Sunday, July 1, 2007

Oh man, the "Good old Days" are Back - It's Begging for the (Handheld) Desktop

I underplayed how important the iPhone is --underplayed it. Oh sure, I had it as part of Steve J's four steps to total world domination - but I was just thinking of it in terms of distribution for portable media, which it is...but it's more. I had to have my hands on the thing to understand. But not very long...

This is online services and desktop computing all combined and all over again. It seems like it’s early days, and it is, but there will be a lot more people who’ll show up to the party early this time around.

The “Club Apple” online service will have a million users and it won't take long. Then 5 million, then 10 million. Then who knows? But it doesn't matter even at 10 million, it's enough scale. It's not really competing against any other desktop quite like it. Yet.

I'm looking at that home page desktop set of icons -- there’s still some room. It's not too early to start kissing up to Steve J. and telling him how great he is.

Psssst, Steve J…you’re freaking GREAT. Great I say: seriously -- best gadget ever. Please put my little stupid blog on your iPhone. C’mon man. You blocked me from streaming in 3GP mode with my Orb and are making me wait for Flash, but I still love you.

Amazingly with all your VISION THING you neglected to design it so that e-mail and text messaging applications could rotate into landscape mode. This is key because in landscape mode I can use a finger or thumb from each hand and that means I can type about as half as fast as normal that way, which is plenty fast enough. Using a finger from each hand in portrait mode is tough. Too tough. But I still love, love, love it and my phone # hasn't even ported over yet. I haven't had my first call come in while listening to the iPod, I mean iPhone. Best portable media and portable internet device ever. The phone thing is a nice add-on. Thanks man.

If you know you’re going to have back to back updates within a month, get me on the desktop in the first update and take me out in the second. Is that so much to ask? One measly month on the desktop. Please, please, please. I bought the iPhone and like 9 ipods. I’ll buy a Mac as soon as the Apple Store opens up on Chestnut St., I promise. Please, please, pretty please.

Steve Case, come back man, come back. We need another Steve, and it’s not that extraordinary visionary Steve Ballmer. Plus you made getting on the desktop work! Oh man.

Microsoft is playing from a really weird position compared to the last time I cared – trying to catch up to Apple some how . Sure Windows mobile/CE whatever their OS for the wireless handheld platform is on millions of phones, but NO DESKTOP REAL ESTATE. Ha!

Yeah, Zune just sold a million, but by the time it hits 2 million, 10 million iPhones will have sold. 10 million people.

I was thinking how on earth would I try to capitalize on this right now if I wasn’t such a lazy guy who quite often prefers thinking to doing. Eye candy. Give me ads that are more or less eye candy. Then I started screwing around with YouTube for the iPhone.

The good old cell phone or low budget video production will always be popular provided it’s coverage of Paris with her boob falling out of her dress or some other celebrity thing. Otherwise the 10 million future residents of Club Apple are going to be elitist with their video. Give me highly produced, high quality video iCandy. They’re going to have to figure out how to stream HD faster. But people did figure this out. Within the featured items were a couple of things I watched purely because they were just eye candy. One was basically just an ad for someone’s Photoshop skills combined with someone’s music skills for the soundtrack. Totally worked for me as iPhone eye candy and looks much better on the iPhone than it does on my 24" monitor running in 1920x1200 mode.

The other was this guy doing a dumb little dance all over the world. Didn’t love the soundtrack but I kept looking. The well produced stuff plays really well on the iPhone.

I’m not sure how Google (YouTube) is getting paid on this or the maps. I'm guessing it traded that for being the default search engine in the Safari browser.

But I’m sure there are no ads in Maps or Youtube right now (just branding). And I’m sure of this, at Club Apple, Steve J, not Ser-gei or Lar-ray is calling the shots. It’s going to be fun. Let the begging to be on the desktop begin.

Please, please - just a month. C'mon man.

The good old days are back.

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