2009-03-05
Mobile phones vs mobile devices
I muttered on Twitter this morning that I “really need to buy an iPhone sooner than later. Yesterday my mobile ran out of battery before I left the house; today I forgot it entirely.”
Chris Heathcote pointed out on IRC that iPhones don’t carry themselves. It’s true, but neither do iPods, yet I can’t think of many times in the last five years when I’ve left the house for more than five minutes without carrying one- having music is that important. (Oh, another nice thing about iPods: I always have a laptop and charging cable, even if it is proprietary.)
I’m probably not normal, but ten years or more into the life of mobile phones, they’re really not that important to me; only just enough that I wish I wouldn’t forget it. So, as I said, it would suit me so much better if the phone was in the iPod.
There is a bigger point here (just); as Tim Bray noted in January:
I was discussing the iPhone with a friend who works at Apple, back when the programming environment was pretty constrained, and he said: “Remember, the killer app is the phone call, so we have to protect that first.” Except for, I don’t believe that any more. And the smart players are going to focus on making their devices better and better Net citizens.
These days, we’re seeing the first phones that aren’t primarily phones; they make calls, but they’re really devices*, and while the iPhone and Google’s G1 took the first steps in that direction, it looks (as Bray says) like the Palm Pre will be the first to allow the phone to be backgrounded. Or, as Dan Hon put it on Twitter,
The iPhone is a phone, an iPod and a breakthrough internet device. The Palm Pre is foremost a breakthrough internet device.
* I prefer this to calling them computers. Unless it has enough power to host a development environment, it doesn’t count, for me anyway.
