A Closed iPhone is an Opportunity

[Andreas Kostyrka]

* Mark Pesce <mpesce at gmail.com> [070112 03:54]:
> Howdy, all.  (My first post to this list, and thanks for having me...)
> 
> While we can't be entirely sure that the iPhone is a closed device -
> Apple may be waiting to spring something onto the world at WWDC, in
> May - all indications are that they regard the iPhone as a firmware
> device, as closed, locked down and fixed as an iPod.  This has been
> reported on Gizmodo (as the earlier post stated) and by several other
> people, who have been asking questions directly to Apple's Developer
> Relations folks.
> 
> If we take them at their word, we can only believe that they've been
> working a bit too hard, and a bit too long, on their lovely new toy.
> If they'd taken a look around - even just briefly - they'd have seen
> that the most fertile areas for mobile development are happening with
> third-party applications.

Well, they are almost bound to this. Don't forget, the iPhone, despite
Apple being happy with having the "control" over it, is a cooperation
between Apple and Cingular. Now consider the motivations of these
players:

Apple:
*) wants a nifty functional gadget. Third-party developers without a
sandbox are in some ways bad. (Yes, my Nokia crashes more often than
the Sidekick did. And it are usually the commercial third-party tools
I need to use that do the crashing. OTOH, my Nokia has a magnitude
more of functionality because of that.)

Cingular:
*) wants to increase the money intake per user.

A traditional way of network operators was to limit what the phones
can do. And Apple will probably go along, because uncontrolled 3rd
party tools increase the liklihood of crashes and problems.

OTOH, because the source of all functionality is a commercial entity
working with the network operator, we won't see many "important"
features:

*) e.g. calling cards these lower the costs per minute per call.
*) e.g. sms sending via 3rd party websites. These are usually also
cheaper than sending directly.
*) least cost routing.

Now, one can basically do anything on my example list manually, but
it's usually not very convinient.

So, yes, a closed iPhone doesn't sound attractive to me in any way.
(beside the fact that they don't offer them in Europe for a starter).

One thing that makes me wonder, why is the Neo so "cheap"?

*) no distributor costs?
*) no MS tax?
*) cheap components (no EGRPS, no UMTS, ...)

Andreas