I think Microsoft purposely made it work like shite so they could boost Vista (as in, ‘You think Vista sucks? At least it’s not Windows Mobile!’)

Just over a year ago I wrote a column about Apple’s iPhone, listing all the reasons I wasn’t going to join the crowd and buy one. Soon after, like millions of other people, I took the plunge and got one. I loved it (well, as much as one is capable of loving a collection of circuit boards and lights) and was one of the first online to upgrade to a 3G model when those became available.

Before the iPhone came out, I was a mobile phone shopping fiend, buying the latest model and selling off last month’s gadget with alarming frequency. The iPhone continues to work so well for me I haven’t given a thought to using anything different for close to a year, a personal record.

I think one reason it works so well is the operating system at its core. It’s intuitive to learn, easy to use and, most importantly, relatively stable as far as these things go. I never really liked the Symbian OS (used by Nokia and Sony Ericsson on many of their phones) – you had to click on too many things to do even the simplest tasks. Windows Mobile? It’s great if you enjoy rebooting your phone 10 times a day. I think Microsoft purposely made it work like shite so they could boost Vista (as in, ‘You think Vista sucks? At least it’s not Windows Mobile!’).

Palm was a different story. They had a great operating system that was stable and easy to use. Almost everything you needed was just one or two clicks away. But Palm screwed themselves up by thinking they were Apple and refused to licence their operating system to other companies. Even worse, their product development cycle was screwed up – the Treo smartphone was great but, as I recall, it took about a year after the CDMA version for the GSM version to appear. And while other phone manufacturers were coming out with new devices almost monthly, Palm took years to come up with a successor to the Treo. They wasted millions of dollars developing a crippled laptop that they eventually decided not to release. In the meantime, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices ate away at their market share; the Blackberry and iPhone all but killed them.

If you can remember back to the ’60s and ’70s, perhaps you’ll recall that any Tom, Dick or Harry with an acoustic guitar was dubbed ‘the new Dylan’. In the past year, every mobile phone company and their uncle released ‘the new iPhone killer’. They’ve been about as successful in killing off the iPhone as they were in killing off the iPod. All they’ve offered is a lot of ‘me, too!’ functionality that aped but rarely equalled and never surpassed what the iPhone could do.

Oddly enough, it may turn out that Apple’s biggest innovation with the iPhone wasn’t the phone but their App Store. If you used any smartphone prior to the iPhone, you’ll know that getting additional applications for your device was a huge pain in the butt. While a few web sites attempted to consolidate the work of thousands of independent software developers, the software was overly expensive and the installation process often caused more pain than jumping into a pool of molten lava.
Apple’s solution greatly simplified the process across the board. All of the “legal” apps are available in one place. See something you like? One click and you’re done – the app is downloaded and installed on your phone the next time you do a sync. And by encouraging developers to reduce prices (somewhere around 10% of the apps in the App Store are free and a huge number cost US$1), they encouraged purchases in volumes that no one could have anticipated and which has led to leagues of developers hoping to strike it rich a dollar at a time with nonsense like Zit Picker which, yes, allows you to pop virtual pimples on your phone.

Right now there are more than 15,000 applications for the iPhone through the App Store – and there’ve been more than 500 million downloads. One guy who made an app that just makes fart sounds netted US$27,000 in two months. From fart sounds.

It sometimes seems that most of the available apps do nothing more than make fart, belch or vomit noises. But there are also a handful of useful ones as well as some very nice games. My favourites include a Bloomberg stock-tracking app, several different currency converters, apps that let you access Facebook and Twitter, the New York Times and TMZ. And several language dictionaries, a Hong Kong weather app, random selections from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies and even a couple of useful guides for ordering yum cha and sushi.

Along with backgammon and sudoku and a variety of card games, one of the best games on my iPhone is a new one called Crayon Physics. You have to manouevre a ball around various obstacles to hit a star by drawing objects on screen that then become part of the game play itself. Ingenious and addictive.

(Okay, I’ve also got a light sabre, a Zippo lighter, a flashlight, More Cowbell and Mark Six results. But no fart noise application. At least not yet.)

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show featured a smartphone that could actually offer the iPhone a run for its money and that, oddly enough, comes from Palm (and even odder, is named the Palm Pre). Palm has managed to generate buzz not by looking at the iPhone and seeking to copy it. They seem to have done what Apple themselves did – they’ve looked at the iPhone and tried to come up with ways to improve upon it.

The Palm Pre features a new operating system dubbed webOS built on a platform of standard tools (including HTML, Javascript and CSS), which should make it easy for developers to create new applications. It has a physical keyboard – and Palm always had great keyboards on their devices. The screen is higher resolution than the iPhones and, yes, it will have cut and paste, something the iPhone still can’t manage, along with true multi-tasking. There are other improvements as well, but the one bit of wow factor will be an accessory called Touchstone – just put the phone on top of it to recharge the battery.

So is the Palm Pre really going to be an iPhone killer? Only time but tell, but David Pogue, the NY Times’ personal tech columnist, has described the Pre as ‘a spectacular, beautiful, joyous machine’.