iPhone

John Gruber has posted a really interesting and insightful piece on BlackBerry vs. iPhone, and why he thinks that RIM is, fundamentally, in a very very bad place indeed.

However, there’s one point that I have to disagree with John on:

“In broad terms, BlackBerrys are optimized first for email; the iPhone for the web. What’s more important, an email client or a web browser? For most people, and perhaps even most current BlackBerry users, the answer is clearly the web.”

For the majority of business users, I think John has got this completely wrong. For them, the ability to send and receive emails, and view the attachments which come with them, is far more important than web browsing. Witness the number of users who spend their time in meetings thumbing their BlackBerry.

That’s not to say that John is necessarily wrong in his overall point that iPhone is going to eat RIM’s lunch. But in optimising for email, as John acknowledges, RIM are actually delivering something that’s far more desirable for business than a device that’s optimised for web.

I’m really enjoying using Brightkite at the moment (I’m ianbetteridge if you want to friend me), and I’m pleased to see that the iPhone web application has now been released in alpha form.

But I was even more pleased to see this comment from one of the developers on the Brightkite blog:

“The native iPhone application with core location (cell triangulation, GPS) is in the works. Checking in will become much easier. We will be releasing it in June through Apple. There are no plans to release a jail broken version as of right now.”

With Jaiku effectively stalled, Brightkite looks a nice solution for location awareness. Plus, it integrates with Fire Eagle, which is great.

Apple Adds Chinese Handwriting Recognition in 2.0?:

“A sign of things to come? Or just another in a long list of iPhone rumors? It appears
that Apple has included Chinese Handwriting Recognition in the iPhone 2.0 Firmware
Beta according to MacRumors.com.
Chinese users can apparently draw a character on the screen with their finger and
then choose from among options for the recognition.”

(Via GottaBeMobile.com.)

Now this might just tempt me back to NetNewsWire again:

“NetNewsWire 4.0 will bring new features and changes to fall in line with NewsGator’s aspirations for taming information. At the top of the new features list will be integration with AideRSS and the company’s PostRank technology for automatically filtering newsfeeds for hot topics and headlines. NewsGator is already using this technology in its web-based client for its top 1,000 feeds, but NetNewsWire 4.0 will bring AideRSS and PostRank to Mac OS X Leopard. If you’re drowning in feeds and headlines that you constantly shrug off with the ‘mark all as read’ command, this new PostRank technology should help you to at least catch the stuff that really matters.”

Plus, there’s this wonderful news about the iPhone:

“As far as a release date for NetNewsWire 4.0, Brent has a more general Fall-ish time in mind. On top of 3.2 and 4.0 development, he’s also working on a native NetNewsWire app for the iPhone, but I can’t share many of those details just yet.”

I veer between using Google Reader and using NetNewsWire on an almost-weekly basis. I love using NetNewsWire as a client, but - despite the massive improvements that the company has made - prefer Google Reader to Newsgator on the Web.

Apple: Kevin Rose Eats Funny Red Pills Again, Predicts iPhone 3G

“The truth, however, is much simpler than that: Apple hasn’t hidden the fact that they are setting this limit to guarantee a flawless user experience, so the core functions of the iPhone are never affected by applications stealing CPU cycles in the background.”

Now, maybe Gizmodo has seen something that I haven’t, but as far as I know Apple hasn’t made a single statement about why it has locked off background processes. Everyone has talked as if that’s the reason: but as far as I’m aware, it’s just supposition. In fact John Gruber has, in his usual way, probably got it more right than everyone else when he says that it’s not just battery life:

“For what it’s worth, I believe the number one reason why the iPhone OS doesn’t allow background processes is RAM. Battery life, CPU sharing, bandwidth — all of these are factors, too, but I think RAM is foremost.”

John Gruber gets it spot-on: “No one likes to point out the mistakes of so-called analysts like I do, but in this case, there’s clearly no backtracking or changing of the tune. Gartner’s recommendation changed when the facts about the iPhone’s enterprise features changed. Gartner has been very consistent about the enterprise-related features they wanted to see in the iPhone.”

FORTUNE: Apple 2.0 Gartner flips its iPhone bozo bit, gives IT the green light «

“So it is with some irony that Ken Delaney is listed as the principal author of the five page report titled ‘Gartner Changes its iPhone Enterprise Recommendations.’”

Er, no. There is no irony. The iPhone got updated in such a way as to make it suitable for corporations. Maybe you didn’t get the memo?

BBC Internet Blog - BBC iPlayer On iPhone Update

“The launch on the iPhone/iPod touch platform has increased traffic to iPlayer by 10% (7% from general increased awareness and 3% specifically accessing iPlayer from their iPhone/touch).”

3%, given the iPhone’s market share in the UK, is pretty spectacularly good.

I don’t really agree with the headline, but it’s still worth knowing about. According to Jason O’Grady, there’s a “Remote execution DoS [which] exploits iPhone by simply loading a Web page” doing the rounds. It doesn’t sound like it’s at the stage of being an exploit (as yet) though - all it does is crash your phone, rather than execute arbitrary code.

furbo.org · Brain surgeons:

“Twitterrific on the iPhone could definitely make use of a background process to gather new tweets. In fact, a prototype version of the software did just that. And it was a huge design failure: after doing XML queries every 5 minutes, the phone’s battery was almost dead after 4 hours. In fact, the first thing I said after giving Gruber this test version was ‘don’t use auto-refresh.’”

And that is a massive, massive issue - and one where the iPhone will be at a major disadvantage to pretty-much everyone else until battery technology catches up to Jobs’ dreams.

And an interesting question: if pinging a server every five minutes causes the iPhone to die in four hours, what will ActiveSync’s over the air “instant” reception of events, mail and contacts do to it? This isn’t a rhetorical question: I genuinely don’t know. If Microsoft has some whizzy way of keeping a device listening for events without draining the battery using only software, that’s very interesting. And if they don’t, iPhone is basically going to be useless as a BlackBerry-killer.