to this sort of unfairness. This litigation, perhaps then, isn’t about particular specific patented components, but rather is about the big idea, the general gist and grand ambition of the iPhone as the basic model for how modern mobile devices should be designed and work. No doubt some of you are nodding your heads and see this as justification for Apple’s suit. But life isn’t fair. Great ideas make the world better. Apple can rightly expect to benefit greatly from the ideas embodied by the iPhone, but they can’t expect to reap all of the benefits from those ideas. That’s the nature of implementing insanely great ideas. The bar has been raised, and, yes, Apple did most of the lifting. That’s how it goes. Paul Graham, yesterday: If this had happened a day earlier I don’t think I would have posted that RFS. Apple is inching ever closer to evil, and I worry that there’s no one within the company who can stand up to Jobs and tell him so. “That RFS” is the request for iPad software startups from Graham’s Y Combinator, and lest you think “evil” is too overwrought a word, Graham clarified later in the same thread: Historically the word “evil” has had a pretty broad meaning. Among tech companies the word has a new and fairly specific sense that follows from Paul Buchheit’s slogan “Don’t be evil.” That’s the sense I was using. It has a pretty low bar. It means, roughly, winning by taking advantage of people instead of by doing good work. I wouldn’t use the word evil this way, but I’m right there with Graham on this sentiment. And I say this not in any sort of hippy-dippy sense of expecting or even hoping for Apple to behave selflessly, holding them to a separate idealistic standard, or expecting them to fight with one arm tied behind their corporate back. And only a fool would argue that a company should never seek redress through litigation. But I believe that it’s good business, in the long run, for a company’s acts of aggression to take place in the market, not in the courts. My concern regarding this litigation against HTC is that it looks like an act of competitive aggression, not defense. I can think of only a few optimistic angles for this suit. One is that perhaps it’s a by-product of the suit Apple is engaged in against (and initiated by) Nokia. Apple’s counter-suit against Nokia involves some of the same patents at play here, and perhaps Apple’s lawyers have concluded that they need to enforce them against someone like HTC in order to use them in their counter-suit against Nokia. Or, perhaps one or more of the truly technical patents Apple has cited against HTC are genuine instances of intellectual property theft, the specific nature of which is unclear from the opaque language of the patent filings, and the rest of the cited patent violations were tacked on as part of a legal strategy along the lines of “If you’re going to punch them, punch them as hard as you can”. I.e. that they’ve filed suit as widely as they can, but have specific narrow violations in mind. What worries me is that idea that Apple, or even just Steve Jobs, believes that phones like the Nexus One have no right to exist, period, and that patent litigation to keep them off the market is in the company’s interests. I say it’s worrisome not because I think it’s evil, or foolish, or unreasonable, but because it is unwise, shortsighted, and unnecessary. For example, consider the timing of this PR Apple released early in the morning on January 5, announcing the three-billionth download from the App Store. Jobs is quoted thus: “The revolutionary App Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users an experience unlike anything else available on other mobile devices, and we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon.” January 5 was the day Google held its event to unveil the Nexus One.�↩
★ The Fear

The NDA is dead, yes, and good riddance, but there remain serious problems with the way Apple is managing the App Store. It boggles my mind that there remain so many people who don’t see this. This piece by Dan Kimerling at TechCrunch is one example; various of the reader comments on Jason Snell’s piece for Macworld last week are another.1 One factor, perhaps, is the tendency to see everything in terms of extremes. Black or white, good or bad. But this debate is not about wanting Apple to make radical changes, such as, say, changing the iPhone from a closed platform to a more open platform a la Android. There are reasonable arguments to be made that a more open iPhone platform would be good not just for iPhone developers, but for Apple and its shareholders. But those arguments aren’t what this debate is about. This debate is about wanting Apple to make minor changes — a slight but very significant course correction. Put another way, this is not about the big picture scope of what kind of hypothetical App Store (or Stores, plural) Apple should have created. That train left the station long ago. This is about the specific details of the App Store that actually exists, and the rules that govern it. I believe that a closed, controlled App Store can work, but by definition that requires developers to place trust in Apple. The problem is that Apple is managing the App Store in certain untrustworthy ways. And I mean trust more in the sense of stability than honesty — like in the way you need to trust a ladder before you’ll climb it. Here is a complete list of what Apple must do to increase developers’ trust in the App Store system: State the rules. Follow the rules. That’s it. This is so clear that even those who are arguing the other side — that Apple’s App Store stewardship is just fine as it stands today — have jumped through hoops in an attempt to argue that Apple’s exclusion of Podcaster was in fact in accordance with the iPhone SDK Guidelines. Kimerling, in his “Stop Complaining About Apple and the App Store” piece, writes: When you create the platform, you set the rules. If Apple wants to restrict iPhone applications to those that do not compete with features built into the iPhone, well, they can go right ahead and do so. It is right in the SDK’s user agreement. That’s just not true. The iPhone SDK Agreement, at least by the standards of legal contracts, is written in clear, straightforward English. (Apple’s lawyers, in the opinion of yours truly at least, are good writers.) The rules it lays down are clear. And Podcaster doesn’t break any of them. Given any set of rules, there will always be edge cases. Judgment must be rendered, and, inevitably, some will feel edge cases were judged the wrong way. But the reason iPhone developers (and prospective iPhone developers) are appalled by Apple’s rejection of Podcaster and MailWrangler is that neither app was near any edge defined in the SDK guidelines. Podcaster was rejected for duplicating the podcast features in iTunes and the iPhone “iPod” app. MailWrangler was rejected on the following grounds: Your application duplicates the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail without providing sufficient differentiation or added functionality, which will lead to user confusion. The word “duplicate”, in any conjugation, does not appear in the iPhone SDK Agreement. Not a word about it. And there is clearly no general rule about third-party apps duplicating the functionality of the iPhone’s built-in apps. PCalc, along with a handful of other calculator apps, duplicates every single feature of the built-in Calculator app. There are dozens of note-taking apps that compete with Notes; MagicPad goes so far as to use the same icon as Apple’s Notes app, just with different colors. There is an entirely category in the App Store — an entire category — for weather apps, several of which “duplicate” the entire functionality of the built-in Weather app. So, not only judging by the rules set forth in the iPhone SDK Agreement, but also by the existence proof of hundreds of apps currently published in the App Store that duplicate (which is really to say compete with) built-in iPhone apps, no reasonable person would have expected Podcaster or MailWrangler to be rejected. So their rejection is problematic on three fronts. First, the submission process is such that an app rejected at the conceptual level — one that cannot be tweaked or fixed to gain entry upon resubmission, but whose fundamental premise is rejected by Apple — such an app is only rejected after it has been written. The developer does all of the work to produce the app and only then finds out it was all for naught. Second, there are clearly rules which are not listed in the SDK guidelines. Third, in its explanations for the rejections, Apple is not stating what these actual unpublished rules are, and is instead offering as the reason this “it duplicates a built-in app” rule which, given all the aforementioned counterexamples that have been accepted into the App Store, isn’t actually a rule at all. The explanation is clearly false. Taken together, these three factors lead to The Fear, which is that developers cannot trust the App Store process. You can spend all of the time and effort it takes to build an app, follow every known rule, and still get rejected. From Apple’s perspective, especially, say, in upper management, it may be all too easy to look at what’s going on with the store — thousands of published apps, a ton of money changing hands — and not see the problem. In the big picture, from both a technical and marketing perspective, the App Store is a grand success. The problem is that the apps that are the most interesting, the most important, are the ones that take the most work to create. And the apps that take the most work to create are the ones that are most likely not even to be made in this environment, because the risk is greater. The more work it takes to create an app, the more you lose if Apple rejects it. Going back to the ladder analogy, the higher you’re trying to climb, the more you need to trust the ladder before you start. It’s not about a handful of developers who’ve had their apps rejected. It’s about all the other developers who are now spooked, and that the ones who are the most spooked are the ones who harbor the grandest, boldest, most innovative ideas. Interpolation Regarding a Theory on Which Apps Apple Won’t Allow Developers to Compete With In the absence of revised iPhone SDK Agreement from Apple, we can attempt to guess what the unpublished rules are. With Podcaster, for example, the “follow the money” rule of thumb leads to the conclusion that Apple will not allow any competition with iTunes, because iTunes is a profit source. This is why MailWrangler’s rejection is the one that puts The Fear in my heart. As unjust as the Podcaster rejection appears, if Apple really wants to prohibit competition with iTunes, even anti-competitively, you can at least see the thinking behind the decision. It’s foolish and unnecessary — the fact that iTunes is wide open to total competition on both Mac OS X and Windows hasn’t hurt it at all — and it also quite possibly invites some sort of legal challenge, but at least there is a logical idea behind it. But Mail? Why on earth should Apple care if some third-party email client for the iPhone becomes wildly popular? It makes no sense. iPhone users who use the built-in Mail app don’t pay extra to do so. Mail doesn’t tie users to Apple’s own MobileMe service. In fact, Mail offers specific setup help to work with Gmail, the service MailWrangler is optimized for. If you can make a replacement for Notes and Weather and Calendar, why not Mail? I have a theory. It is more, well, emotional than logical. But it’s the only theory I can think of that makes any sense at all and fits the available evidence. The theory is that there is an unpublished rule that Apple — and in this case, where by “Apple” I really mean “Steven P. Jobs” — will not publish third-party apps that compete with or replace any of the four apps in the iPhone’s default “dock”: Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod. Go back to Jobs’s original iPhone introduction at Macworld Expo 2007. It was a masterful presentation. Carmine Gallo, writing for BusinessWeek, calls it Jobs’s greatest presentation; I agree. Gallo describes the moment it was unveiled: After laying the groundwork, Jobs builds up to the new device by teasing the audience: “Today, we are introducing three revolutionary products. The first is a wide-screen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary new mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.” Jobs continues to build tension. He repeats the three devices several times then says, “Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device … today Apple is going to reinvent the phone!” The crowd goes wild. This “three revolutionary products” pitch was inordinately effective. For one thing, live, in the hall, Jobs completely fooled the crowd, yours truly included. But then as he repeated the three product ideas over and over, while icons representing the three products rotated behind him on screen, faster and faster, it started dawning on us how we’d been tricked. By the time Jobs came out and said that it was just one device that encompassed all three products, everyone in Moscone West had come to that conclusion on their own — a nifty little way of making the crowd feel clever, as though we’d figured out a riddle. But this pitch also worked because it was true. All three of those products sound good on their own. All three in one device sounds insanely great. Jobs was introducing the iPhone simply by describing precisely what it was. A phone, a widescreen video iPod, and a breakthrough Internet communicator. The icons in the iPhone’s default dock represent the core functionality of the device. Phone, Email, Web, iPod. With nothing other than those four apps, the iPhone still would have been a hit. Not as great, but, still, great. Everything else the iPhone’s built-in apps do could be done, to some extent, through Safari: notes, calendars, weather, maps, stocks. There are a few minor exceptions. SMS is one example, but that’s really just an adjunct to the Phone app. Anything that relates to the phone network — voice or SMS — is unavailable through the third-party iPhone SDK anyway. You couldn’t write your own SMS app even if you wanted to. (Apple clearly has no problem with competing chat apps — there are several IM clients available in the App Store. That’s the same basic concept as SMS, but using IP networking.) And so my guess is that while there may not be any logic, there’s at least a notion, if only in Jobs’s mind, that these four apps are sacrosanct because they define the iPhone. Everything else, both from Apple and from App Store developers, is piffle, secondary to those four apps. Harry McCracken’s recent iPhone user survey indicates that iPhone users agree that those four apps comprise the most-used features of the iPhone. But the least essential of the four is Mail. You cannot place phone calls or play music and video from your personal iTunes library using a web browser, but can read and send email through it.2 Millions of people do just that every day, including, I’m sure, many of you reading this essay. And Google’s iPhone-optimized version of Gmail shows just how well it can be done. It’s not just good for web-based mail, it’s just good, period. And so this idea that Apple seems to have that Mail is particularly special is misguided. The Phone and iPod apps are special, because at a fundamental level they perform tasks that cannot be duplicated in a web app. But there’s nothing any more special about Mail than there is about, say, Calendar. Calendar, if anything, is more closely tied to Apple’s proprietary and commercial MobileMe service — Mail works great with any IMAP server, including Gmail, but Calendar only works for online syncing with MobileMe or Exchange. But Apple doesn’t seem to have any problem allowing Calendar competitors into the App Store. Notes Calendar is a $3 Lotus Notes calendaring client. Exchange Remote Calendar is a $10 is a $10 calendaring client for Exchange. If these are OK, why not a dedicated Gmail email client? The only explanation is that Mail is deemed untouchable and Calendar is not. The real test would be for someone to write a dedicated Google Calendar iPhone app — but given what happened to MailWrangler, it might be hard to find someone willing to try it. In short, my theory is that Mail is on the do-not-compete list not because there’s any strategic reason for Apple to do so, but simply because of a vague notion that Mail is one of the iPhone’s defining apps. This notion is wrong. Mail is important, but there’s nothing about it that needs to be protected from competition. End of Interpolation, Back to the Three Problems, Which, Due to the Grotesque Length of the Above Interpolation, I Will Remind You Are: (1) App Ideas Are Rejected Only After the Apps Are Actually Built; (2) There Exist Secret Unpublished Rules Regarding What Is Allowed; and (3) When Apps Are Rejected for Violating the Unpublished Rules, Apple Refuses to State Just What These Rules Are One thing that would make a difference would be a submission process whereby developers could submit their application ideas to Apple in advance, to find out if they’re OK. That’s how it works on game platforms from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft — developers submit a detailed proposal and wait until they get the green light before actually building the game. That sounds good, but there are problems with the idea. For developers, it would require an additional level of trust in Apple. Ideas are less valuable than actual implementations, but the more original an idea is, the less comfortable you are to share it. And for Apple, it would require significantly more work. They’d still need to examine and approve the actual shipping applications, but now they’d also have to examine and consider application proposals. The world’s hard drives are littered with abandoned unfinished software projects — there would surely be far more proposals submitted for consideration than there are actual iPhone applications. As it stands today, Apple is already struggling mightily to keep up with the work of approving new and updated application submissions — the typical turnaround time is between one to two weeks. Perhaps Apple could offer this as a service limited to ADC Select ($499) or even Premier ($3,499) members. The service is needed most by the developers who are considering the biggest apps, most of whom either are already paid ADC members or wouldn’t bat an eyelash at the cost of joining. It wouldn’t be democratic, but it might make it feasible. Platforms like Wii and Xbox ship maybe a few dozen titles a month, tops. The App Store has published 3,500 titles in just three months. (And it costs far more to join the developer programs for gaming consoles than the $100 iPhone SDK fee.) More important, though, is for Apple to address problems 2 and 3, by publishing in the iPhone SDK Agreement all of the rules they’re using to evaluate applications. If we’re not allowed to write email or podcast clients, say so. If something unforeseen comes up, Apple should make a decision, and then publish the new rule. Rules you disagree with are frustrating. Rules you don’t know about are scary. I will also note that, to my knowledge, not a single published iPhone developer has spoken out in favor of the App Store’s current rejection policies. Those developers who have spoken are against it. Those who see no problem are not themselves iPhone developers.�↩ Even if Apple were to come to its senses and allow third-party developers to write competing email clients, the built-in Mail app would hold one significant technical advantage, which is that it runs in the background. In fact, background processing is the one factor that unites the four dock apps. Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod all continue running the background; no other apps, including those from Apple, do.�↩
Will Google's Android Play DOS to Apple's iPhone?

Daniel Eran Dilger Today's broad array of smartphone operating system contenders are offering lots of potential answers to a problem that only requires one. It appears the market has two options ahead: either pool generic hardware makers behind a single operating system and deliver a smartphone marketplace that resembles the Windows PC market, or watch them fall to a dominant leader and have a smartphone market that resembles Apple's iPod ecosystem. This decision isn't going to be made by a class of intellectual elite, or by government mandate. it's going to be made by the market itself. Here are the factors that will influence the outcome, either marginalizing Apple's iPhone into a niche as the company has twice experienced previously at the hands of DOS in 1981 and Windows in 1991, or positioning it as the dominant leader as Apple has achieved for itself with the iPod since 2001. The third segment in this series looks at Google's Android and the Open Handset Alliance as a possible “DOS-attack” against Apple's iPhone. Subsequent segments will look at Nokia's newly opened Symbian and other mobile contenders challenging the iPhone. Will the iPhone Meet its Match from a Modern Day DOS? Will Windows Mobile Play DOS to Apple’s iPhone? Will Google's Android Play DOS to Apple's iPhone? Will Symbian Play DOS to Apple's iPhone? Google Acquires Android. In 2005, Google purchased a startup named Android, which had been in business for nearly two years. The secretive startup was known only to be working on software for mobile phones. It was being run by a who's who of mobile industry veterans, including Andy Rubin, the founder of Danger. Rubin had earlier worked at WebTV along with Chris White and Andy McFadden, both of whom had also joined Android. Richard Miner of Orange and Nick Sears of Tmobile also brought their mobile provider experience to Android. At the time of the acquisition, Google didn't announce any plans for Android and instead only told BusinessWeek, “We acquired Android because of the talented engineers and great technology. We're thrilled to have them here.” It appeared that Google was only going to be expanding its search services for mobile phone users, along the lines of the Google SMS answer system it had recently released. Google Buys Android for Its Mobile Arsenal - BusinessWeek Windows XP Media Center Edition vs Apple TV: The Fall of WebTV The GPhone Myth. As reports began to leak out about talks between Google and hardware makers throughout 2007, rumors began to fly about “the GPhone,” a competitive offering that was supposed to take on the iPhone. Some phone enthusiasts hoped Google would jump in to rescue the struggling OpenMoko project and turn it into a viable project that could attack Apple's new smartphone. In October 2007, I printed the Great Google GPhone Myth, taking apart the idea that Google would be directly competing against the iPhone, and describing that Google was really working on a free alternative to Windows Mobile as a conduit for getting its search and related services on a broader variety of mobiles. Google's services were already on the iPhone. In November, Google played its hand: it had organized a consortium of companies called the Open Handset Alliance to develop open standards for mobiles. The first product from the group would be Android, a mobile operating system built on the Linux kernel. Google wasn't getting into the phone handset business at all; it was only making sure that its mobile search products would not risk being marginalized by the threat of Windows Mobile on phones in the same way Microsoft had been working to leverage its PC monopoly to push Google search off the Windows desktop. The Great Google gPhone Myth Introducing Android: Leader of Linux. Two weeks later, Google released an early version of the Android software. On top of a Linux kernel, Android uses a specialized version of a Java Virtual Machine that takes Java language code and turns it into what Google calls “Dalvik bytecode” rather than Java bytecode as a standard JVM would. This allows Google to leverage existing and familiar Java language tools without paying Sun for a Java license. Like Mac OS X and its fraternal iPhone OS, Android includes a variety of open source libraries, including SQLite and WebKit. On top of that, Google developed a series of frameworks that handle the tasks Cocoa Touch does on the iPhone. Android also bundles a set of applications. While Apple adapted its existing Mac OS X to work in a mobile environment to create the iPhone OS, Android is more like a customized Java environment running on a specialized mobile Linux variant: elements of maturity in an otherwise experimental new platform. What is Android? -Google Android was by no means the first mobile OS using Linux. Both Palm and its amputated ACCESS software arm have Linux-based mobile platforms. Nokia has Maemo, which it uses in its Internet Tablets, and also recently acquired Trolltech and its Qtopia mobile Linux platform. Motorola has teamed up with MontaVista Software to use its Mobilinux. Intel created the Moblin project for mobile Linux, aimed at Internet devices. Google's OHA also isn't the first consortium to attempt to standardize a mobile Linux platform. The OSDL started the Mobile Linux Initiative to define requirements for hardware; the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) then worked to define various phone profiles aimed at the Japanese market; the Linux Phone Standard (LiPS) Forum tried to do the same thing in Europe. In 2007, LiPS was folded into the new LiMo Foundation, along with the OSDL. All of these committees have had some overlap and some complementary features. Several of Google's OHA partners are also LiMo members, including NTT DoCoMo, Wind River, and Motorola. So why didn't Google just join LiMo? “LiMo, very candidly, wasn't moving fast enough,” OHA board member John Bruggeman told CNET. Google hopes to herd the Linux cats into a progressive, structured platform that can battle against Symbian and Windows Mobile to succeed as the new DOS of smartphones. Will Google fracture or unify mobile Linux? The Presumption of the Necessity of DOS. The previous segment examining Windows Mobile pointed out how the PC industry as a whole assumed that Microsoft's desktop Windows monopoly would easily take over dominance in the MP3 player market, pushing Apple into a niche position. This was expected because DOS had pushed Apple's early computers into a reduced role starting in 1981, and Microsoft had repeated this again in 1991 when the DOS world migrated to Windows, effectively pruning Apple's Macintosh into a Bonsai platform. The inability of one company to dominate any product category has been frequently repeated by PC industry pundits as a given, despite the fact that history is full of examples of this happening. Sony dominated personal music players for two decades under the Walkman brand even while equally large competitors tried to push it from this position; Nintendo has similarly owned handheld gaming despite ill-fated efforts to grab a piece of its pie by products running a generic platform such as Microsoft's WinCE (Gizmondo), Linux (GP32), and Symbian (N-Gage). In fact, outside of the Windows/DOS PC, there are actually few examples of a generic platform taking over an industry. Nearly every other consumer-facing product uses proprietary platforms: car makers, stereo equipment, appliances and so on typically all use designs custom to their maker. The paradox of the Windows PC market has been that Microsoft's broadly licensed software supposedly saves hardware makers from investing in software development while ensuring compatibility, when in reality it adds significant costs to PC makers while limiting their ability to differentiate themselves. That explains why PC makers have been perpetually merging together and going out of business while Microosft has rolled in money over the last two decades. Parallel efforts to copy Microsoft in broadly licensing an operating system have regularly failed: IBM's OS/2, Apple's Mac OS, Palm's PDA OS, even Microsoft's own efforts to duplicate Windows dominance in other markets, from copy machines to PDAs to smartphones to SPOT watches to music players. The closest copy may be Symbian, but its customers are partners, not simply consumers of a generic third party's operating system as Windows licensees are. That indicates it is not necessary to duplicate the dominance exercised by Microsoft over the PC industry in the smartphone market. Google's Android and Symbian exist more as technology sharing pacts among manufacturers, but both aspire to take Microsoft's DOS role among smartphones. However, the idea that Apple's iPhone must be dethroned by a modern-day DOS, whether Windows Mobile, Android, or Symbian, is not just debatable, but does not sync with the reality of more recent events. Apple's recent history of the iPod further refutes the idea that a software analog to Microsoft is needed. The iPod Emergence: Apple & Pixo vs IBM & Microsoft. Apple's iPod in 2001 made no effort to clone the DOS business model; it actually did the opposite. When Apple entered the market, there were a number of existing MP3 devices using custom software, hardware designs, and DRM codecs. The iPod used off the shelf components to deliver a custom MP3 player using third party software, but Apple also added its own technologies: easy to use sync with iTunes, a fast Firewire interface that made uploading music far faster than the prevailing USB 1.0, and an attractive industrial design. With the iPod, Apple played the role of IBM in 1981, using Pixo's embedded operating system to enter the market quickly, just as IBM had used DOS. The difference was that Apple didn't direct any market attention toward Pixo and added a lot of value on top of that core embedded OS. A modern day Compaq couldn't simply clone the hardware and license Pixo to run on it in order to compete against the iPod, because the iPod was much more than just generic hardware running Pixo software. As the iPod developed, Pixo's role diminished and was eventually displaced. Just like IBM, Apple jumped into a new market just as demand was beginning to explode. Apple made MP3 players far more attractive to a general audience by delivering greater playback capacity than most entry level devices offered, along with an ease of use that encouraged buyers to jump in at the higher end of the market. That left Apple with not only the lion's share of the market, but also by far the most profitable segments of the market. Two decades prior, IBM badly fumbled its play with the early PC and ended up irrelevant in the PC world by the late 80s, sideswiped by Microsoft's DOS and the cloners who were licensing it in parallel, notably Compaq and later HP and Dell. Steve Jobs had witnessed that happen, and was determined to not let it happen again to Apple. Rather than being manipulated by a software middleware vendor as IBM had, Apple worked to incrementally develop the iPod market itself. After consuming the hard drive-based player market, Apple took on the Flash RAM-based market with a tiny hard drive system used in the iPod Mini, and followed up with Flash-based devices of its own in the Nano and Shuffle. This allowed Apple to progressively serve an increasingly wider market, incrementally growing upon an established foundation. With the iPod, Apple became, in effect, an IBM with its own internal Microsoft. Microsoft's Failure Despite Features. In contrast, Microsoft entered the music player market by promoting music player hardware reference designs around WinCE. However, it was unable to ship a finished design until the iPod had become firmly established around 2005. Later branded as PlaysForSure, the devices were sold by various hardware makers and all purported to support the same DRM and the same music subscription services while also offering a broader array of hardware that presented video before the iPod did, supported wireless before the iPod, and so on. Despite these unique features, all of those PFS designs still failed. Microsoft blamed the failure of PFS upon its music store and hardware partners and decided to take Apple on itself in 2006. It relaunched a Toshiba PFS player as its own device under the Zune brand, adding WiFi music sharing features and a larger display than the current Pods had. It failed dramatically as well. Did Microsoft's attempts to float a new DOS among music players fail because of Apple's success, or due to Microsoft's own problems? The failure of the Zune, which followed the iPod model rather than the DOS model, seems to suggest that Microsoft itself was to blame. Consider too that Microsoft's Windows Mobile phones, which use the same underlying operating system as its failed PlaysForSure music players and the Zune, had similarly flopped even before Apple could release a charismatic phone equivalent to the iPod. Of course, when the iPhone was released, it hit Windows Mobile hardest. The iPhone made Windows Mobile Smartphones look ridiculous and underpowered, and made Windows Mobile Pocket PC phones look clumsy and awkward, despite the fact that they both supported a variety of features the iPhone didn't, including the ability to edit documents, capture video, send MMS, and so on. Simply adding on features did not enable Microsoft to compete against Apple. The only conclusion that can be drawn from all this is that competing against Apple requires more than just having a feature arsenal. Microsoft's failures in themselves do not necessarily mean that Google's Android will fail in its attempts to float its own smartphone platform. Why Microsoft’s Zune is Still Failing Microsoft’s Zune, Vista, and Windows Mobile 7 Strategy vs the iPhone Will Google Succeed where Microsoft Failed? Microsoft's demonstrated inability to successfully enter consumer markets for MP3 players and smartphones has given observers little faith that the company will somehow turn things around in late 2009 when its next generation of devices are expected to be released. However, prior to that the first fruits of Google's efforts to build its own smartphone operating environment will arrive. Will Google's Android take over Microsoft's crown as the “DOS vendor” among smartphones? Supporters of Google's Android project point to some parallels between Android for smartphones and Windows on the PC: Android will allow hardware makers to differentiate in ways that can offer features Apple can't (or doesn't want to); it should allow software developers to offer features Apple does not allow on the iPhone; it embraces open, hobbyist experimentation in ways that Apple currently isn't; and it opens the potential for content providers that Apple is not interested in allowing. Openness is Android's key competitive feature. Will all this openness allow Google to unseat the iPhone to become the primary platform developers want to participate in, and subsequently soak up the market for third party hardware makers that Windows Mobile serves? While Google currently has no market share due to the fact that no Android phones have yet shipped, it does have broad vocal support from a variety of the same kinds of hardware manufacturers that supported DOS and Windows and helped to make those platforms successful in the desktop PC market. HTC and Android. The first Android phone is expected to be the HTC Dream; Taiwan's HTC (High Tech Computer) also manufactures Palm's Treo Pro phone as well as many of the most visible Windows Mobile devices. In addition to models produced under its own name, HTC also sells Windows Mobile devices under the Dopod brand, as well as no-name phones branded by providers, such as AT&T, Orange, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone, and others. HTC will also be building the XPERIA X1 Windows Mobile phone for Sony Ericsson. HTC was quick to throw its support behind Android despite its long term alliance with Windows Mobile. Why would it so enthusiastically support an unproven platform from a company that has no experience in consumer hardware platforms? One can only assume that HTC is not happy with the current state of Windows Mobile, and desperately wants another “DOS” to succeed where Microsoft's has so spectacularly failed. As an Original Design Manufacturer for Palm, HTC watched as Palm adopted Windows Mobile in place of the Palm OS and subsequently fell even deeper into crisis. Palm's only successful phone since has been its Palm OS-based Centro. HTC undoubtedly sees Android as its ticket to becoming the next Dell, but without a similar dependance upon Microsoft. Android for mobile phones is essentially playing the role of Linux for PCs, except that it has the backing of a major company behind it. Can Android Take on the iPhone with Openness as its Feature? As great as this sounds, it's important to consider that Linux on the desktop has made no significant progress in eating into Windows dominance after a decade of trying. Being open, free, flexible, and decentralized hasn't been enough of an advantage to get consumers to migrate from Windows to Linux in any fraction of significance. Similarly, in the music business, Linux-based MP3 players have had no impact on the iPod, despite offering more features, flexibility, support for additional codecs, and so on. In the mobile phone area, Linux enjoys a sizable portion of the smartphone market, but this is almost entirely due to phones sold by Motorola in China, where the advantages of Linux' openness are void. Motorola's Linux phones offer nothing to users in terms of openness or flexibility, and are really no different in terms of features than other appliance 'feature phones' based upon closed operating systems. And again, a key problem with assaulting Apple in a feature war is that neither the iPod nor the iPhone became popular by being “highly featured.” They both delivered perhaps 80% of the functionality found in all other devices in the market. Rather than trying to match every feature and cater to every niche as Microsoft had with Windows Mobile, Apple's devices did a few things very well at launch, and incrementally developed into full featured devices that still lack some of the more unique features of their competitors. Further, in terms of openness, the demographic that embraces Linux' characteristic freedoms is not the same as the demographic that buys smartphones in quantity and then pays for data service. This is a critical fact to consider because a big part of the iPhone's success stems from the fact that it is being pushed by mobile providers who want to capture the cream of the market willing to pay a premium for data services. The Frankenphone. Combining the fractured aesthetic of HTC's Windows Mobile phone hardware with Android's software, based upon Linux' perpetually unfinished DIY openness and Google's Java-like development platform, will not result in a product similar to the iPhone. Instead, it will look a lot like phones that have already failed in the market. Apple's advantage comes from slick hardware designs with a close attention to detail, combined with software that purposely does less so that it can do what it does better. Even Apple's own conservative attempts to broaden its software capabilities with iPhone 2.0 have resulted in instability problems that can be blamed upon both Apple's early releases of its phone operating system and software from inexperienced third party developers new to the platform. Would the current frustrations with iPhone 2.0 be somehow mitigated by additional openness that also embraced all kinds of variables from different hardware makers with less quality control than Apple, a loose committee of additional cooks working to serve up operating system features targeted at every possible conceived need, and a wider third party software group with fewer constraints on illegal behaviors? The Failure of Open. While it is politically unpopular to criticize the well meaning efforts of open source contributors, the failure of Linux on the desktop, the failure of the vaporware Indrema game console, and the failure of the OpenMoko project to deliver a workable phone within a year of its deadline all underline the serious problems open development faces in the world of consumer oriented devices. Open has simply failed to deliver on its promises in the world of consumer hardware. OpenMoko was supposed to release its first mobile phone to consumers for $250 several months in advance of the iPhone. When the iPhone shipped, the group then announced new plans to get its phone out by the end of 2007. Instead, this spring the group announced new plans to move to an entirely different development platform, and ship its phone mid year for $400 with limited functionality and incomplete software outside of basic GSM phone features. Linux's notable successes, from Motorola's Linux phones to the Tivo DVR to Linksys Routers, have often come without any associated openness or freedom, and were instead delivered simply to provide their manufacturer with a free kernel to build upon. This indicates that while Linux may find its way into an increasing number of smartphones, it will likely not be accompanied by the glorious freedom of an open development environment Google has said it would offer with Android. Apple iPhone vs the FIC Neo1973 OpenMoko Linux Smartphone Can Google Succeed Where Open Has Previously Failed? Despite “openness” being Android's strongest competitive feature compared to Apple's iPhone, Google recently revealed that its wide-open development model is intentionally gravitating towards a closed association of top tier partners due to practical considerations. In July, Google accidentally sent out a notice that revealed that it had been seeding private SDK updates to only a subset of its contributors, angering those who believed that Android would be as open as Linux on the desktop or the OpenMoko project. Further, Google has restricted initial development to higher level APIs just as Apple did, further indicating that Google itself realizes that being wildly open to impress a minority of hobbyists will not result in the commercial success of its new platform. That serves to neuter Android's primary advantage over the iPhone. Without delivering on the premise of being wide open, Android is really just a less mature set of Java libraries used to create a specialized binary that runs on a Linux foundation. Unlike Apple's iPhone, Android phones won't have a slick user interface developed by professional artists, nor the iPhone's legacy of mature software development frameworks crafted over the last thirty years, nor the iPhone's tightly integrated hardware with award winning industrial design, nor its marketing power tied into the iPod and Apple's retail stores. Android won't be an open iPhone, it will only be a Windows Mobile phone with a better kernel that runs specialized Java software instead of Win32 or .NET code. Don't expect consumers to be impressed by that. The Biggest Missing Feature. There is one remaining factor that strangles to death any last remaining hope that Android might assassinate the iPhone and assume the crown of the “DOS of smartphones.” That is: Android delivers zero price advantage to consumers. In 1981 and 1991, consumers who wanted Apple computers faced the sticker shock of a somewhat arrogant price tag. Apple sold its computers, as it still does, at the higher end of the market, but there was simply far more range in prices available. In 1981, that meant the Apple II was $2600 and the new Apple III was $3500, even before you added a monitor. On the low end, Commodore sold its far less powerful, but “still a computer” Vic-20 for $300, while IBM entered the market with the IBM PC at $3000. Over the next few years, Apple focused on delivering additional sophistication at the same price, releasing the $10,000 Lisa and then the $2,500 Macintosh. IBM continued selling PCs in the same $3,000 to $10,000 range, but other DOS PC vendors began selling machines at prices that ranged as low as $1500. That left Apple with a roughly $1000 price premium over low end PCs. The products weren't really comparable, but consumers only saw the huge price difference. In 1991, Apple was still selling moderate to high-end Macintoshes for $3,800 to $10,000; the crippled Mac LC was $2500, and obsolete-at-birth Mac Classic ranged from $999 to $1500. Windows allowed PC makers to ship a functional $1500 PC and claim a rough approximation to Apple's $2500 entry level system, maintaining that apparent $1000 price premium. Today, pundits are lucky to find a Dell or HP system that is even a couple hundred dollars less than a comparable Mac. However, in the smartphone business, the iPhone 3G is now the same price, if not less, than generic competing phones on the market. Even more significant is the fact that the price of the phone hardware is nearly nothing compared to the cost of the service plan. This fact simply eases any price premium that could cause buyers to flock to a smartphone running a generic operating system over buying the iPhone 3G, regardless of whether it runs Windows Mobile or Android. 1990-1995: Planting Software Seeds Android Partners Have Already Failed. That same pricing principle similarly prevented buyers from considering many of the alternatives to the iPod. While Apple's original iPod models were more expensive than many of the first MP3 players on the market, they were price competitive with models offering similar features. By 2004, it was Apple who was undercutting MP3 competitors on price. Microsoft offered zero price advantage when it began selling the Zune, a major factor in its failure, but Microsoft simply couldn't out-price the iPod; it was already losing money offering the Zune at the same price as the iPod. Apple now has tremendous market power in buying RAM and other components that will prevent any competitors from being able to offer a huge discount over the iPhone's $199 price tag. Even if competitors were to give their phones away, they would only offer a $200 discount to users who would then still need to pay the same mobile fees to use the phone. Android's other partners, including Samsung and LG, have already failed to capture any significant market share in the music player market. Are they going to maintain their position as smartphone makers now that they face similar competition from Apple, its iPod ecosystem, its iTunes Music and Apps Store, Apple's retail store experience, and other factors that are pushing the iPhone? If they can, it is not obvious how partnering with Android will help. Other Problems for Android. Android was announced in early November 2007 and was followed with an early preview SDK within a couple weeks, a month ahead of Apple's initial announcement of the iPhone 2.0 SDK. However, between March and July 2008, Apple delivered nine progressive releases of its SDK, opened its App Store, and sold 60 million apps, raising $30 million to support iPhone software development in just the first month. It has since released three more SDK updates to developers related to iPhone 2.1, which is expected next month. Android just published its first open SDK beta update earlier this week, warning developers that “applications developed with it may not quite be compatible with devices running the final Android 1.0.” Additionally, Android still has no phones available. By the time the HTC Dream is expected to launch, Apple will have an installed base of around ten million iPhone (and iPod touch) users supporting software development through iTunes. The business model for selling Android apps is no better than that for selling jailbreak iPhone apps: there is no iTunes Apps Store to promote them, so users will have to track them down on their own. Android developers also have no real freedom that jailbreak iPhone developers lack. The only difference is that there are ten million iPhones to sell jailbreak apps to, and currently zero Android phones. If selling a jailbreak iPhone app sounds like more trouble than its worth, imagine trying to sell Android apps to a non-existant audience. Now add the official iPhone App Store into the mix, where publicity, promotion and profits are booming. What platform is going to have the most applications? How many users will flock to a smartphone platform with no apps? The wisdom of releasing a desirable phone and achieving a significant installed base before releasing an SDK makes a lot more sense in retrospect. Additionally, while Apple has a decade of experience in shipping regular updates to Mac OS X and its Xcode developer tools, Google has only shipped a random assortment of web-oriented SDKs (a number of which have been abandoned) as a tangent to its core business of selling advertisements. When the Android SDK 1.0 is finished later this year, developers will not only lack an installed base to sell their apps to, but will also have no high profile market for selling their apps in, and subsequently no financial incentive to develop applications that add value to the Android platform, just like Linux on the PC desktop. Around the same time, possibly within the next month, Apple will be shipping its second major OS release: iPhone 2.1. Apple will also be upgrading its entire user base to the new software so that developers will have a cohesive platform to target. This mirrors the efforts Apple has taken to upgrade its Mac OS X users to the same reference release. Mobile developers will be seeing money pouring in via iTunes while crickets chirp in the Android section of various mobile online stores. Apple’s iPhone Vs. Other Mobile Hardware Makers: 5 Revenue Engines Same Same, But Different: DOS Model Problems. Android developers will also have a series of other problems to manage. Like Windows Mobile, Android is intended to support everything, from BlackBerry-style keypad phones with a small touchscreen to the simple Windows Mobile Smartphone form factor lacking a touch screen to iPhone-like full size touch screens. Also like Windows Mobile, Android phone makers will have the option to leave off Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS location services, graphics hardware acceleration, and so on. Each Android phone will also have unique camera hardware, support for different video and audio codecs, and varied support for other differentiating proprietary services demanded by mobile operators. This will force developers to to make complex decisions regarding the lowest common denominator they choose to support. So while the iPhone will have a cohesive feature set, a managed software environment, and a functional market, Android will be a loose federation of hardware makers selling the same random features found on Windows Mobile today, with a chaotic development environment that lacks any central market for users or developers. And it will be run as an experiment by a company with no experience in consumer hardware or platform development. The Missing Tap. One specific example of the “DOS model problem” is that Android currently does not support multitouch. It's not touched on in the API, and Google quietly tap dances around its omission. Why no multitouch? Because multitouch screens are expensive, and most OHA hardware members are more interested in making a profit in a competitive phone market rather than impressing consumers as Apple did with the iPhone. Most existing smartphones, even those trying to directly rival the iPhone, use a stylus driven, pressure sensitive tap screen or a simpler, cheaper touch technology that lacks support for sensing multitouch. The iPhone's screen can actually sense up to five fingers at once, but the primary feature multitouch offers on the iPhone is the two fingered tapping and the pinching effects everyone associates with it. Android could certainly support multitouch if there were a demand for it, but that's the point: Google knows that its hardware partners are cheap and unlikely to put out hardware that actually competes with the iPhone. Instead of using expensive technologies that deliver clever yet largely invisible functionality, OHA members, just like PC makers, are far more likely to add flashy, impractical gadgety fluff that's cheap to tack on, such as slide out keyboards, neon tubes, and scratch and sniff stickers. That's how you impress gullible nerds on the cheap. Google itself is blowing smoke and erecting mirrors to distract from the reality that it being a “DOS vendor” means supporting bargain basement hardware from penny pinching duplicators. Android has been demonstrating some “wow” features such as a Street Maps app that pans around based on an internal compass in the demonstration phone. The problem is that that kind of thing only makes for a fun demo. Nobody needs to twirl around their phone in the air to see a view of the other side of the street, but everyone who has used an iPhone will wonder why they can't pinch to zoom out. Even worse, most Android phones aren't going to have a compass built into them, so Google is demonstrating features most Android users won't be able to use. That Sounds Like Microsoft… Google's design decisions are beginning to look a lot like Windows Vista; rather than actually working to make laptops boot faster, Microsoft came up with the idea of adding a small screen to the back of Vista laptops so users could check their email without having to wake the system up. But this was a stupid idea for a number of reasons, the most obvious being that most users just want a laptop that boots up quickly. Few laptops got the mini screen, but every user who tries Vista on their laptop will wonder why it doesn't boot up as fast as Mac OS X Leopard. In the same way, Google is advertising features for Android that most users won't ever see in their actual phones while ignoring things people will expect based on their exposure to the iPhone. Android is simply selecting the wrong features. Android will offer the advantages of supporting MMS, recording video, and the list of other features Windows Mobile already supplies. Those features didn't stop Apple from firing past Microsoft in the smartphone arena however, just as the Zune's highly touted WiFi and screen didn't phase iPod buyers. Incidentally, just months after the Zune, Apple had not only demonstrated a larger display but a higher definition multitouch screen, and not only WiFi, but functional WiFi that could be used to browse the web or check email. This suggests that Apple, with its faster release schedule, won't stay behind any of the leading features potentially offered by Android for very long. Android partners, however, will find it as difficult to catch up with Apple's unique features, just as Microsoft has been stymied to keep up with Mac OS X, the iPod, and the iPhone. The underlying reason: both Google and Microosft are tasked with maintaing support for a huge variety of hardware options demanded by all their partners. Apple has the unique circumstances to do only what it needs to do itself. Android in Windows Mobile's Shoes. Like Windows Mobile, Android faces a difficult market. In the US, it competes against the popular BlackBerry in corporate markets and the iPhone among consumers. Worldwide, it competes against entrenched market leader Nokia. The difference is that Google, unlike Microsoft, has no in. Windows Mobile was adopted by Windows-bound IT shops despite its weaknesses. Nobody has any preexisting reason to try an Android phone apart from hobbyists and open software enthusiasts, a demographic that has done little to move Linux on the PC desktop. Google also lacks Microsoft's installed base; it's starting from zero. The smartphone industry initially doubted Apple's chances of making much progress with the iPhone, despite the company having the Mac platform, the iPod, retail stores, platform development experience, marketing savvy, industrial design prowess, and so on. Google doesn't have any of those things. Mobile Providers vs Android. Apple also started with an exclusive partnership with AT&T, a three legged race that demanded effort from both. Google is hoping that hardware makers handle the hardware details and that mobile providers will be excited to sell its Android phones. While hardware makers such as HTC clearly appreciate having found a free alternative to Windows Mobile, it's not obvious why providers would be excited about Android, as it promises an openness that most mobile providers strongly oppose. AT&T took a big risk in getting behind the iPhone, as the phone encouraged users to use email rather than fee-based SMS and MMS, it supported WiFi for data access, and it bypassed AT&T's MEdia Net services to plug into iTunes instead. Verizon refused to parter with Apple and grant it those kinds of concessions. Is AT&T going to take a similar risk to partner with a phone that is not exclusive to it, and is Verizon now going to open its arms to support phones that do not exclusively support BREW, VCast and its other proprietary services? While Android may well eat into Microsoft's Windows Mobile business by stealing away its hardware makers, it seems unlikely that Android will ever serve as more than free alternative to Windows Mobile in a market where Windows Mobile is increasingly irrelevant. Android may have the dubious distinction of swallowing Microsoft's mobile business the same way Microsoft ate up the Palm OS, but even if it accomplishes that goal, Google will likely find itself unsustainably hungry immediately afterward. It will also find itself swimming in a shark tank of hungry rivals, including Nokia's Symbian, RIM's BlackBerry, and Apple's iPhone. Symbian is the final generic platform vying for the opportunity to play DOS in the smartphone market. The next article will examine Nokia's chances in its bid to match Microsoft's PC dominance in the mobile market while setting out in a new venture to copy Android's open software model. Did you like this article? Let me know. Comment here, in the Forum, or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast (oh wait, I have to fix that first). It's also cool to submit my articles to Digg, Reddit, or Slashdot where more people will see them. Consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!
★ Mozilla, Video, and Mobile Computing

With Microsoft’s announcement this week that IE9 will support H.264 HTML5 video, three of the big four browsers — IE, Safari, and Chrome — will soon support H.264. The only major browser holdout is Firefox.1 Mozilla is couching their position in terms of ideals: H.264 is an open industry standard but patent-encumbered and has licensing fees; Ogg Theora is open, not patent-encumbered, and free of licensing fees. Brian Crescimanno has written a fine argument that this is a situation where pragmatism should win out over idealism, and that Mozilla should include support for H.264 (in addition to Ogg Theora) in Firefox. As he points out, it’s not as though Mozilla has never before supported proprietary formats (e.g. GIF). But Crescimanno’s best point is that Mozilla’s support for Ogg Theora is doomed because it’s technically inferior to H.264: People and businesses are willing to embrace free software when it provides an equal or better product than the proprietary alternatives (see the success of Linux on the server). However, when free software doesn’t keep up with the best non-free products, people stay away (see the lack of success of Linux on the desktop). Simply put, there just aren’t that many people who share the same moral imperative as the Free Software Foundation; most of just want it to work. Put another way, “open and better” is a recipe for success; “open but worse” is a recipe for obscurity. Popular video publishing sites aren’t going to use Ogg Theora instead of H.264, and I think they’re very unlikely to support it in addition to H.264, either. Encoding and storage are expensive; supporting both would at least double those costs. The practical effect of Mozilla’s current position will not be to drive adoption of Ogg Theora. What’s going to happen is that Safari, Chrome, and even IE9 users will be served HTML5 video, and Firefox users will get Flash. Publishers will support both HTML5 video (for Safari, Chrome, and IE9 users) alongside Flash (for browsers that don’t support HTML5 and H.264) because they already have the Flash video publishing infrastructure in place, and because Flash can be used to publish H.264-encoded video. Publishers don’t have to encode (and store) video twice; they can encode (and store) it once and serve it two different ways. The sites that are the most popular — YouTube being number one, obviously — would bear the most expense to support an additional encoding format. It isn’t going to happen. So, even those using the latest version of Firefox will be treated like they’re using a legacy browser. Mozilla’s intransigence in the name of “openness” will result in Firefox users being served video using the closed Flash Player plugin, and behind the scenes the video is likely to be encoded using H.264 anyway. There’s another factor that occurred to me recently: mobile computing. Apple, Google, and Microsoft all seem to view mobile computing as a top-level priority. H.264 video playback on mobile devices is aided by dedicated H.264 decoding hardware. That’s how the iPhone and iPods get such long battery life for video playback. I believe this is also true for Android devices, and will be true for Windows Phone 7 and Zunes. Relying on the CPU for video playback simply isn’t practical on mobile devices. There are no hardware decoding chips for Ogg Theora. If you want to send video to mobile devices, H.264 is the only practical encoding for the near future. (I think this explains why Microsoft is throwing its support behind H.264 rather than some proprietary video codec of its own — Microsoft knows a winning position when it sees one.) Ogg Theora may well be “good enough” for desktop computers, but it’s completely unacceptable for mobile devices. Mozilla, as an organization, doesn’t seem to value mobile computing as a top priority. Yes, they have mobile initiatives. But the only platform they have a mobile browser for is Nokia Maemo. All of you using a Nokia Maemo, please raise your hands. Crickets. Compare and contrast with WebKit, which I suspect will soon have more mobile than desktop users. The needs of mobile computing are driving the adoption of H.264 HTML5 video more than anything else, but Mozilla doesn’t feel that pressure because it isn’t a mobile company. And at this point, “not a mobile company” is getting hard to distinguish from “not a relevant company”.2 Opera is on Mozilla’s side, supporting Ogg Theora instead of H.264, but Opera isn’t a major browser in my book. Feel free to include it in your book, though.�↩ Opera, on the other hand, is a major player in the mobile market. I think it’s safe to say that Opera is far more relevant in mobile computing than on the desktop. So it strikes me as odd that they aren’t on board with H.264. Perhaps (unlike Mozilla) they truly can’t afford the licensing fees.�↩
★ Putting What Little We Actually Know About Chrome OS Into Context

It has seemed obvious for some time that Google would someday release a PC OS. I became convinced after they released Android: if they’re creating and giving away a free OS for phones, why not PCs, too? But I expected that Google’s eventual PC OS was going to be an expanded meant-for-a-bigger-screen version of Android — sort of the inverse of what Apple did for the iPhone. Apple took a PC OS and whittled it down to a fundamental core, then built new handheld-specific UI libraries and APIs on top. The hypothetical PC version of Android I’m imagining would have entailed1 taking the core of the mobile Android OS and creating new meant-for-a-PC libraries and APIs on top. So it’s not weird that Chrome was announced. But what is weird is how it was announced. And, despite the title of the weblog post in which the announcement was made — “Introducing the Google Chrome OS” — nothing has actually been introduced. There aren’t even any screenshots, let alone a demo or any specific technical information. With an expected ship date of “the second half of 2010”, it’s a textbook example of vaporware. I don’t get the timing. Why announce it now, when it clearly isn’t close to ready? Why not at I/O, Google’s developer conference six weeks ago? Or why not wait until it’s ready to release to developers? I like facts, demos, and best of all, shipping products. I don’t like vague promises. Web Apps as Native Apps It’s certainly interesting and ambitious to state that the entire application platform will consist of web apps. If anyone was going to build such an OS, it’d be Google. Much of the initial commentary regarding Chrome OS has been wholly positive, but one common note of skepticism has been with regard to the “web apps are the only apps” aspect, with the frequent point of comparison being the the 1.0 release of the iPhone OS. E.g., Nick Mediati at PC World: Both users and app developers are still hungry for so-called “native” applications — that is, software designed for a particular operating system. A prime example? The iPhone. At the 2007 Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple discussed a “pretty sweet” way of developing apps for the iPhone: Web apps. While the Apple executives onstage spoke of the potential and power of Web apps, many developers and users groaned. They didn’t just want Web apps, they wanted real apps—apps that could take full advantage of the technology the iPhone offered. (As an aside, in the 2007 WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs didn’t describe writing web apps as a “pretty sweet” solution for developers who wanted to write software for the iPhone; he described it as a “very sweet solution”. I described it as a “shit sandwich”.) Mediati was right that not just developers but users wanted native third party apps for the iPhone. The difference from what Google is promising with Chrome, however, is that web apps will be the native apps on the system. Presumably all of the default applications from Google itself will themselves be the Google web apps we already know. It’s an eating-your-own-dog-food issue. What irked about Apple’s endorsement of iPhone-optimized web apps as a “really sweet solution” was that, of course, none of the iPhone’s built-in apps were web apps. They were all written in Objective-C with Cocoa Touch. Apple’s own iPhone apps set a high bar for user experience — a height that could not (and still can’t) be reached with web apps running in MobileSafari. Chrome OS sounds a lot more like Palm’s WebOS than it does the iPhone. Palm isn’t just telling third-party developers to write apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, they’re doing it themselves with the WebOS’s built-in apps. In fact, considering how web-app centric Google is and always has been, Palm’s WebOS is fundamentally more Google-y than Android, a platform where native apps are written in Java. One thing to note regarding WebOS, too, is that while a WebOS app is written with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and runs within a WebKit frame, it can do more than a regular “web app” running in a browser. The runtime exposes additional JavaScript APIs specific to the WebOS environment. Regular web apps — ones you “run” by telling a regular web browser to load via a URL — can’t do things like access the hardware camera or post one of those cool WebOS system-wide notifications at the bottom of the screen. Or, taking the flip side, you couldn’t just take a WebOS app and run it in a web browser on any other platform. There’s a big potential difference between “web apps” and “apps written using web technologies”. If you’re a programmer, I’m sure you understand that; if you’re not, I worry that it sounds like semantic hair-splitting. The best example I can think of are Mac OS X Dashboard widgets: they too are written using HTML, CSS, and JavaScipt, but they don’t work anywhere other than Mac OS X. I presume that there will be similar Chrome OS-specific APIs for web apps optimized to run on Chrome. But who knows? From the description in the announcement, it sounds like Chrome OS “apps” really could just be web pages. Will it support things like importing photos and videos from a camera? Again, I presume so. But then what gets stored locally and what gets stored remotely, on Google-managed servers in the quote-unquote “cloud”? Something would have to be stored locally, because uploading video (and even just full-size photos) over the Internet can be slow and expensive. The Driver Issue Microsoft has to deal with a veritable mountain of device drivers because Windows has to run on every “Windows PC”. But Microsoft made this problem for themselves. It is Microsoft that decided Windows would run everywhere on everything. No one says Chrome OS is going to run on all, or even most PCs. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s only supported for use on new PCs that are specifically certified to work with it. Hence the hardware partner list in the otherwise almost information-less “Chrome OS FAQ” Google posted tonight. Chrome Will Not Be a ‘Linux Distribution’ Renai LeMay’s “No Thanks Google, We’ve Got Ubuntu” captures another common reaction to Chrome: In this context, Google’s decision to create its own Linux distribution and splinter the Linux community decisively once again can only be seen as foolhardy and self-obsessive. Instead of treading its own path, Google should have sought to leverage the stellar work already carried out by Mark Shuttleworth and his band of merry coders and tied its horse to the Ubuntu cart. “Linux” means different things to different people. At a precise technical level, Linux is not an operating system. It is a kernel that can serve as the core for an operating system. What most people mean by “Linux”, though, is an operating system built around the Linux kernel. For use as a desktop PC operating system, all the various “Linux distributions” are basically the same thing: variations of Gnome or KDE sitting atop the ancient X Window System. Ubuntu is almost certainly the pinnacle of these distributions, but they’re all conceptually the same thing, and the only significant difference is the choice between Gnome and KDE, and even there you’re just choosing between two different environments that are conceptually modeled after Microsoft Windows. The entire X Windows/Gnome/KDE “desktop Linux” racket has never caught any traction with real people. Almost no one wanted it, wants it, or will want it. My theory on this is rather simple. Early versions of Gnome and KDE were pretty much just clones of the Microsoft Windows UI. They’ve diverged since then, and I’d say Ubuntu’s default Gnome desktop is in most ways better from a design and usability standpoint than Windows Vista. But it’s still fundamentally a clone of Windows — menu bars within the window, minimize/maximize/close buttons at the top right of the window, the ugly single-character underlines in menu and button names. At a glance it looks like Windows with a different theme. The idea being that if you want Windows users to switch to Gnome or KDE, you’ve got to make it feel familiar. But that’s not how you get people to switch to a new product. People won’t switch to something that’s just a little bit better than what they’re used to. People switch when the see something that is way better, holy shit better, wow, this is like ten times better.2 So I think Gnome and KDE are stuck with a problem similar to the uncanny valley. By establishing a conceptual framework that mimicks Windows, they can never really be that much different than Windows, and if they’re not that much different, they can never be that much better. If you want to make something a lot better, you’ve got to make something a lot different. Whatever Chrome OS turns out to be, it isn’t going to be that kind of “Linux”. They’re using the Linux kernel, yes, but they’re building something new and original on top of that. Linux is to Chrome OS what BSD is to Apple’s iPhone OS — which is to say something that users will never see, smell, or notice. Everything from TiVo to Palm’s WebOS uses Linux as the kernel for their operating system — using the commodity underlying operating system (in the comp-sci sense of the term) and ignoring the commodity user interface systems. Here’s the telling line from Google’s announcement: The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. From a user-level perspective, Chrome isn’t going to look, act, or work anything like Windows. And that’s why Google has a chance to make something that might actually prove popular in a way that Ubuntu hasn’t. An Odd Name I’m sure what I’m about to suggest is anathema to Google employees, but in addition to the sky high vapor-to-bits ratio, there’s another aspect of the Chrome OS announcement that reminds me of Microsoft: the name. In the same way that Microsoft has used “Windows” to describe very different things — both a computer operating system and an online suite of web apps — Google is now using “Chrome” to describe two very different things. A web browser is very different from an OS, even if the OS only runs the browser. Google themselves recently conducted a survey that suggests that most regular people do not understand at all what a “web browser” is. If regular people are confused about what a browser is, it’s a good bet they’re even more confused about what an “OS” is. Calling them both “Chrome” isn’t going to help clarify the matter. Install Chrome the browser on your PC and if you don’t like it, you can delete it and you’re right back where you were. Install Chrome the OS on your PC and if you don’t like it, you can delete it and you have a blank hard drive. I’m not predicting that people will mistakenly install one when they meant to install the other; I’m just saying that significantly different things should have significantly different names. Client-Services, Not Client-Server There have been numerous client-server systems throughout the history of the computer industry. Some popular; some not. The basic idea behind all of them is that you have many cheap client machines that users actually sit in front of, connected to a few expensive server machines that do most of the actual computing. The complexity is almost entirely on the server side, managed, presumably, by professional experts. A single client machine, unconnected to the network, is pretty much useless. Chrome OS is in many ways a return to that model. Web apps largely consist of server-side code, with a relatively thin layer of JavaScript that runs on the client. Data, too, mostly resides on the network, not the client machine. But there’s a big difference. The Chrome OS model isn’t about thin clients connecting to a server. It’s about thin clients connecting to many and any servers. One of the few sure things about Chrome OS is that it’s going to work well with Google’s own web apps, but the web is open, and Google is a strong proponent of open web standards. Everyone will have the opportunity to write web apps that run just as well in Chrome OS as Google’s own. At an abstract level, there is much appeal to this concept. With all of your data and all of the software you use online, you have nothing to back up. Nothing to migrate when you buy a new computer — just log in from a different Chrome OS machine and there’s all your stuff. But at a practical level, how well will this actually work? Is it feasible to use Chrome OS as your sole computer? If not, how big is the market for “secondary” computers, especially as (a) more and more people buy laptops to serve as their primary machine, and (b) more and more people buy iPhones and Pres and Android-based mobile phones? I say: not very big. In short, will Chrome OS pass the dog food test: is it something Google’s own engineers will want to use? I’m skeptical about the prospects of any new system or product that isn’t intended for use by the people creating it. Gmail, for example, is the best web mail system because it was designed to be used not just by “typical” users but by expert users, including the engineers at Google who made it. The iPhone is simple enough to appeal to almost anyone, but guess which phone the people who created it use? Make something intended not for your own use, but for use by dummies, and you’ll usually wind up creating something dumb. The future of computing probably is in the direction of thin clients connecting to network services for storage and software, but my hunch is that Chrome OS is too thin. Or, perhaps, it will entail rather than would have entailed, as I’m not convinced that the existence of Chrome OS precludes Google from also releasing a PC version of Android. It sure would be odd for Google to produce two competing netbook-optimized OSes, but what little we do know about Chrome OS so far is, well, a little odd. And because they’re both open source, it could be that Android continues evolving into a credible PC OS through community effort alone.�↩ The group that’s the most enthusiastic about Gnome and KDE desktop Linux systems consists of those who care the most about the political and licensing aspects. With regard to the freedoms that stem from the software being open source, something like Ubuntu isn’t just, say, ten times better than Windows or Mac OS X, it is infinitely better.�↩
Opera: Apple won't let us in the App Store

Filed under: Internet Tools, App Store, SDKOpera Software CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner said in a New York Times interview yesterday that its engineers have developed a version of the Opera web browser that works on the iPhone, but Apple has rejected it for the App Store because it competes with Safari. This isn't unprecedented: Apple rejected an app called Podcaster possibly because it duplicates functionality in an upcoming version of the iPhone software. Podcaster was (for a time) available via ad-hoc distribution before that, too, was shut down. Daring Fireball's John Gruber suggests that Apple rejected Opera because the browser included its own JavaScript interpreter, something forbidden by the iPhone SDK developer agreement. Opera makes two flavors of its mobile web browser: Opera Mini for most mobile phones, BlackBerry, Palm, or Windows Mobile; and Opera Mobile, a more featured version for Symbian and Windows Mobile. A beta version of Opera Mini for Android is also in development. Update: Gruber used his massive Rolodex over the weekend to determine through an unnamed source that the app may not have even been submitted to the App Store. Huh. Read�|�Permalink�|�Email this�|�Comments
50 Killer Mac Apps For Under $50

� �Who doesn't need more for less? We present 50 Mac|Life-approved applications--many free, all under $50--that'll guarantee you get the most from your Mac without traumatizing your wallet.�The Internet is full of noise--countless different applications for every occasion, with reviews everywhere that love and hate them at the same time. While that’s hardly news, it’s still a hassle that isn’t going away. Say you picked up a spiffy new MacBook Pro, and it’s time to kit it out with the leanest, meanest software. After all, Macs have that rich history of garage-roots development, of a few folks in a basement brewing up quality software that smokes the big-name stuff. So you’ve got a feeling there’s great, affordable software just waiting for you to find it--and you’re right. But how do you sift through the zillion calendar apps and jillion media players to find the gems worthy of your hard drive space? And more importantly, your time and money?We’re here to help with a compendium of essential software. It didn’t come easily--we debated, argued, haggled, and even pleaded to secure a prized position on this list for our favorite, most useful applications. But by limiting the software we’re highlighting to 50, we’ve guaranteed you the best of the best--no Internet spew here. And by capping the cost of the software we’ve selected at $50, we’ve made sure you can reasonably buy what you need. You may love your Mac already, but you’re not gonna believe how much it can do once you load up even a few of these choice applications.� �Entertainment�Sure, iPods and iTunes make music and movies easier to enjoy, but they're not without headaches of their own. That's where these awesome apps come in. They take the pain out of kicking back with your favorite flicks and tunes.�Simplify Media�Share & stream your iTunes library over the Internet.The iPod has made several portable music formats obsolete, and we sure don’t miss schlepping around fragile cassette tapes or heavy wallets full of CDs. But even the mighty iPod has its limits--namely capacity. That’s where Simplify Media (free, Simplify Media, simplifymedia.com) comes in handy. It guarantees that the size of your music library doesn’t matter by letting you stream music between computers via the Internet. Yup, this app will play your entire library on any computer (as long as the one that has your library is powered up and online).Stream your tunes from home or the next cube.Once installed, a simple login fires up your music. Simplify Media works with iTunes just like the built-in LAN sharing does, and the remote libraries appear under Shared, alongside any local shared libraries. Even better, you can add up to 30 friends’ shared libraries, and an iPhone app ($5.99) lets you pipe your music to your iPhone or iPod touch.��SuperSync�SuperSync keeps multiple iTunes collections in sync.�Speaking of iTunes libraries--streaming is great, but what if you want to sync libraries across multiple Macs? SuperSync ($22, SuperSync, supersync.com) makes it so. Sure, Apple introduced limited music-transfer capabilities with Home Sharing in iTunes 9, but that feature requires computers to be on the same local network. SuperSync one-ups iTunes by syncing iTunes libraries over the Internet. It’s perfect for anyone who uses multiple Macs, and SuperSync also has a bunch of other tricked-out features. In deference to the record companies, Apple makes transferring music from an iPod to a computer unnecessarily difficult. SuperSync handles the task with ease, making it a bacon-saver when the hard drive in your Mac kicks the bucket. SuperSync will even allow you to sync libraries cross-platform.SuperSync's color-coded interface helps you synchronize your iTunes tracks across multiple Macs.��VLC Media Player�Never worry about video file types again. If most of your Mac video-watching happens in the form of DVDs or QuickTime movies, you probably don’t think too much about player software. But move beyond the most basic video types, and you’re asking for trouble. With the myriad formats, containers, and encoding parameters available, the simple act of playing back a cat video can become incredibly frustrating. VLC Media Player (free, VideoLAN, www.videolan.org) is like a Swiss Army knife for digital media. It’s open source and cross-platform, and the app will play back practically any audio or video file you throw at it. VLC also handles file conversions with ease, so you can use it to convert audio and video for use online or on portable devices.It plays, it converts, it makes toast (okay, maybe not that last one.)��RipIt�Backup & convert DVDs with RipIt.There are plenty of legit reasons to rip a DVD. Backup copies of kids’ movies for the minivan, watching Glee on your iPod touch while you’re on the bus, or even just saving battery power on your laptop (playing back a file from a hard drive is much more efficient than spinning a DVD).RipIt's simple interface makes ripping DVDs seamless and easy.Once the domain of übernerds, DVD ripping is a one-click affair thanks to RipIt ($19.95, The Little App Factory, ripitapp.com). And since it makes full rips, all of the menus, bonus features, and subtitles remain intact. You can play back the resulting files with DVD Player on your Mac or use a freeware tool like Handbrake to convert your rips into iPod-friendly formats. ��Delicious Library�We love the iTunes Store, but we still end up accumulating books, DVDs, console games, and, yes, even CDs. Delicious Library ($40, Delicious Monster Software, www.delicious-monster.com) helps catalog your collections by--get this--taking snaps of UPCs via your webcam and then automatically organizing your meatspace content onto virtual shelves for easy sorting and browsing. You can track loans to friends, post items for sale on Amazon, and publish Web catalogs formatted for your iPhone. That way, you can avoid buying another copy of John Hodgman’s More Information Than You Require. ��Connect360�We’re Apple-faithful, but that doesn’t stop us from engaging in a little Modern Warfare 2 on our Xbox 360. And since the 360 is much more than a simple gaming machine, we also use it to stream iTunes tracks to our entertainment center and view pictures from our iPhoto library on our HDTV--with the help of Connect360 ($20, Nullriver Inc, www.nullriver.com), that is. It works over wired or wireless networks, and it even streams H.264 video straight from our MacBook. Sweet! ��Peel�Pack rats, beware: Peel ($14.95, Hjalti Jakobsson, www.getpeel.com) can get really overwhelming, really fast. But if you’re an avid follower of music blogs, Peel can automagically grab new tracks as they’re posted. So forget all that pesky right-clicking and manually adding to iTunes. Just feed Peel a list of your favorite music blogs, and then kick back as tons of new, free tunes get downloaded straight to your Mac. You may never have to buy (or pirate) music again. ��CoverScout�Cover Flow is one of those features that looks great in a demo but doesn’t quite translate at home. iTunes can attempt to find the album art that makes Cover Flow actually useful, but it’s limited in scope and can’t make fuzzy matches. CoverScout ($39.95, equinox USA, www.equinux.com) scours the Internet to find your missing album art and presents you with multiple options to let you choose the best images. Don’t Cover Flow without it. ��TuneUp�For all of those untitled and mistitled tracks in your music library, there’s TuneUp ($19.95/one year, $29.95/lifetime; TuneUp Media; www.tuneupmedia.com). Like CoverScout, TuneUp can find and download missing album art, but its best trick is cleaning up your ID3 tags--the artist, title, and album info displayed in iTunes. A quick search is all it takes to clear up all those Track 1s and Unknown Artists in your library. It sure beats cleaning up metadata by hand.�Next Page: Productivity Apps >> �Productivity�Takin' care of business, every day. Takin' care of business, every way. Workin' on a Mac, it's all right. This productivity software is workin' overtime.�WriteRoom�Blocks distractions so you can write in peace.Proving the tired adage that “less is more,” WriteRoom ($24.95, Hog Bay Software, www.hogbaysoftware.com) is a light text editor with a full-screen mode. Start a new document, and everything else fades away--your Dock, your menubar, and other windows on your Desktop. You’re left with a black screen and friendly green text for a clutter- and distraction-free experience. The Escape key toggles between full-screen mode and windowed mode, which resembles TextEdit with a live word count.WriteRoom can save your work as plain text, rich text, or Microsoft Word’s .doc format. The preferences offer tons of customization: auto-save, character counts, the appearance of text in full-screen mode, and more. But WriteRoom’s real magic is how it gets out of your way and lets you focus on what you’re doing.��BusyCal�One calendar application to rule them all.BusyCal ($40, BusyMac, www.busymac.com) is iCal on steroids. It dances circles around iCal, chanting, “Everything you can do, I can do better.” And it’s right. Sharing is a snap: You can set up two-way syncing with your Google Calendar or with other BusyCal calendars on your local network or the wide-open Internet. But even aside from sharing, BusyCal offers tons of calendaring bells and whistles: customizable views, sticky notes, weather forecasts, moon phases, graphical icons, a to-do list, notes, tags, and much more. And since it uses the Sync Services built into Mac OS X, your BusyCal calendars can sync with MobileMe and your iPhone. You can even switch back to iCal anytime without losing any of the events or to-dos you entered in BusyCal.So what if iCal is free? BusyCal is better.��Things�Flexible to-do list syncs with iCal and the iPhone. For busy people like us, a good to-do list is beyond essential. But some that we’ve tried are so complicated that just managing your tasks becomes a chore in itself. So the light, easy-to-understand Things ($49.95, Cultured Code, www.culturedcode.com) is a breath of fresh air. You can go the full Getting Things Done route, adding contexts, priority levels, a tickler file, and so on. Or you can keep it simple, with one-off and repeating tasks and multistep projects. iCal syncing can get your deadlines on your calendar, and Things on the Mac can sync wirelessly with Things on the iPhone ($9.99 in the App Store). We’ve tried multiple task-managment systems, from Web-based ToodleDo to iPhone apps like ToDo to Mail’s built-in To-Do list to good old paper and pencil. Things is the cream of the crop for its good looks, quick entry, and easy syncing.Things uses tags to organize your projects in a million ways--or you can ignore the tags altogether and just work.��Express Scribe�Transcriptions made easy... well, easier.Transcribing an interview, lecture, or other recording is hard enough, just with the listening and typing. Toss in the extra arm movement as you frantically click from your text editor to your audio-playback application every time you want to pause the recording or rewind a few seconds, and your transcribing job just got tougher and more frustrating. Express Scribe (free, NCH Software, www.nch.com.au/scribe) lets you set system-wide hotkeys for audio playback so you can stay in your text editor, fully control the audio, and never need to reach for your mouse.Express Scribe can also slow down your audio without changing the pitch, supports video, works with lots of file types, loads recordings from analog or digital audio recorders, and more. Plus, it’s completely free. Wahoo!��NoteBook�The Mac is silly with note-taking applications (Evernote, Yojimbo, ShoveBox, MacJournal…shall we go on?), but Circus Ponies’ NoteBook ($49.95, Circus Ponies, www.circusponies.com) is a standout. If you subscribe to “a place for everything, and everything in its place,” NoteBook can be the place for notes, Web clippings, bookmarks, documents, voice memos, photos, and more. It struts its flexibility with ready-made templates for planning a trip, writing a research paper, collecting recipes, keeping a journal, and so on, while its fun spiral-notebook interface is a nice touch. ��TextExpander�A thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters could produce Hamlet a lot faster if they knew how to use TextExpander ($29.95, SmileOnMyMac, www.smileonmymac.com). This wonder app installs as a System Preferences pane and lets you define shortcuts for your most commonly used words and phrases. Abbreviate long URLs, your email signoff, even your own photo or scanned signature file. Then as you type those shortcuts, they’re automagically expanded to what you really wanted to say. Brilliant. ��iFinance 3�Sure, Quicken is popular and Mint.com is free, but iFinance 3 ($29, Synium Software GmbH, www.synium.de) was built from the ground up just for Macs, and it shows. The intuitive interface makes it a cinch--dare we say a pleasure?--to track your accounts, keep an eye on your cash flow, set up a budget, and graph your expenses. It can also import from CSV and QIF files for easier data entry. Plus, a companion iPhone app lets you enter transactions on the go.��FlexTime�This charming timer app ($18.95, Red Sweater Software, www.red-sweater.com) lets you set up multistep routines that run once or repeat ad nauseam. Each step can be marked by a sound, spoken text, or even running a script. Once your routine is perfect, you can export the audio to iTunes--great for following a recipe’s carefully timed steps or taking your favorite yoga routines on the road. ��DEVONthink Personal�Another great catch-all for storing, sorting, organizing, and searching information, DEVONthink ($49.95, DEVONtechnologies, www.devon-technologies.com) can take almost anything you can throw at it. Documents, PDFs, photos, multimedia files, bookmarks, webpages, iChat logs--all of those can be imported, sorted, and read right in DEVONthink. Searching is easy, and you can cobble together a brand-new document from items in your DEVONthink database and export it to your favorite text editor for printing or as HTML for posting. �Next Page: Internet Apps >> �Internet�It's a wild place, that Interweb, so there's nothing like a few primo apps to tame everything from blogging to FTPs to Twitter and Flash banners.�Transmit�Traveling the two-lane FTP highway.FTP has been around forever. Social networking and cloud computing may come and go, but FTP is in it for the long hall. Fortunately, there are a wealth of great FTP clients for the Mac, and the best of those is Transmit ($29.95, Panic, www.panic.com/transmit). The client utilizes a split directory window that shows the path on your computer and the path on the FTP site. With in-app search and the ability to sync folders on your Mac and on the FTP site, Transmit helps alleviate the search and drag-and-drop blues of other clients. The sync feature is especially helpful for Web developers and designers. You can even create desktop droplets for quick uploads to heavily used sites.Two-window FTP FTW.��Mac-Journal�Web-based apps suck.Blogging about your life is a faux pas. Blogging about anything else that people actually care about is the proper way of utilizing of the blogging systems available out there. The ongoing problem is that most blogging platforms are bit of a pain to use because they’re Web-based. Plus, if you’re somewhere without Internet access, you can’t start laying out your blog posts for your site. MacJournal ($39.95, Mariner Software, www.marinersoftware.com) solves that problem with an easy-to-use multiplatform blogging client. Lay out your articles offline with images, video, and audio, then save them for later posting. The app includes the ability to both write in full-screen mode so you won’t be interrupted by your Twitter friends, and to record an audio podcast in the client.Create blog posts quickly and without browser issues.��Tweetie�Multi-account Twitter action.After wowing the world with its iPhone Twitter app, atebits decided to release a desktop version of Tweetie ($19.95, atebits, www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/). The app can handle multiple Twitter accounts, compose tweets in a separate window, allow you to change the account you’re sending a tweet from on the fly, and let you drag and drop pics and videos right into the Compose window. Don’t have the perfect media on your Mac for a tweet? Record a video or shoot a pic from your iSight camera directly in Tweetie. And since Twitter conversations can be difficult to follow, Tweetie displays the conversation you’re having in a timeline if you just double-click one of the pertinent tweets. The Tweetie bookmarklet in Safari also allows you to share links quickly from your browser.Have an actual conversation on Twitter with Tweetie.��Dropbox�Stop, drop, and roll on home.Transferring large files can be a huge pain. Where the hell did you leave that thumb drive? External hard drives leave an unsightly bulge in your pocket, and all those cables are always getting tangled in your shoes. That’s a safety hazard, son. Dropbox (2GB storage for free, 50GB for $9.99/month; Dropbox; www.dropbox.com) is a cloud-based storage drive that you can access from any computer or iPhone. Just pop files into the Dropbox folder on your Mac, and it automatically syncs up with the online disk (which you can view on Dropbox’s website) and with any other machines you have the application installed on. You can even share folders and files with other Dropbox users. If the free 2GB box doesn’t cut it, you can upgrade to 50GB for $10 a month.Access your files from anywhere in the universe (with an Internet connection).��LogMeIn�If you need to remotely access a Mac or (gasp) a PC with Windows on it, LogMeIn (free, LogMeIn, logmein.com) allows you to peer into your remote computer from anywhere. You can launch apps, move files, and adjust your preferences via a Web-based interface, as if you were sitting at that computer. For $29.99, you can get your iPhone in on the action too. ��TweetDeck�If you’re a Twitter power user, TweetDeck (free, TweetDeck, www.tweetdeck.com) should be in your arsenal of Twitter apps. The interface is a series of columns that displays info like your friends’ feeds, saved searches, mentions, direct mentions, and Facebook updates. You can also keep up with trending topics with just a quick glance. If there’s something you need to track on Twitter, TweetDeck can make a column for it. ��Vuze�Allegedly, BitTorrent steals medication from senior citizens, but isn’t it time to forget about all the evil things it supposedly does? Instead, focus on the greatness of Vuze (free, Vuze, www.vuze.com) and its ability to download legally available video files. After you’ve done the downloading, Vuze can convert your files for use on the iPhone, Apple TV, iPod, Xbox 360, TiVo, and PlayStation 3. It’ll even stream videos to your set-top boxes. Nice! ��BannerZest�Creating Flash banners is difficult, especially when you don’t know or own Flash. BannerZest ($49, Aquafadas, www.aquafadas.com) takes the pain out the process and gives you a simple way to create quick, beautiful Flash banners. From a standard gallery to an interactive experience, BannerZest comes with a collection of themes for different uses, and it uploads your banners to your FTP or MobileMe disk. ��FileChute�Sending large files over email can result in the dreaded bounced email. FileChute ($17.95, Yellow Mug Software, www.yellowmug.com) works with your MobileMe-, FTP-, or WebDAV-accessible Web server. Drop your file into the app, and it uploads it to your online server of choice and then creates a URL to add to your email. If you drop more than one file, you get an archive uploaded to your server. Adios, bounced emails! �Next Page: Content Creation Apps >>�Content Creation�Sure, Adobe's stuff is the gold standard, but you don't want to have to count on a good night at the poker table to pay for it, right? Cue these killer applications, which let you effectively draw, edit photos, render, animate, and even scratch for a very fair price.�djay 3�Budgeted beats to grow on.You want to spin phat beats, but your slim bank keeps you from purchasing the high-end DJ equipment and software. That’s okay, young DJ-in-training, djay 3 ($49.95, algoriddim, www.djay-software.com) gives you everything you need to rock the house without losing your shirt. This surprisingly robust audio-mixing software integrates with your iTunes library and puts all the usual mixing and scratching right on your desktop. The application supports multitouch trackpad scratching and fading between tracks, so it’s especially perfect for the last few generations of MacBooks. And as you grow as a DJ, the application will grow with you thanks to its support for MIDI controllers. That means when you get the cash for those fancy digital mixers and turntables, djay will be right there with you.With your iTunes catalog at your fingertips, you'll find some pretty interesting mashups.��Audacity�Free audio editor extraordinaire.Audio editing seems simple at first. Then suddenly, you’re knee-deep in samples, frequencies, and bitrates. Sound editing really is part science, part black magic, so we’re thankful that Audacity (free, SourceForge, audacity.sourceforge.net) removes one of the biggest obstacles: choosing a quality application and figuring out how you’re going to pay for it. Audacity is both terrific and free, which is kinda hard to beat. An audio-recording and -editing application, it captures up to 16 channels at once from multiple sources, features noise removal, includes a metadata editor, and supplies unlimited undos. It can handle most of the audio files out there, and it’ll work with multiple files types in the same project. Audacity is also is cross-platform, so if you’re a recent Mac arrival, you may already know about its awesome power.So many features, you'll second-guess the price: free.��SketchUp�3D for you and me.Maya, 3D Studio Max, and SketchUp--all of these will let you create magical 3D worlds. Only one will do it for free, and you probably nailed it in one--it’s Google’s SketchUp software (free, Google, sketchup.google.com) that brings the world of 3D to the average Joe. You can create your own items or utilize Google’s 3D warehouse to find models created by other SketchUp users. With all those models at your fingertips, you can create floor plans for your home, build a level for your favorite FPS, or export the files to animation software or Photoshop. The application includes tutorials that’ll get you up and rendering in no time at all… so now nothing stands between you and virtual-world domination!Build a virtual man-cave for you and your stuff.��Ringer�Wham-bam ringtone, ma'am.We get tons of people asking us, “How do I make a ringtone for my iPhone?” Until recently, we told them to launch GarageBand, cut a ringtone, and export it to iTunes. Now we recommend Ringer ($15, Pixel Research Labs, pixelresearchlabs.com/ringer) as the quickest and easiest way to create ringtones from your favorite songs and audio files. Ringer has access to your entire iTunes library and works with MP3, AAC, MOV, MP4, M4V, and QuickTime files. Yeah, you can make a ringtone from a video file. A super-simple editor with waveform information makes it a snap to select the perfect section of audio, and you can fade in and out of the file and preview the ringtone before cropping it and sending it to iTunes for a sync with your iPhone. ��Acorn�Using an image editor doesn’t have to cost you hundreds of dollars. In fact, with Acorn ($49.95, Flying Meat, www.flyingmeat.com/acorn), you’ll get features like layers, AppleScript support, 64-bit support, drawing, and filters in a package that’s easy on the wallet. This easy-to-use software strips away most of the features most people don’t use and gives you a clean image-editing tool. ��Inkscape�While raster-based image editors like Photoshop are great at pushing pixels around, the vector-based drawing programs are where all the real action happens. The open-source application Inkscape (free, Inkscape, www.inkscape.org) is similar to powerhouses like Illustrator and CorelDraw, but with one important difference--it’s free. The app utilizes the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format and includes a nice 3D drawing tool that allows you to set your vanishing points. ��Screenflick�With Snow Leopard, Apple introduced screen-capture into QuickTime, and it’s a nice feature if you’re looking to make a quick full-screen screencast. But if you want something that has features like fixed location output at up to 60 fps, Screenflick ($25, Araelium Group, www.araelium.com/screenflick) is an application you can get behind. It’ll highlight mouse clicks and keyboard events, adding a nifty visual cue into your screencasts that highlights what you’re doing. ��Bracketeer�While your eye can take in an amazing range of light to dark, your camera cannot. In order to help create images that include a tonal range that the average camera can’t capture, HDR applications and plug-ins have appeared on the market. These applications take a series of images that have been bracketed from dark to light and combine them to include the darkest darks to the lightest lights in one HDR image. Bracketeer ($29.95, Pangea Software, pangeasoft.net/pano/bracketeer) is a standalone application that does just that. Adjust the saturation, the contrast, and exposure from within the application. The application will even auto-align your images in case you got the hiccups while taking your pics. ��iStopMotion 2 Home�Most animators’ first animation was probably a stop-motion piece with Star Wars action figures. And whether those childhood lightsaber battles have you hoping to become the next Brad Bird, or you just love the look of stop-motion, iStopMotion ($49, Boinx Software, www.boinx.com/istopmotion/overview) is a quick, easy way to create simple stop-motion animations. Use your iSight or connect a camera to your Mac and start making your own Wallace and Gromit short. You’ll feel the Force, Lu… sorry. �Next Page: Utility Apps >>�Utilities�Slick utilities can add crucial functionality to your Mac, so we've selected the best options for everything from secure password managers and system-troubleshooting tools to an app that will let you play Windows games on your Mac... without Windows!�AppZapper�Completely trash applications.Unlike using Windoze, installing and uninstalling apps on a Mac is painless. Drag an application’s icon into your Applications folder, and you’re pretty much good to go. Deleting them is just as simple--just grab them and toss them into the Trash. But if you’ve ever dug around Library or System folders on your Mac, you’ll see that even after you Trash an app, many of them leave crumbs in different parts of your machine. For cleaning up those last little bits, AppZapper ($12.95, Austin Sarner and Brian Ball, www.appzapper.com) is a must-have utility that’s also great for troubleshooting problems. Wiping out all of an application’s preferences and other random files can often turn a troublesome app into a perfectly behaved one after a clean reinstall. Completely remove unwanted applications with a simple drag and drop.��Hazel�Clean and organize your Mac--automatically.Hazel ($21.95, NoodleSoft, www.noodlesoft.com) is kind of like Rosie the Robot for your Mac. Or it’s like OS X’s Folder Actions… if they were super-awesome, easy to use, and perfect for helping you keep your Mac’s folders and files organized. Hazel installs as a pane in System Preferences, monitoring locations that you choose, and performs actions on files based on your criteria. By creating simple rules, you can delegate repetitive and annoying file-management tasks to Hazel--for example, automatically add downloaded MP3s to iTunes or move DMGs to an archive on an external drive. Hazel can delve deep into metadata for complex actions like copying images into subfolders by ISO settings or reorganizing music files according to bitrate. You can even set up simple rules for auto-deleting items that have been in the Trash longer than a certain amount of time.��1Password�Keep all your confidential info on lockdown.You’ve heard it before--secure, unique passwords are the way to go. Yet there you are, still using the same password for everything from your maclife.com login to your Gmail and your bank account. Do we even have to tell you again why that’s a colossally bad idea? 1Password ($39.95, Agile Web Solutions, agilewebsolutions.com) can help clean up your online act, creating and managing complex passwords for every online account and then logging you in with a keyboard shortcut. The app can also be used to securely store personal information like credit card numbers and addresses for use in Web forms. And since all of your passwords are unique, you won’t have to worry about your banking info being compromised because of a data breach at that sketchy Russian website you used to download MP3s for a penny.1Password securely stores Web passwords, logins, software licenses, and other important information.��iPhone Explorer�Store & browse files on your iPhone.Breaking tradition with the iPods of yore, Apple doesn’t provide the ability to use your iPhone as a USB drive. iPhone Explorer (free, myPod Apps, www.mypodapps.com) is a simple app that will let you drag and drop files onto your phone for easy portability. The app itself is lightweight, and all it takes is a USB cable to view your iPhone’s folder structure. In addition to storing files, iPhone Explorer can be used to restore iTunes tracks from your iPod to a Mac or to rescue photographs from the depths of your iPhone’s memory. No jailbreaking is required, but more adventurous users with jailbroken phones can also recover contacts, messages, email, and other data. It’s a powerful tool, but it’s simple to use for the careful novice.��AppleJack�AppleJack (free, The Apotek, applejack.sourceforge.net) is one of those things you’ll install once and never think about again—if everything goes right. But if, god forbid, your Mac starts acting weird one day--or stops acting, period--it’ll be AppleJack to the rescue. It’s a command-line utility for diagnosing and repairing problems with your computer. Use the menu-driven system to repair permissions, validate preferences files, and remove screwy cache files.��SuperDuper�With Time Machine built into OS X, there’s really no good reason not to have an automatic backup. But Time Machine has its limits--a big one being the lack of bootable backups. SuperDuper ($27.95, Shirt Pocket, www.shirt-pocket.com) easily handles creating and updating bootable clones of your Mac’s hard drive so you’ll be ready to go when disaster strikes. Just plug in your clone, restart, and you’re up and running again. ��CrossOver Games�PC fanboys like to slag the Mac for having fewer games, but with CrossOver Games ($39.95, CodeWeavers, www.codeweavers.com), Mac users--and Linux fans too--can easily play games coded for Windows machines. The list of officially supported games is hundreds deep, and since CrossOver is based on Wine, you don’t even need a copy of Windows just to play Team Fortress 2. ��Clean My Mac�Hard drives are never big enough. Whether you have a MacBook Air or a Mac Pro, there always comes a point when there’s just not enough space on your internal disks. Clean My Mac ($29.95, MacPaw, macpaw.com) can help with that problem, scouring your Mac’s drive and tossing out all sorts of gunk you don’t need. Use it to toss unneeded language files, scrub extraneous code from universal binaries, and thoroughly clean up after deleted applications. ��rooSwitch�OS X’s Fast User Switching is handy for juggling multiple user accounts and their corresponding settings, but rooSwitch ($19, Rocket, rooswitch.com) allows you to maintain different settings on a per-application basis. Use it to manage Home and Work browser profiles, for example, or to have different profiles in your word processor for writing or editing documents. rooSwitch works with nearly any application, and it supports Automator and AppleScript for the ultimate in customizability. �Next Page: Wild Card Apps & Staff Picks >> �Wild Cards�Not all Mac apps fall into your neat little categories. These five break the mold and completely deserve a place on your hard drive.�Bricksmith�Virtual bricks you can't lose or step on? Sold!Legos are the official plastic brick of Mac|Life--we’ve had many discussions about the empires we built in our childhood bedrooms and how much we miss “playing Legos” as the soulless adults we are today. Bricksmith (free, donations accepted; Allen Smith; bricksmith.sourceforge.net) lets you recapture the magic in a highly geeky way. It’s a 3D Lego-model creator, offering drag-and-drop construction using thousands of parts in every color of Lego’s rainbow. Tutorials and the one finished model that’s included show you the ropes, and once you’re done with your virtual creation, you can export step-by-step instructions to build it for real. There’s even a mini figure generator where you can design and outfit a matching Lego man and insert him into your model. This software couldn’t be cooler.We can't believe an application this sweet is donationware.��CameraBag Desktop�Give your photos a new identity or some old-timey charm.We named the iPhone version of CameraBag one of our “101 Essential Apps for 2008,” and now the same fun can be had on your Mac, thanks to CameraBag Desktop ($19, Nevercenter, www.nevercenter.com). You drag in a digital image, and the app re-creates the look of a real film photograph--choose from Helga, Lolo, Mono, 1962, 1974, Instant, Magazine, Cinema, or Colorcross.For more variations, click the Reprocess button, and all the options will change their look and coloring just slightly. Or check the Multi-filter box and experiment with adding multiple filters to a single photo. Of course, you can export your altered images back to your hard drive without affecting the original file. The novelty of taking an everyday digital snapshot and making it look like a Polaroid image or washed-out 1974 photograph never gets old.Your digital photos, plus extra personality.��SousChef�Recipe database + shopping list + cooking assistant = one kitchen lifesaver.SousChef ($30, Acacia Tree Software, acaciatreesoftware.com) edges out MacGourmet ($49.95, www.marinersoftware.com) in the cooking-assistant category for its cloud database of recipes. Every time a SousChef user enters a recipe (133,000-plus at press time), it’s synced to the cloud, and you can search those and import them into your own library. You can also opt out of sharing your own recipes so Aunt Erma’s secret matzo ball soup stays in the family.Once a recipe’s in your library, you can edit, print, email, or blog it--or even add its ingredients to your grocery list. Click the Cook button for a full-screen view of the instructions that you can read from across the room, keeping your Mac out of the splatter zone. The Mac’s built-in speech recognition lets you advance the recipe’s steps with your own voice, or you can use the Apple Remote or a Keyspan Front Row Remote.��Temporis�Attractive, drag-and-drop timelines make it easy to "show, don't tell."Everyone loves a good infographic, or at least geeky types like us do. (And the geeks shall inherit the earth, don’cha know?) Temporis ($24.99, Bartas Technologies, www.bartastechnologies.com) makes it easy to create neat-looking timelines on your Mac, which you can then print or export as PDF or TIFF files that are ready for importing into your presentation software, word processor, or page-layout app.Adding new events is just a Command-click away, and it’s a snap to drag the start and end dates around on the timeline. The Arrange button will automatically stagger your timeline’s events into the most logical and easy-to-read order, and the Inspector lets you tweak fonts, colors, titles, labels, and your timeline’s span and intervals. You can even export the event data separately as an XML or CSV file.��Manga Studio Debut 4�Create your own comics and manga, and even manga-fy your photos.Manga Studio Debut 4 ($49.99, Smith Micro, my.smithmicro.com) is a must-have for fans of Japanese manga or anyone who wants to make their own comic books. Its ingenious Beginner’s Assistant groups together the tools by processes so you can intuitively wind your way through a typical manga workflow: sketch, panel, draw, tone, and add character dialogue.You can scan or draw your own art (graphics tablets supported, natch), play with the included samples, purchase manga content from www.contentparadise.com, or even import your own digital photos and watch Manga Studio make them all comicky-looking. Draw speed lines, add dialogue bubbles, move your pages around, and then print or export your finished comic book. Manga Studio Debut 4 is the younger brother to professional-level Manga Studio EX 4 ($299.99), but Debut has plenty of advanced features too, including layers, templates, customizable patterns, and more.�Mac|Life Staff Picks��Bass Tuner�I’m a beginning bass player--like, very beginning. So it’s a huge help that I don’t have to worry about staying in key. This terrific, simple, and streamlined little app ($9, www.rustykat.com) lets me quickly get in tune in front of my MacBook using the built-in mic. With that necessity sorted, I can fire up some tracks and tablature and focus on struggling to play along.��Multiwinia�Multiwinia ($19, www.ambrosiasw.com) offers crazy replayability. You devise a strategy for your stick-figure army, then watch them take on up to four other teams in six game types on 40 vector-graphic maps. Online multiplayer against Mac and Windows players works flawlessly and keeps me coming back for more. No Napoleon complex necessary. ��MetaX�If you need to tag a large amount of MP4 files, you could use iTunes’ painfully slow process. Instead I found MetaX (free, www.kerstetter.net) for all my tagging needs. The app will search the IMDB catalog and plug the information into the appropriate fields, then share that info via tagChimp. You can even scan DVD barcodes via iSight! ��Bean�For a word dork like me, word processors are a big deal. Bean (free, www.bean-osx.com) is a lightweight, open-source word processor. It’s missing many of the blinky lights and thingamajigs of the big boys, and that’s exactly the point. Fewer distractions equals better writing, faster. And for anyone who needs to hit a certain length, the live word count rocks. ��Fluid�I often find that Firefox has the tendency to crash when I have too many Web applications running. But Fluid (free, fluidapp.com) lets me create a site-specific browser out of my most essential websites, like Google Docs and Flickr. Simply plug in the URL, and voilà! You have a separate application running that won’t go down if something else does. ��Next Page: More Gaming Bang for 50 Bucks >> �More Bang for 50 Bucks�Some of the Mac's best games are also its cheapest? Sweet!Fifty bones won’t buy you even one new Xbox 360 or PS3 game, but on the Mac, you can snap up a stack of premier games for less than that. Or at least, that was our theory when we gave Florence, our new associate online editor, 50 whole American dollars and asked her to max out her Mac with the best gaming that short stack of money could buy. Man, did she score--check out the results of her diligent “research.”�Plants Vs. Zombies�$16, amazon.comLine up perilous peashooters and sun-soaking sunflowers against an abominable horde of zombies in Plants vs. Zombies.This animated tower-defense favorite pits you against a horde of zombies with one thing on their (decaying) minds--invading your home for brains! Pit your arsenal of zombie-fighting plants, each with their own spectacular organic weaponry, against 26 zombies and 50 levels of adventure. Fair warning: Once you start playing this excellent game, it’s incredibly hard to stop. �World of Goo�$10, amazon.comStack up adorable globs of goo to build structures and watch them band together as you help transport them across various levels.World of Goo is another addictive and totally adorable puzzle game. Created around the idea that circular goo balls make adequate building materials (naturally), the game has you solving puzzles by dragging and dropping goo to create all kinds of crazy structures that enable you to transport your goo across the level. The oh-so-cute googly-eyed blobs pack the game with charm, and you can also connect online and play against other Goo architects around the world.�Braid�$15, playgreenhouse.comBraid's aesthetically appealing backdrop and profound storyline will keep you engrossed until the very end.Some games defy description, and Braid might be easy to pass over because it appears to be just a mix of platforming and time control set against a gorgeous backdrop. But it subverts and transcends those two well-worn clichés with brilliant design and an absorbing story that packs a twist that you’ll never see coming. Watch the YouTube videos if you need help solving its puzzles, but just make sure you see this masterpiece through to the end.�Balcassa�$8, openplanetsoftware.comBalcassa has a mountain of exciting brainteasers for the puzzle fiend.Balcassa feeds off those nightmares you still have about attempting to master that archaic, rainbow-colored Rubik’s cube. And while most of you probably never cracked the damn thing (we didn’t!), Balcassa gives you a second chance. The objective of the game is to slide the cubes into a specific sequence, pattern, or orientation. It may sound like a simple task, but much like fiddling with a Rubik’s cube, figuring it all out is the real reward.�Freeware Fun�If you’re interested in first-person shooters and MMORPGs, Quake Live and Second Life can give you hours of entertainment at our favorite price: $0.00. Both games perform smoothly on Mac OS 10.4 or later. Quake Live doesn’t require beefy hardware because it runs through your Web browser. But that doesn’t stop it from delivering all the fast-paced action of the classic first-person shooter. Second Life, while not as packed with storyline as World of Warcraft, offers a similar massively multiplayer world where you can meet people, customize your character’s look, and participate in a virtual world that’s just like our own. You don’t even have to watch the clock to make sure you’re on time for a player-versus-player raid!You don't need fancy computer hardware to frag your way through this beloved shooter.�Vital Statistics on Our 50 Killer Apps�Total cost if you bought all 50 apps: $1219.83Number of apps that are free: 13Apps that have an iPhone counterpart: 15Whaddaya waiting for? (apps that have a free demo): 39Number of countries these apps were born in: 7Apps named "iSomething": shockingly... just 3!Apps that require Snow Leopard: 1Apps that require Leopard: 14Apps that promise "iLife integration!": 9�
★ Regarding the Verizon and ‘iPhone Lite’ Rumors

There’s been much speculation this week regarding reports in BusinessWeek and The Wall Street Journal of talks between Apple and Verizon. To wit: that Apple is considering Verizon for a future iPhone and/or its mythical forthcoming tablet. This is not too complicated. Let’s just play “What’s in it for them?” Verizon — Would they want to sell some sort of iPhone model? Yes, of course. The iPhone has undeniably turned into a big deal. Verizon has nothing to do with it, and it is the single best competitive advantage held by AT&T, Verizon’s biggest rival. None of the iPhone rival devices Verizon has offered so far is any good or very popular (cf. the BlackBerry Storm), and the Palm Pre is exclusive to Sprint. AT&T — The iPhone means more to AT&T than any other phone it carries. Most people decide which carrier to buy a phone from, go there, then pick a phone. With the iPhone, people decide they want to buy one, and then they go to AT&T. Some number of iPhone owners switched to AT&T specifically and only because of the iPhone. In fact, there are some who switched to AT&T to get the iPhone despite the fact that, all things considered, they’d prefer to buy a phone from another carrier — often Verizon, which is widely regarded as having the best overall U.S. network coverage. It is very much in AT&T’s interests to keep the iPhone as an exclusive AT&T device for as long as it can. Apple — The iPhone matters to AT&T, but AT&T doesn’t really matter much to Apple. The U.S. is Apple’s (and the iPhone’s) biggest market, but it’s still just one country in a big world. In the just reported quarter, AT&T reported activating 1.6 million iPhones. But Apple reported selling just under 3.8 million total iPhones — so 58 percent were sold outside the U.S. AT&T isn’t Apple’s iPhone partner. They’re just Apple’s iPhone partner in the U.S. I think the U.S. tech press often overlooks this, hence some of knee-jerk skepticism that Apple would even talk to Verizon. Apple wants profit and they want market share. The trick is balancing the two. Surely Apple makes more money per iPhone with an exclusive deal, but they would sell more total devices if iPhones were available on both AT&T and Verizon. Yes, Verizon’s network is CDMA, not GSM, and so it would require Apple to produce different hardware. But there are some number of Verizon customers who won’t switch to AT&T but who would buy an iPhone from Verizon, and my guess is that that number is high enough for Apple to at least consider producing Verizon-compatible hardware. So, even if Apple would prefer to stick with AT&T exclusively, at least for another year, I’d find it surprising if they didn’t at least talk to Verizon just to hear an offer, and perhaps more importantly, to leak the flirtation to the press so as to keep the pressure on AT&T to offer Apple the best possible terms. But as for whether I think an iPhone on Verizon is actually imminent — as in “coming in the next few months” imminent — I doubt it. During Apple’s quarterly finance call last week, analyst Gene Munster asked why Apple has maintained its exclusive agreement with AT&T. COO Tim Cook said: On AT&T, Gene, we view AT&T as a very good partner. We believe that they’re the best wireless provider in the U.S. and we are very happy to be doing business with them. They have done a very good job with iPhone, they’ve put the full force and weight of their company behind it, it’s a major strategic thrust for them and so we’re very happy with the relationship that we have and do not have a plan to change it. And then Cook again, responding to a follow-up question regarding any “technical hurdles”: Well from a technology point of view as you know, Verizon is on CDMA and we’ve shown from the beginning of the iPhone to focus on one phone for the whole of the world and when you do that, you really go down the GSM route, because CDMA doesn’t really have a life to it after a point in time. Steve Jobs, famously, is known for pooh-poohing ideas or features only to turn around months or years later and declare them to be the best ideas or features ever, now that Apple has embraced them. Apple doesn’t announce big changes until it is ready to announce them, direct questions be damned. And so I wouldn’t count on Apple’s “not having a plan to change” the AT&T exclusivity lasting forever.1 But the CDMA comment does not sound like misdirection from a company planning to unveil CDMA phones this summer. That comment was specific, and it wasn’t something along the lines of we’re not going to do CDMA, but rather more along the lines of CDMA is on its way out industry-wide. That’s just not something Cook would say if Apple were planning to announce a CDMA phone in June — and without a CDMA iPhone, there’s no iPhone for Verizon.2 Ask again when Verizon’s next-generation LTE network is running, though. But that’s just the iPhone. If Apple is preparing to soon announce its supposed tablet / mediapad / whatever, and if said tablet / mediapad / whatever is going to support mobile broadband, it could well use EVDO from Verizon without contradicting anything Cook said about CDMA or the iPhone remaining exclusively on AT&T. (Brief Interpolation Regarding the Proper Perspective Regarding Any Rumored New Devices: Keep in mind that these tablet / mediapad / whatever rumors are growing to the point where if the WWDC keynote comes and goes without any mention of this device, the jackass contingent is going to blame Apple for not releasing it rather than blame the rumor reporters for being wrong. BusinessWeek’s report had the most details about purported new devices, but in terms of timing, only said “One of these devices may be introduced as early as this summer.” Point of this interpolation being that if — and this is a very real if — this really is a device Apple is preparing to release, fever-pitched rumors won’t make it appear any sooner than when Apple deems it ready.) Erring on the Side of Increased Market Share It’s my assumption that Apple’s long-term plan for the iPhone platform is patterned after Apple’s long-term plan for the iPod. Apple’s iPod strategy has been phenomenally successful, and there are many obvious parallels. The biggest difference is that the iPhone has succeeded far faster than the iPod did — Apple didn’t release the Windows version of iTunes until two years after the original iPod was released as a Mac-only peripheral. One of the key points in the history of the iPod was the release of the iPod Mini in January 2004. That’s when Apple expanded the iPod from a single product to a family of products, and the Mini proved to be a smash hit. The formula behind the iPod Mini was simple: Apple made a smaller, cheaper device with more or less the same technical specs as the original iPod from October 2001. Apple went on to repeatedly improve upon the iPod in two ways: on the high end by producing new devices with the same shape and price but with new features (additional storage, color screens, larger screens, video, etc.); on the low end by taking the existing features and making them smaller and cheaper. So here’s how I see Apple applying its iPod strategy to the iPhone. At some point the iPhone will expand to two form factors: A high-end iPhone with the same basic size and price as previous iPhones, but with significant new features. Obvious potential new features would be things like more storage space, more RAM, a faster CPU, an improved (and eventually video-capable) camera, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and superior battery technology. A new, lower-priced, smaller, and more adorable iPhone, with more or less the same technical specs as the original iPhone. Given that those specs include the 320 � 480 display, I wouldn’t expect something tiny, but remember that the original iPod Mini was “just” 35 percent smaller by volume than the then-current full-sized iPod. Shrink the iPhone’s forehead and chin and make it thinner — maybe a lot thinner — is what I’m thinking. Existing iPhone apps would run just fine on the new device, as it’d have similar, if not identical, CPU performance and RAM to previous full-sized iPhones. Such an iPhone sounds much like the “iPhone Lite” that BusinessWeek reported its source saw. The only question is when. Could be this year. Could be next year. But put me on the record for predicting it’ll happen before the end of 2010. The reason why Apple did this with the iPod, and why I’m convinced they’ll do it again with the iPhone, is that when it comes to managing the balance between per-unit profit and overall market share, Apple is determined to err on the side of market share. (Not as much with the Mac, however — the difference being that PCs are now a firmly established market.) Most gadget companies, when they have a smash hit on their hands, try to milk it. A typical company that found itself selling millions of $400 hard-drive-based digital music players would try its best to continue selling the same $400 hard-drive-based digital music players for as long as it could. Apple, despite an overwhelming 70 percent market share, aggressively added features and drove down its own prices, year after year after year. I’ve previously quoted the following passage from Steven Levy’s 2004 Newsweek interview with Steve Jobs, but it’s worth repeating here. The topic was the Mac’s long-stagnant (at the time) market share. If that’s so, then why is the Mac market share, even after Apple’s recent revival, sputtering at a measly 5 percent? Jobs has a theory about that, too. Once a company devises a great product, he says, it has a monopoly in that realm, and concentrates less on innovation than protecting its turf. “The Mac user interface was a 10-year monopoly,” says Jobs. “Who ended up running the company? Sales guys. At the critical juncture in the late ’80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits. They made obscene profits for several years. And their products became mediocre. And then their monopoly ended with Windows 95. They behaved like a monopoly, and it came back to bite them, which always happens.” In the near term, Apple could fuel explosive iPhone unit sale growth just by reducing the entry price. But at some point, looking a handful of years down the line, expanding the iPhone’s U.S. market share is going to require going beyond AT&T. The only question is when. Worth a footnote: Munster never mentioned Verizon by name. He simply asked about maintaining exclusivity with AT&T. Cook brought up Verizon on his own.�↩ The CDMA/GSM schism has blocked Verizon users from even unlocked iPhones. I’ve long wondered how much more prevalent iPhone unlocking would be if Verizon had a GSM network.�↩
★ Assorted Brief Observations and Thoughts Regarding Windows Phone 7

They Stopped Digging Good for Microsoft for starting over with a truly new UI and new developer APIs. There’s an old saying that when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Microsoft found themselves in a hole the day Apple unveiled the iPhone, but continued digging for three more years. Better late than never, though. The Zune UI Just about any new UI would be better than the existing Windows Mobile UI. But basing the new Windows Phone 7 UI on the Zune raises the question of why they think it’s going to fare any better than, well, the Zune. The ‘Phone’ in the Name Renaming the platform from “Windows Mobile” to “Windows Phone 7 Series” makes it even less applicable than ever to non-phone mobiles, like the iPod Touch. I think the iPod Touch is the single greatest strength of the iPhone OS platform. You can argue that phones like the Nexus One and Pre Plus are worthy rivals to the iPhone 3GS, but there is no rival to the iPod Touch. Now, admittedly, Apple’s mobile OS has “phone” in its name too, so I suppose there’s no reason why someone might not make a non-phone device running the “Windows Phone” OS, but it seems shortsighted to me. The only logical explanation I can think of is that Microsoft only plans to license the OS for use on actual phones, and they’re going to pull an Apple with non-phone devices for this platform with their Zune brand. The ‘Windows’ in the Name The bigger naming question: Why name it “Windows” anything? If Microsoft is going for a clean break, why not a new non-“Windows” name? I think it shows just how perverse Microsoft’s obsession with “Windows” is. There’s no good way to leverage their Windows PC OS monopoly to extend it to mobile, other than the name, so they’re sticking with it. It doesn’t even make literal sense. The whole point of the “Windows” name is that it was for a system whose UI revolved around the concept of on-screen windows. There are no windows in the Windows Phone 7 interface. (There’s also no Start menu in the WP7 UI; that was the linchpin of UI similarity between Windows (for PCs) and Windows Mobile.) A new non-Windows name would have let Microsoft use a 1.0 version number. I think the “7” in “Windows Phone 7 Series” is a detriment to their message that this is a clean break from Windows Mobile 6 and earlier. The 7 implies “new version of the old thing”, which isn’t what they want at all because the old thing is unloved and unpopular. A new 1.0 thing would have also dampened uncomfortable questions about why phones available today won’t be upgradeable to the new system when it ships. The Osborne Effect That (a) Windows Phone 7 units aren’t expected until late this year (and think about what happens if the schedule slips); and (b) current Windows Mobile 6.5 phones will not be upgradeable suggests that Windows Mobile phones aren’t going to have a good year, sales-wise. Windows Mobile sales and market share were already in steep decline; the Osborne Effect isn’t going to help. Perhaps in the long run it doesn’t matter just how badly Windows Mobile handsets sell between now and the debut of Windows Phone 7 handsets. But on the other hand, the last thing Microsoft needs in the weeks and months leading up to the new handsets debuting is bad press about tanking “Windows Mobile” sales. (Another reason why it would have been a good idea to use a new brand name.) Triumph of the iPhone Form Factor When the iPhone debuted, there were no popular phones based primarily on a large touchscreen. Now, nearly all new smartphones share the same basic form: a roughly 3.5-inch touchscreen. (Non-touchscreen BlackBerries are the biggest exception.) Many include a hardware keyboard, but the touchscreen is the starting point. The Windows Phone 7 software doesn’t look like the iPhone’s much at all. But the hardware is pretty much an iPhone with two extra buttons (Back and Search). One advantage Windows Phone 7 may have over Android is that WP7 was designed with this form factor — the large touchscreen — as a baseline assumption. All major Android phones on the market have this form factor too, but the Android OS itself was designed to be abstract enough not to require a touchscreen at all. That’s handicapped Android in terms of things like text editing, which requires the use of a trackball or direction pad instead of a pure touch interface. Who’s the Competition? The big three mobile platforms right now are iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android. (Feel free to add Nokia as a fourth.) I think Windows Phone 7 is most competitive with Android, because that’s the one with the same business model: licensing the OS to OEM hardware makers. They’re even competing for attention from the very same hardware makers, especially HTC. Google’s been undercutting Microsoft with free (or nearly free) services for a few years now: Google Docs against Office, Gmail for Business against Exchange, and soon, Chrome OS against Windows. But this one, Android vs. Windows Mobile, is the first one where Google seems poised to take the lead. Windows Phone 7 doesn’t just have to be better than Android, it has to be better enough to convince handset makers that it’s worth the licensing fees.

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