Take a Bite

Winning and keeping the favor of the masses in the fast-moving mobile world is tough. Apple Inc. has trodden the road to success with their iPhone well. Yet, the decisions made to balance the slick design and ease of operation with the company’s marketing goals are sometimes hard to swallow.
Those who get through the obvious hurdle of the at&t exclusiveness (in the U.S.) soon encounter some annoying limitations. Would you like to have a replaceable battery, a list of fixes in a software update or do you prefer your own earphones? Tough luck, you can’t. (The last point was “fixed” in the 3G version.) And additional problems come from the tight control over third-parties.
Instant messaging (and other applications) could easily run in the background but aren’t allowed to. You might be left scratching your head over the missing turn-by-turn navigation in the GPS-enabled gadget, especially because some have already been produced but are not allowed into the ‘AppStore’ under the SDK license. And it is not as if Apple was offering their own solutions without the limitations.
Elsewhere, in the largest apple-producing state, is the home of Windows Mobile. For better or worse, Microsoft’s mobile platform has little in common with its big desktop cousin or iPhone. Not only does it need to support multitudes of hardware devices, the applications need to be written from the ground up rather than partially ported. And while my iPhone is slick and fast, it is surprisingly the latter company that seems to have the more liberal and open approach to its customers.