“When Steve Jobs stood on stage Tuesday at Macworld and showed off the iPhone for the gathered masses, he wasn’t just selling a phone. He was selling us the future — mobile, broadband-connected and ubiquitous,” Michael Calore writes for Wired News.
Calore writes, “It’s a well-worn vision, in fact, but one that suddenly seems tantalizingly close. His sleek little device runs an operating system born from Mac’s OS X. This gives the handheld the potential it needs to run real applications, not just widgets and ‘lite’ versions of desktop apps, as is the case with so-called smart phones powered by Microsoft’s Windows CE and PalmSource’s Palm OS.”
Calore writes, “The iPhone then is not just a phone, or a combo MP3-video player, but rather a portable computer. And, like a magician, Jobs has performed a sleight of hand in which the computer itself seems to disappear, just as the word has disappeared from Apple’s corporate name, leaving only its function behind. ‘I think this is a very big deal,’ says Silicon Valley technology forecaster Paul Saffo. ‘Cyberspace was a wonderful thing, but the only place you could enter cyberspace from was your desktop. We’ve had some brain damaged ways of accessing it from the places where we actually live our lives, but until now, they’ve all been compromised. If the iPhone works as advertised, it’s a no compromises node, and that’s a huge deal.'”
“‘This isn’t the next computer,’ Saffo continues. ‘This is the next home for the mind. Computers have had a nice long run, and laptops will always play at least some role. But the center of gravity is now slowly shifting from the desk to the device in your pocket.’ One thing seems certain. As software moves from the desktop to the web and as handheld devices get more powerful, it becomes more likely that we’ll see these little touch-screen communicators ruling our lives one day,” Calore writes.
Calore writes, “To be sure, the computer hasn’t literally disappeared with the advent of the iPhone, and it likely never will. It’ll just continue to get smaller and more powerful. How small and how powerful is now the subject of furious debate among software developers who really want to know: Is the iPhone in essence a slimmed down Mac?”
“The answer for now quite clearly is no. One of the salient features of a genuine computing platform is the ability to run third party applications, and currently the betting money says Apple won’t be opening its mobile platform to outsiders, at least for the foreseeable future,” Calore writes.
Full article here.
We disagree only with one of Calore’s statements: a “genuine computing platform” does not have to have “the ability to run third party applications.” Take your Mac and run only Apple applications and you certainly have a “genuine computing platform” with a world-class operating system, web browser, email, word processing, media editing, content management, presentation creation, and on and on and on. Just because Apple is the only company that’s realistically capable of providing a such a platform without any third party involvement today does not make it any less of a “genuine computing platform.”
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