I’m insatiable and I know it.

Here I am holding my iPhone - by far the best consumer electronic device
I’ve ever owned - and I want more. After spending every spare moment
together over the last several months, my iPhone and I are past the
honeymoon phase. From time to time I find myself looking at its smooth shiny
surface and asking, “iPhone, what have you done for me lately?”

Since the iPhone is a closed operating system, no one but Apple can
distribute new features on it. Apple strategies have rarely centered on the
openness of their solutions. Instead they have focused more on high end
design and user experience to win market share. For example, Apple could
have chosen to make iTunes more easily available to a broad variety of
devices in order to support increased sales of online music and video.
Instead they have chosen to tightly couple iTunes with the iPod. By closely
controlling the end to end experience, they have been able to create a set
of simple yet intuitive interfaces that have driven both iPod sales and
iTunes transactions.

They are obviously extending this strategy to the iPhone. If the iPhone was
a more open environment, you could easily imagine developers creating a
feature which enables people to download new content from Amazon.com.
Instead, the one new feature created by Apple since the iPhone was released
this summer is a feature which enables people to download songs from iTunes.

The user experience of the iPhone is unquestionably delightful. But from a
new feature perspective, we are stuck with what Apple gives us. It’s not
enough for me. I’m not the only one who feels this way.

There’s a community of developers and iPhone users out there hungry for new
features. They’ve gone so far as to create programs that enable you to
“unlock” your iPhone so that you can install third party software
applications on your phone. I haven’t gone down this path yet because I’m
concerned what these hacks will do to the stability of the operating system
and I know I can’t expect much support from Apple if I get in trouble
through hacking their software. Also updates to the latest iPhone software,
will relock the phone and delete third party applications.

So what’s a bored power user to do?

Google has an answer to this question. It’s called the Google Android
project.

Let’s discuss it in the next blog entry.

Dan Fox, Technology