Gary Allison's Leadership Blog

Effective Software Projects and Tech News14 Jun 2008 05:15 am

This week Apple unveiled the iPhone 2.0 device and more importantly showed the results of their SDK released just 3 months ago for iPhone. As someone who has been leading teams in building mobile applications off and on over the last 6 years, the results are really impressive. The ease of which very sophisticated applications can be ported to iPhone is astonishing. During the keynote at the WWDC, some interesting games and just amazing medical imaging applications are on display.

More than simply an interesting use of mobile technology, in my view Apple has created the first viable platform to move laptop users to the truly mobile device. They have the device, now with 3G speed, they have the platform based on their desktop OSX, and they have the developer tools and APIs to quickly build the application.

Contrast this with google’s android. Cool concepts, plenty of big budget behind it, but no devices, and with so many vendors in play there is likely to be subtle differences in implementation / compatibility. These are problems that have plagued Windows Mobile and Java 2 Mobile Edition, both of which propose to be a unifying platform. Truth is that you have to build and test for each device you intend to support. This is expensive and inconvenient as you start putting conditionals in the code for devices, screen sizes, etc. And, is it just me, or are the top folks at google starting to look like IBMers?

This is where Apple has it right, in my view – great dev tools (as Microsoft ahs clearly shown is a key part of promoting a new platform), great platform (with innovative location and push notifications), and that gorgeous device. To top it off, they have a terrific market distribution channel with iTunes. Boy, do they have this right. I’m completely impressed.

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