iPhone: The AOL of Cellphones

Further to iPhone becoming a competitor to Arduino…

Today this turned up…

from hackaday.com

So there you go. Parallel Evolution, Machine Generation and yet another shining example of why patents are bad, and the whole lot should be scrapped. Innovation grows out of the Primordial-Meme-Soup. People have the same ideas at the same time – it’s not Morphic Resonance, it’s common memetic ancestry. Vicarious Lamarkianism.

IPhone is ideal as a separate, swappable brain for previously dumb devices… it’s actually a fairly big computer, and it has so much in the way of sensory and communication gear built in. It’s potential as something other than a cellphone, or even a computer as we currently understand them is huge.

Trouble is though, iPhone is closed-source, and therefore a bit crap.

Mark Rolston (on A vision of our evolving mobile world), suggested that Facebook was the AOL of social networking… a control system rather than a set of standards.

I think he’s right – and I think that iPhone is the AOL of cellphones… or more accurately, hand-held computers. It’s the Ooh! Shiny thing that gets people through the door in large numbers, and holds their hand so nothing can go too scary can happen. IPhone is a mobile platform for grandmothers. It fails to understand where the true potential lies – and that is out there in the wild wild web – a set of standards rather than a control-system.