Mmmmmmm me want

[Trev]

iPhone v. Windows Mobile market share: http://www.edibleapple.com/iphone-tops-windows-mobile-in-worldwide-market-share/

Interesting bit:

Microsoft, in its zeal to get Windows Mobile onto as many phones as possible, is left with a phone OS that no one wants to use, and more importantly, one that developers don’t want to code for. Developers, who have long been getting chump change for their apps, are starting to see that they can make quite a bit of money developing programs for rival platforms such as the iPhone. Compounding the problem is the sheer number of devices that run Windows Mobile. If I’m a coder who wants to develop for Windows Mobile, which phone specs will I be using when I sit down and try to hash out some code? Will the phone have an acceleromator? Will it have a touchscreen? How big will the screen even be?! The questions are endless, and the headaches for developers numerous.

Gee, sounds a lot like developing for any platform that runs on arbitrary hardware, particularly with regard to game development. The toughest part for developers on the iPhone is the perception that everything should cost 0.99 USD (too much for a song, in my opinion, and probably not enough for a decent application). I've resisted buying music from iTunes because you can only download the song once, despite the fact that Apple keeps a complete history of your purchases and authorized playback devices. With apps, however, you can purchase them once and download them as many times as you want to however many devices you own.

EDIT: Wishful thinking: Microsoft releases Windows Mobile to the masses as an open source general purpose RTOS. It's necessarily quite open as it is, but even though you can port it to most any hardware platform, Microsoft won't allow you to redistribute your port without paying the piper.

I use my iPod Touch and iPhone 3G for browsing the web on the toilet and in the car and talking on the phone, although I prefer my old Motorola SLVR (w/ iTunes, which I never used) for the phone bits.

@kickstart

Although despite most plans for smart phones having unlimited data, providers still implement and charge exhorbitant prices for SMS messaging. SMS needs to die.

[Trev]

@mikrucio

That was an excellent counterpoint.

[Trev]

I'm on ATT and the data package I have includes unlimited SMS/MMS. I don't know if SMS should die, but SMS prices need to die as they're rediculous. Before I got my data plan ATT changed their rates to 15 cents to send and 15 cents to recieve! That's crazy.

It's 20 cents now, and the city of Sacramento (which I live near but not in) passed legislation to start taxing mobile phone services (in addition to taxes already imposed by state and federal laws).

[Trev]

Agreed. As I've said about 5 times in this thread so far, developers really need to know their target (unless you're doing J2ME stuff but even then you still need to know what JSRs are supported).

I wasn't trying to say that they needed to know their target platform (which in this case is Windows Mobile and not the hardware itself, although having to compile for multiple CPUs does complicate performance analysis)--that's a given. What I was I trying to imply is that programmers need to be smarter than that.

Extending the GPS reference a bit, you don't write GPS code, you write location awareness code and let the operating environment worry about how the location is determined (GPS, cell tower triangulation, WiFi hotspot database, user input, etc.). It's unfair to blame the platform for your own design mistakes.

Apple's tight coupling of hardware and operating environment allows developers to write, in theory, worry-free code, in the same vein as the game consoles of old. The advent of software updates for console games--Xbox, Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii--has, in my opinion, allowed console developers (or rather, quality assurance analysts and program managers) to get lazy. Why fix today....

That said, I'd rather see an open platform. I love my Mac--it's pretty, it talks to my audio gear without headaches, etc.--but I do all my hacking on a generic Windows box (including cross-compiling for the Amiga).

[Trev]

@AmigaHeretic

Yes, but that's just battery wasting eye candy.

[Trev]

@adolescent

Microsoft must be gettimg stingy with their SKUs. Last I read, support included ARM, SH, MIPS, and x86.

[Trev]

@adolescent

Which is why I said Microsoft must be getting stingy with their SKUs. The compiler itself still supports the various architectures. Microsoft must have decided not to sell Windows Mobile 6.x for anything than ARM (and probably x86 for testing).

As far as eye candy, of course the iPhone can flip, rotate, and texture map screens. It also multitasks (it's running the same kernel as Mac OS X, after all). The difference is that task switching is controlled by the Home button and Home screen. The OP asked whether or not the iPhone could do it, not whether or not the operating environment mimicked that behavior out of the box.

The thing I don't like about the iPhone, iPod Touch, Windows CE/Embedded/Mobile, and so on is that when you close an application, it doesn't end the process. Instead, the process continues running in the background. You can kill processes on all the environments I've mentioned, but it's usually difficult and annoying to do so (holding the Home button on the iPhone, control panel on Windows). The same annoyance exists in Mac OS X (and NeXT, I suppose, which is where Mac OS X got it), but at least you have an option to end the process directly.

It's also prevalent in Windows apps that minimize to the system tray (which was never intended for that purpose) and UNIX apps that run as a combination daemon and user interface. In other words, it takes control of the process out of the hands of the user. Bad mojo. Time to revolt against the MCP, perhaps.

@JJ

I don't know if you can use iTunes (or another media player) as background music while you play a game. I'm not sure you would want to, though. Personally, I prefer to play games the way the designers intended them to be played--in the same I prefer matted widescreen to pan and scan. ;-) The iPhone, like most mobile devices, is not supposed to be all things to everybody, although it's more of a general purpose computer than most phones. The same can be said of Windows Mobile devices, I'm sure.

That sort of task switching is also a serious resource drain, unless the idle tasks are properly suspended. Most small devices are designed with a specific power budget/footprint in mind.

EDIT: Just thinking that I would like to create a custom radio station in Fallout 3 that streams from the XM 40's station. The GNR station in the game gets repetitive. I also had the BGM so low that I didn't realize the game even had BGM until after I'd finished it the first time through.

[Trev]

@bloodline

I did not know that, and actually, it makes me like my iPhone a little more. ;-) The last thing I want is Widgety Guy computing pi in the background and chewing up my battery.

EDIT: But I'm not fond of vendors artificially restricting their customers. Still, it results in a more stable platform.

[Trev]

I think apps like AIM have to be running to receive messages. Thought: if they ran in the background, they'd compete with Apple/AT&T's implementation of SMS. Same goes for media players. Apple would probably frown upon (or even forbid) anything that competes with iTunes. That's too bad, though, since you can use the iTunes desktop app to listen to "Internet radio" stations. The same functionality should be added to the iPhone/iPod Touch. I guess you can listen to podcasts, but I'm not sure if those can be live streams or if they're just the fixed length recordings uploaded to iTunes--I haven't used it yet. I'm sure Bloodline can weigh in here.

The advent of "netbooks" is once again changing people's views of mobile devices. I think someone already commented on buying a netbook with a 3G card as opposed to a smart phone of the same price. (Or maybe I read that somewhere else.)

Semi-related question: does anyone see value in an iTunes-compatible (read: iPod software clone) audio player for Amiga-like systems? Not sure how connectivity would work, but I'm thinking along the lines of using mDNS to locate local iTunes libraries.

[Trev]

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Semi-related question: does anyone see value in an iTunes-compatible (read: iPod software clone) audio player for Amiga-like systems? Not sure how connectivity would work, but I'm thinking along the lines of using mDNS to locate local iTunes libraries.

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Would be fun, are there any open source ones that could be ported?

There are commercial iTunes implementations that could be reverse engineered and reimplemented (without infringing upon patents, natch) for interoperability. Could be tricky, though, as the courts have not been kind to the interoperability crowd, regardless of their intent. Apple doesn't want competing software to have access to purchased iTunes content.

Yes, Apple provide a standard API to your app can use the Push service for whatever it needs, it doesn't have to be an IM/IRC client... could be anything that needs background processing.

Which is probably why it's delayed. Apple, too, does not want Widgety Guy computing pi or folding proteins on its cloud just so iPhone customers can feel good about their standing in the unit processing race.

[Trev]

That's because the compiler is for any Windows Embedded Compact device, not just Windows Mobile. AFAIK, Windows Mobile has been ARM only from the beginning. Not stingy... standard.

And every other edition of Windows, excepting the 16-bit stuff. (Although you can still produce 16-bit code with the latest version of MASM and link DOS executables with the last version of LINK.EXE from ftp.microsoft.com.)

Since they share the same codebase, I tend to think of them as being the same thing, in the same way that Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7 are the same thing, albeit with changes to the base feature set (and, d'oh, the dropping of support for Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC) over the years.

None of that changes my original point, though. :-) If I were developing for the WinCE kernel, I wouldn't limit myself to a single device profile or SKU.

[Trev]

@bloodline

Add a dock port compatible mass-spec, and the iPhone becomes a tricorder. Of course, it couldn't automagically transfer the whole of an alien civilization's literary works (plus an artificialy-preserved lifeform or two) to internal memory, but it would still be pretty cool.