iPhone News Beat: Weekend Edition - November 18, 2007

Slow news weekend, but here's the round up:

Seems HiJacking your iPhone has consequences.

Why Google's Android is wrong.

What Android means for Apple.

The iPhone Java fantasy continues...

I'll second this wish for iPhone WiFi podcast downloads.

Of course, the big news this weekend was the impending Monday morning launch of the Amazon Kindle eBook reader.  Newsweek has the cover story (oddly without pictures but Engadget has some).

Finally, we are 4 days until black friday.  If your in the market for Apple products, set you alarm clocks early friday and get down to the nearest Apple Store as they have historically had some good deals.  For everything else, and to save yourself a trip out after eating all that turkey, check out Amazon's Black Friday Deals Page.

iPhone vs. Android: The New Platform Wars?

Paul Murphy over at ZDnet has an interesting take on the Mac OS X Leopard reviews making the rounds on the web.  Murphy (rightly I think) points out some inconsistencies of the reviewers in failing to note certain aspects of Leopard but, more importantly, he says:

But if you ignore the partisan reviewers and ask what the real bottom line on “Leopard” is, the answer turns out to be the iPhone - because the current Mactels are this generation’s Apple IIIs.

What’s going on is that 10.5 is a mixed bag reflecting both short and long term agendas. In the short term it cleans up some x86 issues and offers some new user features raising the bar for Microsoft’s next effort -particularly with respect to time machine because this will be hard for Microsoft to duplicate while Apple’s adoption of ZFS means that all of the compexity here will disappear in the next release.

In the long term, however, what 10.5 is about is positioning Apple’s application developers to jump to the integrated server/playphone world of the future - that’s why there’s so much Solaris and Java development stuff there.

I think he's got it right. The important thing about Leopard is that it is the iPhone OS.  I believe that Apple has determined that the future of computing (or at least where there is money to be made) is in these smaller devices - iPods, iPhones and smaller laptop/tablet form factors.  The Mac OS X technology stack - Cocoa libraries (especially the "Core" libraries), H.264, Webkit - and the "noun" interface (which includes the Gesture input methods) is Apple's future.  To this stack, Apple has bolted on some complementary technology (for e.g. ZFS).

Add it all up and you have a very good OS stack for small devices like iPhones, iPods (and it is clear that the iPods future is the iPod touch and not the iPod classic), "Tablets" and event set top boxes.  The missing piece of this puzzle is the iPhone SDK.

Which brings us to Android, Google's new phone OS.  There has been some speculation that Apple will use Android as its SDK.  After all, Android uses the webkit rendering engine, which is the basis of Apple's Safari.  And, there does seem to be an "Apple" like influence to Android's UI.  But, I don't see it happening.

First off, Android uses Java, which Apple has shown some distain for.  Apple is seems to be firmly committed to Objective C.  But more importantly, the Android platform is meant to run on handsets from any manufactuer.  Anyone who knows anything about Apple and Steve Jobs knows that controlling the whole widget is important:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

So, what we have is Apple's more or less "closed" platform vs. Android's open one.  Not to mention the fact that Microsoft and Symbian will want to join this battle.

This is not unlike the Mac vs. Windows war of the late 1980's and early 1990's.  Who "wins" this war will depend on what Apple learned from its battles with Microsoft and, in no small part, to what degree the Android platform finds users.

Odds & Ends: Today's Interesting Reads

Vampires, Ghosts, Unicorns and other mythical things (a.k.a. Google Phone edition):

The gPhone is Coming!

Verizon Google Phone

Google Boogyman

Unlocking is price of success

WWGD

Odds & Ends: Today's Interesting Reads

Here are today's interesting reads, mac and non-mac:

2 Million Cats on the Loose

Leopard is Apple if His Eye

Why it was Called the Manhattan Project

What is a Hulu anyway?

Apple needs an actual TV

How to Save Apple TV

Odds & Ends: Today's Interesting Reads

Here's today's interesting reads, smug OS X Leopard user bashing Vista edition (oh, we kid, microsoft!):

Anderson's Razor

Lifehacker's 20 Useful OS X downloads

Visa Sales Down

Vista sales anemic while Mac Sales grow 30%

Robin Bloor at IT-Director.com has a interesting (and I would say accurate) take on the power of Apple :

In the US, 14,811,000 PCs were shipped, indicating only 2.9% growth in PC sales in the first quarter. In other words the impact on PC sales of Vista appears to have far lower in the US. But actually that 2.9% figure is not what it seems, because 1.15% of that growth is attributable directly to Apple. The sale of Apple Macs grew by 30% in the quarter as they have in quarter after quarter for quite a while now. In other words Vista made no competitive dent whatsoever in the sale of Macs—and that very bad news for Microsoft.

Now that's good news for Apple, but here's the really interesting analysis by Bloor:

Apple now has 5% of the US market, which may seem small, but that 5% punches well above its weight because Apple focuses on the home market—that 5% is more like 15% of the people that actually choose their PCs (in the corporations you get what you are given) and at current rates of growth that 15% will be 30% in the US in about 2 years, unless Apple's momentum slows. Now consider the fact that the US market drives PC buying trends in the rest of the world to some degree and Apple's momentum comes more into focus. Apple's momentum has not been stopped at all by Vista, and this is ahead of the release of Apple's answer to Vista—the Leopard version of OS X.

Although Bloor's analysis makes sense, some so-called "Technology Analysts" (see, for example, here ) will just fight this common sense tooth and nail. Not surprisingly many of those who deny this are paid consultants of Microsoft.

Up with Math?

Here is a post that I actually think makes sense. The Author's contention is that the U.S. teaches math wrong, substituting depth for breadth and emphasizing math for science and engineering too early in a student's career. Check it out....

Proof Microsoft is Crazy about the iPhone

Lets see here now, xbox is hemorrhaging money and the zune is a joke so take this comment by Microsoft exec Chris Sorenson for what its worth:

It's a great music phone, and I'm sure it will be fantastic and have an interesting user interface," Microsoft's Asia-Pacific head of smartphone strategy Chris Sorenson told press during a recent visit to Australia.

"However, it's a closed device that you cannot install applications on, and there's no support for Office documents. If you're an enterprise and want to roll out line of business applications, it's just not an option. Even using it as a heavy messaging device will be a challenge."

So, support for office documents is the end all be all of a cell phone. Now, I a few years ago, I was the typical "road warier" and near abused my cell phone and PDA. And yes, I did have lots of word docs on my PDA. But let's be frank here...reading docs on a cell phone or PDA screen just sucks.

Perhaps Apple will come up with a better solution for reading documents on the iPhone . But maybe the better question is, why would you want to? Remember that the iPhone is also an iPod . I get along just fine with my documents copied to my iPod available for me where ever I have access to a PC or Mac. And, I am really beginning to like google's docs and spreadsheets alot.

Apple Earnings Contest

Well, Apple will release its quarterly earnings report next week:

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial estimate Apple will earn 64 cents a share on $5.17 billion in revenue for its second-fiscal quarter, while the company previously forecast a profit of between 54 cents and 56 cents a share, and sales in a range of $4.8 billion to $4.9 billion.

I have been following Apple seriously since 1998. It seems every quarter to beat the analysts (in fact I cannot recall the last quarter it failed to meet or exceed expectations).

So, to that end, I'm setting up an informal contest to see if someone can guess what earnings Apple will report. I'm going to say 65 cents a share and $5.20 billion in revenue. Anyone else?