iPhone - Applications to be sold on iTunes

My iPhone arrived a week ago and since then I’ve spent a lot of time looking for the optimum cleaning cloth in order to remove my grubby finger prints. I’ve battled pizza and the need to check my mail knowing full well I’d probably cause some hideous smear which would send me into a paroxysm of panic and handed it around to my friends like a newborn whilst looking carefully over their shoulder as they coo and rock.

My first email to my wife was ‘I no longer need human interaction’ which in my naivety contained the signature, ’sent from an iPhone’. ‘Good she replied, does this mean I can get hold of you now?’.

With my iCal sync’d she most certainly can.

I’ve learned to delete the signature, there’s no need to rub people’s face in it and I enjoy playing with the magnified bubble cursor anyway so deletion and correction are pure pleasure.

I brandished it like Captain Kirk with his transponder on some planet of tentacled extras at last weeks Future of Mobile conference in London.

I had such high hopes for the conference after the revelatory Future of Web Apps earlier in the year. It went something like this:

‘The mobile web is the future, everyone says so, everyone also (involved in the mobile industry) says that more people will access the web via a handheld device in 5 years than do via a PC… but, oh it’s a big butt, no one can agree on open standards to develop on mobile because they’re all too busy getting very rich to care very much and Google is really very far behind and that Android announcement is like announcing in 12 months you may have grown a beard and you might want to shave it off, kinda pointless and a little itchy. Oh and we know we shouldn’t because we’ve written some books n’ stuff but all we can talk about is the iPhone, look here’s a picture of me and a web billionaire queuing in San Fran, yeah man, yeah man, fucking yeah… ooh look it’s panel time, my index finger is hurting from all day stroking my iPhone and sending emails to people I don’t really like very much, but, well I can, so I will and there’s only one pretty girl at this conference and I’m sat next to her. Oh and boo hiss to you pudgy Italian man who always has an angry question at the ready.’

So the iPhone isn’t an open platform and the hacking community isn’t responding well to the antibiotics, but at least it’s not coughing up blood and methinks El Jobs is secretly keeping a very close eye on said community and will no doubt invite a few of it’s more consumptive members over for tea and smoothies and a little ‘yeah man’.

But just play with it and marvel, it’s a true thing of wonder. I can open up my favourite blogs when within wireless contact, then head down into the stinky tube and read the cached pages on the commute home or whilst on the plane to Barcelona (make sure and sit at the front of the plane on EasyJet because the bacon rolls are strictly limited).

With the nifty camera zoom I’ve managed to look up my daughter’s nostrils despite being several hundred miles away.

The YouTube application is revelatory, surely YouTubeism was made for the mobile, the ability to snack on funny, crass and generally gross short form entertainment and then share it with my buddies. Mobile TV is dead, it wasn’t even mentioned at the conference so it must be, I never cared for the idea in the first place, but YouTube, oh boy it was made for mobile, all I need now is a handy guide directing me to the best of the 100,000 + videos uploaded daily… hang on I feel an idea coming on, I’d better write a note about it on my iPhone.

My prediction and something that wasn’t mentioned at the conference is that come January El Jobs will announce that you have to apply and generally supply ‘yeah man’ DNA to design applications for the iPhone and iPod, but once you’ve shown you can yell ‘yeah man’ really loud whilst downing your fifth blueberry and kelp smoothie you’ll be shown the special stuff inside the device, you can then create applications that people can buy on iTunes. There will be a lot of license stuff, paperwork etc and strictly no voip permitted, but it’ll open up a whole new frontier and one not dependent upon super targeted assassin like advertising so favoured of Facesoft.

Once the bacon had settled I came across this choice quote in the Guardian this morning, attributed to a ufologist:

‘If the pet hamster in your bedroom suddenly manages to construct a machine gun, you are going to have to give him more than the usual amount of attention’.

That kinda sums up what the iPhone is going to do to the mobile phone market in the months to come. Our furry friend just got ammo.

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