apple news/media reports
01/12/2007, 4:30pm, EST
Friday, January 12th
Jobs speaks on closed iPhone platform
Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently spoke with Newsweek about the company's new iPhone, revealing that the software on the device is purposely closed to prevent potential issues from cropping up on Cingular's network. "You don’t want your phone to be an open platform," said Jobs, referring to the concept of any phone owner writing applications for it. "You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up." Despite the closed platform, however, the iPhone still runs some form of Mac OS X that can functionally support numerous applications not currently present on the prototype phone displayed by Apple's chief during his keynote at Macworld. "There’s no reason we couldn’t have iChat on here," Jobs said when prompted to speak on the topic. When presented with the concept of allowing iPhone owners to take a song from their iTunes music library and turn it into a ring tone, however, Jobs said it could be done but implied through a simple hand gesture that the move would cost Apple a fairly large sum of money.
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Maybe the iPhone's OS would be more robust, like your Symbian may be, or maybe you've just had luck with properly written apps (unlike so many flaky ones on PalmOS).
Either way, if I had to choose between "a handful of blessed apps that work" and "tons of apps but an instable phone," I'd go for stable. I've had to give up many of the apps that I really want to use on my Treo because, ultimately, the phone is useless when it locks up and I can't use it as a phone.
Of course, this is Apple we're talking about. Their v1.0 would probably be far better than Palm's V5.
As to the stability of Treos - its all about choice isn't it? You can take the choice to minimise what you're running, or you can take the choice to run a richer environment with a little risk. FWIW I've got a Treo 600, with a few third party apps - the only time I've had it lock up, or need a reset is when trying to use the phone for internet browsing/mail via the phone network, and that definitely has nothing to do with any third party apps.