Will Wait For Beer: iPhone Spawns Gray Market
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How badly do you want an iPhone? Would you pay US$1,500 to buy one? How about $300 for someone to wait on line for you?
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This just in: iPhone won't be able to do everything when it launches on June 29.
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Soon there will be two iPhones on the market. Each will do different things, but at least the companies behind them won't be squabbling over who can use the name and how.
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There's more to gain than lose from the upcoming iPhone.
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(InfoWorld) - No one ever said Apple marketers weren't clever. So if they wanted to start a firestorm of ISVs developing applications for the iPhone, how better to do that than to make development as simple as possible with the least barriers? Nevertheless, until we hear more details from Apple about the way in which applications are handled on the iPhone, we won't know how clever Apple really is. At WWDC07, Jobs promised that there will be a "new way to create applications for the iPhone" due mainly to the fact that it uses the full Safari browser engine. But a lot of developers are disappointed with what Apple is offering. "Web-based apps are cool for a lot of things. But what people were looking forward to was to to let them develop native applications," said Anthony MeadowÂ , president of Bear River AssociatesÂ , an ISV for mobile applications Without native access to facilities, you don't have storage or sharing of information between applications, or reading and writing from address book and iCal. "There is not any easy way to do that with a Web-based application," said Meadow. Overall, Meadow was not impressed. Although he admitted it is really not very clear what Apple intends. But, he added, "If they don't intend to have access, they should just tell us." Ken Dulaney, the senior mobile analyst with Gartner says Apple's Web 2.0 solution is likely to be similar to what RIM does now. "It avoids having to put code down on the device," Says Dulaney, which in turn protects it from crashing due to outside influences. On RIM devices, the application is rendered on the server side, and the cache in the browser reformats it and pushes it down to the device. "The code is only resident briefly on the device," Dulaney said. Similar technology is also used by device manufacturers using mobile Linux from MontaVista. Now resident on tens of millions of cell phones, the MontaVista design uses a "computing peer" design, Linux on the server and on the phone, giving developers the flexibility of partitioning an application on the client side and server side. An ISV can put a heavy load on the phone or a light one, says Jim Ready, CTO and founder of MontaVista. "Linux on the phone is every bit as capable as Linux on the server," said Ready. Certainly this supports similar statements from Jobs about Safari on the desktop and Safari on the iPhone. However, like Meadow at Bear River, Ready has some reservations about the future capabilities or the richness of applications running on the iPhone. When applications are developed solely using an "abstracted" development environment that doesn't talk to the lower layers of the device, such as the hardware and middleware, there is a dividing line in terms of the capabilities of the application. "Take video frame rates. The reason you back out of an abstracted environment is because you pay for the abstraction in performance. It is a tradeoff," said Ready. And not only for performance -- developers also need to write native applications that get down closer to access the hardware and the middleware for size and control reasons, as well, although Meadow doesn't see access to hardware as a major problem. "There is a handful of people that care about writing to the chips. It is possibly useful for really high performance graphic drivers and low level networking code," he says. So where does that leave gamers and business users whose need for rich network applications might be problematic on the iPhone? Unfortunately, until the full story is known, it is hard to tell what the software limitations of the iPhone will be. Certainly, if Apple wants the device to be a great mobile gaming system for use by millions of road warriors during those long waits at the airport, it will have to address the issue of how to get developers to write applications native to both the hardware and middleware. In business as well, cell phones are currently being used with customized software, such as bar code and RFID readers. "You can't do that with a browser interface," says Jerry Panagrossi, vice present of U.S. Operations for Symbian. "You need something more in-depth that can talk to IBM or Oracle middleware using native APIs for a richer experience." Jim Ready at MontaVista sums it up when he says keeping the development environment as simple as possible will facilitate the largest amount of applications. As far as the capabilities of those applications Ready says, "There are limits, but sometimes it's okay that there are limits."
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Love it or hate it, the frenzy around Apple's iPhone is forcing consumers to think about what they want from a mobile device.
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With the iPhone launch still over a week away, mobile market research firm M:Metrics reports that 19 million Americans have shown strong interest in purchasing the device.
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The closest Peter Tribeman has gotten to Apple iPhone's elegant touch screen is a television commercial. Now he wants one. There's only one problem: You can't just get it anywhere.
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Google released an update to its offerings for the iPhone, hoping to continue a trend that recently saw the iPhone briefly become the No. 1 mobile phone hitting Google sites.Despite its small share of the overall mobile phone market, the iPhone spiked to No. 1 on Dec. 25 among phones using Google&#39;s services, beating out mobile makers that have been selling smartphones for many years.Google revealed a chart showing that around the middle of November, iPhone users began to surpass BlackBerry customers in accessing Google, though they were still behind Symbian and Windows Mobile users. But on Dec. 25, iPhone users shot above them all, then quickly settled into the second-largest Google user base.By the end of September, the last quarter in which Apple reported numbers, Apple had sold more than 1.3 million iPhones. By comparison, Nokia has sold 50 million of its N-series line of phones, said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Current Analysis. At the end of December, there were 12 million subscribers using BlackBerry devices.&quot;One thing this does is shows that Apple has done a remarkable job of publicizing some of these capabilities, even if they&#39;re not the first to bring the capability to market,&quot; Greengart said. Some of Google&#39;s mobile services, like Google Maps, were already available on mobile phones before the iPhone hit the market. Yet, clearly, iPhone customers are using the services more frequently. &quot;Either because of the design or PR or brand, or in all possibility because of the implementation ... Apple has popularized the notion that you can do more on the phone than you might have tried to do previously,&quot; he said.iPhone customers will indeed be able to do more using Google services, with the updated offerings unveiled Monday.iPhone users can now customize Google services through the menu bar and iGoogle home page. When iPhone users visit Google.com, they can&#160;choose Google applications to appear as links in a menu bar&#160;that runs across the top of the page. Signing in once, users can then access a variety of Google services, including Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Docs, and Picasa.In addition, iPhone users can also visit their customized iGoogle page from their phones. iGoogle is a page that users can arrange to include widgets of their choosing, including news, weather, games, and recent Gmail messages.Other changes to Google&#39;s iPhone service include an updated user interface and a monthly view on the calendar. In addition, users won&#39;t have to hit refresh to see new e-mails in Gmail because Gmail will automatically show new messages.The new Google services for the iPhone keep pace with some&#160;new services that Yahoo introduced just last week. Yahoo began letting mobile users, including iPhone customers, choose widgets to arrange on their mobile Yahoo home pages. On its mobile Web site, Yahoo claims to offer the only e-mail service that pushes new messages to the iPhone as soon as they come in.The new mobile services from Yahoo and Google demonstrate the eagerness both companies have to win over mobile users.
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Blog: Exploring future product opportunities using the iPhone's components
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Can't get an iPhone? Here's how some hot cell phones from other manufacturers measure up.
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You've heard it all before. The CEO buys an iPhone, falls in love, and leans on IT to shift its stack of tasks to make work-enabling his new gadget IT Priority No. 1.But as IT departments scramble to sync e-mail and slap together Web apps for Safari-based iPhone access, the question remains: Can Apple's ear-candy crush object draft off this executive effect to true enterprise mobile legitimacy, or are execs' iPhone fetishes jeopardizing the integrity of their company's mobile strategy?[ For an in-depth review of the iPhone, see "iPhone: The $1,975 iPod" ]Here we examine the iPhone ecosystem's evolving backdoor bid for enterprise, one that pits security concerns, vendor intentions, and gadget affinities against caution-minded enterprise IT.Executive inroads to the enterprise A midsize company providing inventory supply services to schools, government facilities, and other institutions across the United States was perfectly happy with its mobile Palm-based inventory software until the CEO and other high-level execs purchased their own iPhones.?Suddenly, they were saying, ?Hey, this is really nice,? and reevaluating their whole handheld strategy,? says Ben Gottlieb, president of Stand Alone, which provides business inventory software and consulting services to the aforementioned inventory supplier. ?Then came the questions about where the Palm OS was headed and whether their inventory application could be iPhone-enabled.?Mark Russell, vice president of sales and marketing at U-Line, a Milwaukee-based manufacturer of under-counter icemakers and refrigerators, had an iPhone for fun and a Nokia E70 for work until he accidentally crushed the Nokia device in his mother-in-law?s recliner. Instead of getting a new E70, he asked IT to sync his iPhone with the corporate Exchange server.?Our IT guy was nervous at first, but when Visto added iPhone capability to its Visto Enterprise Server, he gave it a try,? Russell says, referring to the mobile messaging service provider, Visto. U-Line was already using Visto to sync its smartphones with Exchange.Russell is perfectly happy with his business iPhone and has no intention of repurchasing the Nokia or any other device. And according to Daniel Koshute, U-Line systems administrator, several other employees are ready to make the switch as well.The above examples are not unique. Like the PDAs, USB storage devices, and Wi-Fi devices that came before it, the iPhone is pushing its way through the side door of today's enterprises, thanks to a sexy interface, a superior mobile browser, and executive pressure.?Apple has definitely achieved its goal of making you smile every time you press a keystroke,? says Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner.And it's precisely that smile that has enterprise IT nervous. After all, Apple has very openly targeted the iPhone as a consumer device, doing little to enable it with the security, management, and other features the typical enterprise IT department demands from any mobile platform it supports. Not to mention that Apple?s enterprise sales and support -- or lack thereof -- have not exactly endeared the company to the enterprise in the past. Yet analysts and vendors of smartphone software report that enterprise demand for the iPhone is rising.?When the iPhone came out, we had a surge of enterprise IT customers asking when we would support it,? says Senthil Krishnapillai, director of product management for Sybase iAnywhere, which will soon offer an iPhone enterprise e-mail syncing solution. ?They told us that management was asking for it.??We?re definitely seeing enterprise interest in the iPhone, mostly driven by executives and rogue users, rather than IT,? says Matt Parks, director of product management at Visto, which recently introduced iPhone/Exchange/Domino syncing for its Visto Mobile Enterprise server.IT in the crosshairs Perhaps most disturbing to IT is the security quandary it faces in supporting the iPhone.?An enterprise must ensure that whatever device comes into the environment doesn?t breach any of the security policies it has in place,? Dulaney says. ?Otherwise, they have two choices: Be a hypocrite, or lower their overall investment in security because one breach, no matter how small, is a breach after all.?Although it does come with VPN capability, the iPhone?s built-in security just doesn?t measure up to those of its more enterprise-focused BlackBerry and Windows Mobile competitors.?Most enterprises cite two must-have security features for any supported mobile device: the ability to force the user to create a complex power-on password, and the ability to wipe out the data on the device remotely if it?s lost,? Dulaney says. ?In order to do that, you need the right hooks in the firmware, which Apple doesn?t provide.?And because they aren?t yet in the firmware, software vendors that support the iPhone, including Visto and Sybase, can?t offer those capabilities.Other security, usability, and management issues are also conspiring to ensure that the iPhone will not dominate the enterprise any time soon.As opposed to the BlackBerry, the iPhone doesn?t provide any inherent firewall or data encryption. Now holding up to 16GB, the iPhone's storage capacity gives IT jitters because it can be used to steal large amounts of data from an unprotected PC. Moreover, the iPhone comes with a built-in camera, which many IT departments do not allow as a matter of policy.?One of the things that really scares me, particularly with government agencies, is that Apple?s core iPhone framework allows it to take pictures or video and record sound without any flashing light or other indicator that anything is happening,? says Jonathan Zdziarski, research scientist for a security vendor and author of iPhone Open Application Development, which explains how to develop iPhone applications using Objective-C and an open source, community-developed iPhone toolkit.?This lets Joe Hacker create software that can secretly eavesdrop on conversations and record video, then send the audio or video file anywhere over the network,? Zdziarski says.Apple could prevent such hacks by requiring the user to visually authenticate an application's ability to access the camera or microphone much like Leopard does for applications that want to listen for incoming connections, Zdziarski adds.Others have taken issue with the fact that the iPhone is based on the OS X operating system and Safari Web browser, both of which have been around long enough for hackers to know how to exploit. Yet, at the same time, it?s a closed system, at least until Apple releases a native SDK in late February or early March, so security software vendors are unable to provide protection software for it.Where?s the road map? Even when Apple?s SDK comes out, nobody knows whether it will provide the kernel and hardware hooks that security vendors demand. And that brings up another sticking point that enterprises have with Apple: the lack of a publicized road map.Enterprise IT depends on the technology road maps published by established enterprise vendors such as Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and HP to plan and budget for hardware and software upgrades. Apple?s road maps are a closely held secret.?Since Apple is primarily a consumer company, they won?t tell you anything until the day of release,? Gartner's Dulaney says.In the meantime, according to Zdziarski, some prospective iPhone software vendors and enterprise developers have used the Open Source SDK to get their feet wet. Others, such as NetSuite and Salesforce.com, are taking advantage of AJAX for the Safari browser, but this doesn?t provide the flexibility and access to the OS that a native SDK would provide.Another sticking point: Apple?s enterprise sales and support staff are minimal, rumored to be in the teens, although Apple would not divulge this information, and Apple has never demonstrated a real commitment to the enterprise, nor does it have any developed enterprise sales channel.?Apple needs to develop key enterprise partners to help them get past executive appeal and get traction on the IT side, and they simply haven?t done it,? says Sean Ryan, research analyst for mobile enterprise solutions at IDC.As for management, Apple offers nothing even remotely similar to the centralized device management capabilities offered by RIM or Microsoft. There are no tools for monitoring mobile assets or enforcing corporate software policies, and the iPhone?s reliance on iTunes for activation and software updates just doesn?t sit well with IT, nor does the need to send the iPhone back to Apple for a battery change.Waiting for the SDK Finally, until the iPhone SDK allows client software installation on the device, there are several outstanding usability issues. Even with existing corporate e-mail solutions, the iPhone doesn?t offer true push e-mail, but rather syncs with the server once every 15 minutes, an eternity for true e-mail addicts. It also offers no native calendar and contact syncing abilities, so users might miss rescheduled meetings.Meanwhile, enterprise e-mail sync vendors such as Visto, Sybase, and IBM have implemented work-arounds to cope with the iPhone's drawbacks. Because the phone provides no data encryption, IBM plans to provide all its Domino access using Safari, with absolutely no e-mail storage on the iPhone itself, according to Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president of Notes and Domino at IBM. Visto and Sybase take advantage of the iPhone e-mail client, but both provide tight control over attachment-download policies. Sybase?s iAnywhere can remove mail data from a lost or stolen iPhone, but not until the next time it syncs with the server.These vendors and others are waiting anxiously for the SDK, after which a number of security and other iPhone enhancements are expected to be offered by third parties, depending on the depth of access provided by the SDK. Meanwhile, AT&amp;T has begun quietly offering business service plans for the iPhone, starting at $45 per month, although with no notable business-focused extras, such as corporate e-mail syncing, as of yet.Still, the iPhone has a long way to go before moving beyond an executive luxury to becoming a true enterprise player. Much of the momentum depends on Apple?s cooperation and an enterprise commitment it has not demonstrated in the past.?Apple is doing just fine with consumers and businesspeople who purchase the iPhone with their own money,? Dulaney says. ?Those two groups make up 85 percent of the 2.5 billion phones out there. What real incentive do they have to screw with the enterprise??Related articles Review: Supersmart phones for extreme mobility We pick seven serious business phones with all the bells and whistles, plus the power and flexibility that real mobile professionals need Review: iPhone: The $1,975 iPod Apple's and AT&amp;T's high-price gadget is a heartbreaking triumph of greed over genius Video: Two Geeks and an iPhone: Part 1 What we use and why Video: Two Geeks and an iPhone: Part 2 Tips and tricks for e-mail, safari, and more Video: Two Geeks and an iPhone: Part 3 How to add third-party apps to your iPhone Thoughts on the iPhone/iPod touch SDK Enterprise comes to iPhone 15 things Apple should fix in iPhone 2.0
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Posts on Craigslist offer a host of options for those unable or unwilling to wait in line for the coveted device.
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By Barbara Grady  MATT MORGAN of Alameda said he plans to borrow an iPhone from a friend to check it out before he plunks down $500 for his own.
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Developers will get to write applications for the iPhone. Sort of.
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People who bought IPhones hoping to resell them for a profit find few takers.
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While it doesn't match the hysteria of iPhone Day, hundreds of people still turn out to wait hours in line for the newest version of Mac OS X--even though they could have preordered a copy weeks ago.