Well App Store shows there is at least intrigue in mobile based web/desktop apps. And the support Apple is putting into developing this platform certainly shows they believe mobile browsing is a big part of the future of digital connectivity. On the whole though App Store is still a home for iPhone versions of apps that presently exist as Widgets for Mac or Gadgets for PC, most of which are basically feed readers for a particular type of information – like ‘shares’. But there are some great apps as well and the initial level of game development would suggest this platform is going to be a serious competitor over time for Sony and Nintendo products alike!!

GPS for us offers the real excitement. Obviously the device is a really small laptop with a phone and a camera so great desktop like apps will get developed for it – the key is for developers to tap into the unique nature of this device over any other CPU and that is GPS. This thing is on the move with you and while in contact with the network service it knows where you are and can connect to where millions of other people are. It can feed unique information to a user based on their location, it can personalise the user experience based on that data – this is a genuine first. However there is still quite a way to go.

We already have apps like Loopt and CenceMe that tap into the idea of connecting to your network of friends and seeing what each other is doing in real-time. This type of functionality actually brings the social back to social networks, by bringing the experience and connections to the real world. Heading to a spot in town at the weekend and seeing via your map where all your other iPhone friends are.

Citysense another app that is available for the Blackberry and is coming to the iPhone is another nice early example of bringing real life data to users finger tips. They aggregate massive amounts of anonymous user data so you get a break down of activity in your area – how busy the CBD is to plan your travel. The busiest night spots or restaurants etc etc Though reliant on users being happy to be tracked it is anonymous and over time the useful data that can be captured is interesting.

It is obvious even with these very early and basic GPS based apps that the economic opportunities will be huge and also why the addition of open mobile platforms like Android and LiMo is going to help grow the space very quickly.

Users themselves are already pretty familiar with geo-tagging and now the device enables this to happen automatically, live blogging from the field will open some interesting opportunities in the news and reporting arena – see CNN’s Magic Wall and you start to get an idea of where this can be taken for mainstream news casting – then switch it back to the user and you get personalised interactive news casting to your phone.

This is the start of what we at F/F are coining ‘NextWeb™’.

More info on geo-broadcasting.
More on mobile social networking.

The figures
1 million units sold by about middle of last week
10 million downloads from app store in the first weekend!!
Around 800 applications available for download in the App Store, over 200 of these are free; at launch, there were about 550 apps available.

“It took 74 days to sell the first one million original iPhones, so the new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start around the world,” said Apple chief executive Steve Jobs in a statement.

So all in all a pretty major success for Apple!

The problems
Well releasing a new firmware update barely 2 days after launch threw a few people and it would appear the sheer volume of units pushed inevitably made things tricky for the retailers and there staff but on the whole most articles are reporting positive feedback on the buying experience.

But not everyone is happy of course here are the top 10 reasons to hate the new iPhone. On the whole we feel this is a good article that highlights the main areas where the the new 3G iPhone is a of a let down – though we feel hate is a very strong word!! It would appear that what we are really seeing here for the first time (second with the original iPhone) is Form without function. For years Apple products were the workhorses of the faithful creative industry and therefore function was everything, they weren’t public facing products. Since the original fruity flavoured iMacs, and the march of the iPod revolution things have been moving to a consumer focus for Apple with great success. On the whole however they were competing in areas where they had the lead over their competitors – with the telco market this is somewhat different and although this is more an exercise in creating the first generation of mobile web devices – Apple has many hurdles to jump in needing to placate the telcos themselves. This is why we don’t have instant messaging out of the box, and is possibly a big reason behind no web cam and certainly no forward facing camera – how long would it be before there was a skype hack. It’s a shame because many people want the old telco model to be broken and if every new product innovation that comes along is trapped to their network architecture then we surely stay in the mobile web dark ages, regardless of how well the browser renders!!

The big issue
The price of plans!! The prices from country to country are all over the place and the big issue F/F have is that ignoring the phone aspect of this – what you are really wanting to pay for with this phone is the internet and email capabilities and this is where it sucks. In Australia where broadband is still quite expensive you would think the iPhone plans would reflect broadband packages not other mobile packages – or at least reflect the pricing of Blackberry packages. But no and this is the case in many other countries.

Pricing is also a big issues for overseas business travelers as unlike the Blackberry the methods used to serve emails and documents with attachments seriously lack the needed compression to keep your data transfer to a minimum – this can quickly prove very costly. It would appear that buying your iPhone and getting it unlocked and going pre-paid in which ever country you are in may be the best option for now.

But the bottom line is there are no unlimited data plans and for power users the Blackberry will win out over the 3G iPhone in every market. Because of this the Blackberry is surely likely to remain the phone of choice for big business.

Price revolution
Though a small concession, consumer action across the web has managed to cause a reduction in plans in Canada, showing that with enough voices the consumers can get results. But I fear the sheer hype and demand around this product means most people will just swallow the cost of plans as if this product is so much better that this is just what it costs. Remember for many people this is the first time the will have used such a phone, they won’t have any experience of competitor phones or their associated data plans – and the telcos are obviously fully aware of this.

Thoughts
As it stands no one has an iPhone here at F/F. We really do want one, the apps and the future of mobile web truly starts here but for now the price really does out weigh the need.

A simple sweeping assessment is that one way or another once internet connections are fast/robust enough to deliver it then surely the web browser as such will essentially become an alternative operating system.

The way we see it there are certain commercial considerations that could drive such a move, the primary one being license control. This new web based system environment would deliver a digital world where licensing issues would no longer be an issue as the applications would be served directly via the web and not installed locally – access would demand a genuine login via a paid subscription. Commercial users would no doubt be able to buy a for life key/login but amateur users would have the option of pay per use on applications. Photoshop Express by Adobe already shows that the software houses are thinking in terms of web apps, and out of the box subscription on a per use basis already exists for some products, such as photoshop, in the offline world.

Google apps is another pointer in this direction – the notion of creating a system like environment online that can service all you needs – mail, calendar, simple document creation.

Yet we are still seeing daily releases of new desktop apps that essentially take the need to log on to the web out of the equation for site based tasks such as uploading images to Flickr, writing a blog post to WordPress or Twittering with the Twhirl. In some cases such as the Destroy Flickr Air app the whole online experience it brought to the desktop not just the uploading/creating features. So how come – if the web is becoming all powerful in terms of the functionality and services it can provide why are people developing desktop versions of web apps. Simply because connectivity is still a huge issue.

Broadband still isn’t universally great – here in Australia it is on the whole average, wireless broadband is an even lesser proposition again and in many markets relatively expensive, and with poor coverage. What desktop applications allow the user to do is download a dump of information when connected and then use, edit consume that information while offline – while commuting for example. Yet it would seem at some point the delivery of online connectivity will reach a point where these offline versions just become redundant – raising again the question of the web browser becoming operating system of the future.

Of the great features two stand out: first is the text identification feature – which can identify text in images, on a business card of flyer, so that these hard image based uploads become index searchable by the words they contain. Second is the web page clipping tool allowing you to just clip the parts of a webpage (windows only at time of posting) you are interested in to store in your notes.

Essentially with a web enabled computer and a mobile camera phone with web access we you can now save and manage notes from both the online and offline worlds with ease.