No Such Weblog

Every once in a while, I'm at risk of falling for the iPhone -- it's a really nice device after all, and from day one, the user interface had something going for it. The first generation of the device was just too expensive for my taste, and it didn't have either 3G or GPS. It was also a closed platform, but presumably, that was going away at some point, so I guess I was willing to compromise on that point.

The 3G variant pretty much looks like the phone I'd take; the price range (including the one of the subscription that I'd need to change into) works for me, and the feature set (except for the camera's resolution, but hey, it's rare that any cell phone camera leads to great photos, so that's not a big deal at all) is what I'm looking for; the UI looks like they have taken care of many of the subtleties that I heard others complain about (e.g., you can now navigate the address book by initials).

But what really keeps me away from that phone is Apple's attitude of keeping applications off the device for competing with Apple, or for having an interpreter built in, or for whatever other reason they come up with, depending on the phase of the moon.

What we're seeing in action here is an environment that's tightly controlled, and in which innovators indeed need to ask for permission from some company that thinks it's competing with them. So I'll stick to Nokia for now, where I can run applications like Joikuspot to my heart's content. (Now, if Nokia would just finally get its act together and release decent desktop software for any platform other than Windows...)