“Apple’s iPhone is still six months from store shelves, but the backlash has already begun,” Leander Kahney writes for Wired News. “For the last week or so, bloggers and pundits have been furiously ranting and raving with a litany of the complaints: It’s too expensive, it requires a two-year Cingular contract, and it won’t open Office attachments.”
Kahney writes, “The biggest upset is that the iPhone will be a closed platform. It won’t run software from anyone but Apple.”
“‘You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,’ Jobs explained to Newsweek. ‘You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up,'” Kahney writes.
“While he’s exaggerating that one unruly app will take down the network, it can certainly take down a single phone. Just look what the open-platform approach has done to Windows (and, yes, Mac OS X too, to a lesser extent) — it’s a world of viruses, Trojans and spyware,” Kahney writes.
“How to avoid? Make the iPhone closed. Jobs’ motivation is not aesthetics, but user experience. Like most of Apple’s products, the software, hardware and services users access will be tightly integrated,” Kahney writes. “While some see this as lockdown, to Jobs it’s the difference between the pleasure of the iPod and the pain of an off-brand MP3 player. I’ll take the iPod — and the iPhone.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “TTzz” for the heads up.]
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