iPhone – The New Personal Computer
When Apple first announced the launch of its iPhone platform, we wrote here that it is a game changer.
Even the core of iPhone is a major advance in mobile computing, but with
the platform iPhone becomes the new personal computer. The desktop from now on will be for professional and business work. Laptops aren’t going away, but will get increasingly less personal use. The reason is that iPhone with its application platform is a better
personal computer and it’s widely accessible.
At Your Fingertips. Fast.
Every major service, Amazon, Netflx, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, is already available, or will soon be, on iPhone. Either the companies or third parties will deliver these applications. The result is, you have the world in your pocket; anytime, anywhere you can access what you need. This is powerful and unprecedented. For a while now, we’ve been seeing desktop and web converging, with increasingly more desktop apps leveraging the web. iPhone places this convergence into the spotlight. Smart little apps with fluid Apple design are now leveraging the vast amounts of information available on the web.
Location Awareness
Another leap
is location awareness. Apps are now smarter because they understand an important part of your context. Want nearby movies, restaurants or maps? Applications automatically
leverage your current location.
And we’re now seeing a true blend of physical and digital. When you’re at a restaurant, see what your friends thought about it. When in a bookstore, look up reviews on Amazon. If in Paris, access an instant map. Sure, you could do this before, but this iPhone platform takes the experience to a new level. It takes it to the mainstream.
The New Personal Computer
There’s an irony in Steve Jobs’ recent move to drop the word computer from the company name. Arguably, this iPhone is the first really personal computer. True, the PC was called that first, but from today’s view PC is for heavy tasks while iPhone is small, smart and portable.
iPhone comes with a pack of applications perfect for today’s consumers. Like iMac 10 years ago, this device focuses on essentials. It has all the necessary communications: phone, email, text messaging. It has a camera and a way to manage photos. It’s the best smart phone to play video. And its music support rocks.
Even the original iPhone was great at finding information: maps and Safari made the web instantly accessible. Now with the application platform open-ended, all other non-Apple essentials become available. Each of us can download the apps for services we use and make iPhone personalized and personal.
What’s Next for Business Computing?
Beyond personal computing iPhone aims to help people do business. Its much anticipated Exchange integration will generate an army of converts. Jobs and his crew know the personal computer needs to support business folks, as few people would want to carry two devices.
Where does this leave laptops and PC? Obviously neither is going away anytime soon, but both are more orientated towards business professionals. Programmers will not be using an iPhone to write Java code. Designers will not be using it for graphics, and engineers will never run CAD on iPhone. These aren’t personal computing things, but business. iPhone will become our new personal computer.
Conclusion
Seeing the new applications on the iPhone is eye-opening. They’re powerful, they’re beautiful, and they’re only getting better. Having all personal applications and services at your fingertips makes one realize iPhone is really the first personal computer.
Increasingly, desktops and laptops will be for professional computing. iPhone and its descendants will be our new personal computer. This is an exciting page in the history of our technology. It’s the start of an era: ubiquitous, portable, personal computing.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )12 Future Apps For Your iPhone
With the new iPhone SDK, it’s just a matter of time before we see a wave of new applications. We expect a lot of popular web 2.0 apps to offer an iPhone version. Native Twitter, Facebook and Flickr clients for iPhone will run faster than their in-browser versions and will take advantage of the impressive Apple UI libraries. But there is an entirely new breed of applications also coming to iPhone. These apps simply would not be possible without a device like iPhone.
The major theme of this new wave of apps will be blending of the physical and digital worlds, using iPhone as the bridge. In this post we take a look at what’s coming.
1. Reality Tagging
Tagging reality is not new, but will be much better done with iPhone. Here’s how it will work. You take a picture of a landmark, then comment and add tags. The phone will automatically geo-tag it and send the picture to a photo sharing service on the Web. Now anyone in the world can find your picture by exact geo location, or by its tags. Reality tagging will be like a distributed Google Earth, but for pictures.
2. People Tagging
Even better than tagging landmarks, you will be able to use iPhone to tag people. You can already take a picture and assign it to a contact. It is just a matter of time before these pictures will available to a search engine. Doing it on the phone will be quick and fun. In a couple of years the problem that we described in this post will go away.
3. Reality Recognition
Reality recognition will be fueled by reality tagging and advanced image recognition. Imagine going on a hike and coming across a tree that you have not seen before. You will point iPhone at the tree and instantly a Wikipedia page about it will load. Or imagine that it’s your first time in New York City. You point an iPhone at the Chrysler building (because you think that it is the Empire State Building) and again information about the landmark will be paged to your iPhone.
4. Physical Social Networks
Today’s social networks exist on the internet, but mobile technology is going to bring it to the physical world. You will be able to walk into a restaurant, open up your iPhone and see a list of your friends who have been to the place. You can flip through their comments and ratings, share comments on the menu – all from the palm of your hand. Similarly, standing next to a painting in the Louvre, you will be able to instantly find out what your friends thought of it. Looking at this broadly, as we discussed in this post, advances in mobile computing enable us to overlay the digital on top of our physical world.
