apple – Is It Yourself?

I found a comment I made over on Ed Felten‘s Freedom to Tinker blog about the recent iPhone release been quoted by CNN link. My orignal post has been edited a little bit but I guessing that they at least they there there was some merit in my original comment :

I think that the iPhone will be the game changer that it has been touted as, but it may not necessarily be the winner (Apple isn’t always successful, the newton any one?). If some company comes along with a device that matches the iPhone but doesn’t demand a contract lock in, they could charge ahead and gobble up all the people who are interested in the iPhone but are not Mac zealots enough to accept the current situation.

I don’t know if that now makes me an authority, but it is good to know that know that some one out there is paying attention.

Original Freedom to tinker article.

For the record I recently acquired a Nokia N95 (unfortunately I had to buy it, I did try and drop a few hints around the internet and hoping that Santy or Nokia would hear it, but alas no). I’m still getting a feel for it but there is huge power here already but not as sexy as the iPhone. Nokia have a history of stylish design in the past and they may be able to churn out a iPhone killer.

From Darla Mack Blog :

This is not a paid endorsement from Nokia, however I am interested in any future devices you might produce, give me a call.

To Apple I still can’t wait to get an iPhone in my hand so all is not lost yet, also give me a call.

And finally to CNN I am a noisy windbag that pretty much has an opinion on any thing so feel free to quote me again in the future, you know where I am.

One of my original posts on this blog was to call Steve Jobs a big fat liar, which I admitted at the time might have been a bit to harsh. However I wasn’t convinced that he had listed all his concerns with DRM and the Apple implementation, Fairplay, in his famous “Thought on Music” letter in February 2007. At first I thought that it was some thing fundamentally wrong with the current released version of Fairplay that Apple engineers knew but had yet to make it into the wild.

However AppleInsider today have a write up about a patent they found filed by Apple in September 2006. detailing a technique for one mobile device communicating with another.

“The mobile devices can then wirelessly transmit data from one mobile device to the other”

The natural extension of this is have iPod and iPhone swapping and sharing information seemlessly. Sounds pretty good (remember back in September 2006 Apple had yet to announce the iPhone)

iphone meet photo ipod, originally uploaded by b. andy andy andy d..

This, I believe, is one of the reasons Steve Jobs wanted iTunes to move away from been forced supplying and maintain DRM files. So far they have been able (barely?) to keep the DRM model working, as long as a computer must to use to download music to the iPod. However if Apple want to put add in the functionality as detailed in the patent, one mobile device pretty much transmitting data ad-hoc to another mobile device, supporting the current DRM gets problematic fast. First they would have to spend time getting it to work, getting two client devices to maintain DRM would be more complicated than the current host/client situation that is used. Then, more than likely, it would be cracked which won’t be as easy to fix as updating iTunes is, which would make Apple look bad. The solution make sure that Apple start moving away before the iPhone is released, Jobs letter on music was one month after the iPhone was announced.

So while Steve Jobs as always is less than honest about his intentions as listed in his letter, this is probably another example of how he is way a head of the game and on the way to making pant loads of even more money.