Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iPhone
Inc.com: iPhone is "next major computing device"
Zach Nelson at Inc.com has seen the future of computing, and it is the iPhone. He writes:"Some people use it to play music. Others marvel at the photo-browsing interface, and some of its users just want to look cool. I don't care about any of those things when I look at the iPhone. What I see is the breakout of the next major enterprise computing platform."
This is basically what I said after my first full day with the iPhone. It's a portable computer that just happens to make phone calls, not a phone that performs a few tricks. Months later, my feelings haven't changed. I use it primarily as a computer (and an iPod) and occasionally as a phone. In fact, when I'm showing it off to people, the phone features (making calls, working with contacts, etc.) are what they're least interested in. Email and the internet are always first.
With that in mind, I'll share my ten favorite iPhone-optimized web sites.
- meebo. Nice AIM implementation. No frills, just function.
- PocketTweets. Until we get Twitterrific for the iPhone, I'll use PocketTweets. It looks nice and works.
- Leaflets. A portal for several useful iPhone-optimized pages. I especially like their Newsvine, Flickr and Major League Baseball implementation.
- JiWire. Quickly find public Wi-Fi in your neighborhood.
- Tomatometer. Find reviews on nearly any movie.
- MoviesApp. Somehow, pulling up movie times on an iPhone impresses people more than anything else.
- PopTakeout. Browse top headlines from Digg, Newsvine, Delicious, more. Plus, the Chinese takeout box icon is cute.
- MyPhoneFootball.com. No frills, just speedy updates on NFL scores and standings.
- Fumbleview. Real-time, java-powered play-by-play on your favorite NFL games plus chat. I love it.
- Weather Underground humiliates the iPhone weather widget.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Martin said 4:20PM on 11-26-2007
For what it's worth, this site scrolls slow as hell ever since you put that new background up.
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Likely said 4:30PM on 11-26-2007
Think it's having no social life that makes twats talk shit ?
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Frank Furter said 4:40PM on 11-26-2007
Wow - I was going to comment on how weak I thought Weather Underground was (am I missing something? Looked like a text-based forecast to me.....), until I saw Likely's comment. Is that a tongue twister?
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Aaron Sherman said 4:51PM on 11-26-2007
Amazon.com has a new iPhone beta site, by the way. Just go to amazon.com on your iPhone and you'll be redirected.
I like the Facebook one, and the Food Network one is pretty cool too.
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punkassjim said 4:56PM on 11-26-2007
Jailbroken phones really hammer the point home for some folks. When I told my boss that I'm running Apache, PHP, AFP, Tinyproxy and a bunch of other services from the BSD box in my pocket, he nearly had a canary. And when I showed him Labyrinth, he was giddy as a schoolgirl.
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linugen said 5:04PM on 11-26-2007
I'm sorry, but the iPone is the "next major computing device" because it has a decent browser??? That's just plain ridiculous. Nokia has been including a decent browser for years, based on webkit just as Safari is, with the same user experience. Not only that, it's had 3.5G devices on the market for quite some time as well, which allows for a decent internet experience as opposed to the iPhone. Not to mention, it allows for companies to develop real productivity applications for the platform.
Now don't get me wrong. I love the iPhone. It looks wonderful, and the operating system on it is just gorgeous. But the device itself is still waaay underperfoming the market standard that Nokia has set for a couple of years now.
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Travis said 5:07PM on 11-26-2007
The iPhone is a pretty cool phone as I am sure everyone here can at least respect it a little bit. But it is still 1st generation hardware at this point, and Apple seems to have been dropping its level of quality for 1st gen stuff :( http://www.tekbite.com/2007/11/1st-generation-apple-problems.html
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bugster said 5:50PM on 11-26-2007
@8 I read it more as "The next major computing device(for Apple)" and maybe the next form factor for computers in general.
My 3 week old jail broken iPod touch has already taken over a substantial part of my IM/email/web browsing. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Apple realizes it's more than just an iPod+ and opens the device up with a full developers kit release in February. Otherwise that Nokia 810 is looking quite nice.
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Pete Zich said 6:21PM on 11-26-2007
I don't know if the developers of these pages take a look at these comments, but I was playing around with the movies app and weather underground and noticed that the debug console suggests using "device-width" for your meta viewport instead of a fixed number. I hadn't noticed that on the iphone dev site, but the debugger has some interesting info. Also, when the iphone went to check the weather from a local PWS location, I got 34 debug messages, still works fine but I'd look into it.
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scw said 6:34PM on 11-26-2007
I think the Accuweather one is much better, though it is annoying they removed the zoom on the radar picture:
http://apple.accuweather.com/widget/iphone1/iphone.html
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Brandon said 7:14PM on 11-26-2007
I Love my iPhone, and your right the first features I show off is Mail and Safari. Followed by Google maps. They know it makes phone calls they don't need (or want) to see that.
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JKT said 7:42PM on 11-26-2007
When he says "the next major enterprise computing platform" he gets one particular word wrong. "Enterprise". Apple is, if anything, moving AWAY from enterprise right now. They delivered the iPhone with no way to connect to major enterprise e-mail systems (Exchange and/or Lotus Notes). In OS X they've actually made AD work worse in Leopard than Tiger. They won't even sell iPhones through enterprise sales. No, until Steve realizes the goldmine that exists in the world of billion-dollar corporations (and one wonders how elaborate his blinders have to be to not realize it already), iPhone will be useless to enterprise.
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Paul Joyce said 7:51PM on 11-26-2007
Great list! I've just added JiWire, MoviesApp, Tomatometer and MyPhoneFootball to my bookmarks. Hello ESPN and Sporting News - please design better mobile sites! It is embarrassing having to text to get fast scores.
Oh, and for weather, xhtml.weather.com/xhtml loads quickly.
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Jeremy said 8:09PM on 11-26-2007
Hey i just found this when trying to bold something in one of the notes in the leopard email:
Convert this note to rich text format?
Changing the style or formatting requires that this note be converted to rich text format. Rich text notes may not be editable on iPhone and other devices.
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MILE said 8:13PM on 11-26-2007
As for a nice alternative to Meebo, check out BeeJIve:
http://beejive.com/
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Rob Menke said 8:29PM on 11-26-2007
@JKT:
Why should he consider getting into the enterprise market? Microsoft has that hands-down, and as long as they control the de facto standards, Apple would end up chasing Microsoft forever. The margins at the enterprise level are just not worth that Sisyphean effort. As the saying goes, "Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft."
For every enterprise-level customer, there are a number of SOHO customers not tied to Exchange/Outlook, and are willing to embrace published protocols (IMAP, SMTP, LDAP, &c) without becoming reliant on Microsoft's proprietary extensions.
Apple's server offerings work well with Linux and Windows, because they follow the published rules. An iPhone will work well with a Linux server, because both follow the published rules. Only Microsoft's server offerings refuse to tell you what the rules are.
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eighthgear said 8:54PM on 11-26-2007
I agree. a nice story, I first heard it on macnewsdail.blogspot.com
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Ben the Dog said 9:13PM on 11-26-2007
Much as I hate to say it, the drip-feed release of such a cool device to half a dozen countries (so far) makes Apple look like a bunch of money-hungry chumps. I would love to love the iPhone, but Stevo and his marketing gimps won't release it in my country (and I'm not willing to buy a hacked iPhone that could potentially become an iBrick)
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d said 9:32PM on 11-26-2007
Great list! I'm a huge fan of www.textonphone.com for all my ebook needs. I recently discovered it and absolutely love it!
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airmanchairman said 9:48PM on 11-26-2007
Most gadget freaks that post here in their impatient fury can't seem to get past the current feature set of the iPhone when assessing its prospects for the near or far future (a fool uttereth all his mind, but the wise one keepeth it in till later, said Solomon).
I believe the article's author is talking about the emergence of the "convergence device" as the next mass-computing platform:
While the "jail-break" applications and the Webkit-legit ones written so far clearly show the vast potential of such a device, great care has to be taken at this early stage of development of the platform to avoid most of the irreversible pitfalls that PC development has fallen into. The implications of this potential are just too vast and complex to even begin to discuss here.
In this light, I am not in the least surprised at the "drip-feed release" approach by Apple, themselves a previous and tragic victim of several wrong turns in PC development.
One thing they are refusing to get wrong this time is neglecting to recover the vast sums they spend on Research and Development, thereby ensuring that they are not just going to be doing all the innovating for other gormless, witless and unimaginative parasites to run away with efforts they have not contributed to in any significant way. And believe me, from the USA through Europe and the Far East, those parasites loom large and thick as swarms of hungry locusts waiting for the next free ride...
Not this time, I suspect, not if the folks at Cupertino can help it. Once bitten, thrice shy.
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