I meant to link to Symbian’s Death – Imminent or a Desperate Hoax shoutout? at the weekend, but it slipped my mind. The perceptions within are worth a few minutes of your time.
As far as iOS is concerned, its nothing much more than mere eye-candy. Power users are bound to be disappointed. I was, when i used an iPhone. Even now, there’s no real multitasking on it. Symbian has a great multitasking prowess and its been doing that for a long, long time. The eye candy is one thing that has attracted people to iOS and yes, the developers too. What Symbian needs is more eye candy. And one thing that has to be noted is that iOS is what it is today because it has been treated like a kid by Mr. Jobs – like a person protects his kid, so is iOS – no multitasking, super restrictive terms.. this is something where both Android and Symbian score points over iOS. And yes, there’s some sense why iOS is protected – its pretty weak from the core. Okay, lets not delve on such things.. Lets get down to digest some facts.
Wow. There’s a lot of Symbian fanboys on there. I’ve also heard the rumour about Symbian Foundation being wound-up (think I saw it via LadyGeekTV). Wonder what those guys will move to if Symbian does go. It certainly seems that Nokia are putting all their focus on Meego for smartphones now.
The people who go along with what was said above will probably never be completely satisfied with a smartphone OS. Sure iOS is restrictive. It’s designed that way for a reason. Because most people aren’t power users or geeks (like me) or often even heavy computer users. They don’t think too much about multi-tasking. They just want something to work simply and easily. Something that lets them do what they want to do. And that’s not fiddle with an OS.
I’ve said this before, iOS is trying to make computing into an appliance, where knowing what’s going on underneath isn’t needed. Sure some of us get into the heavy details of our HDTV, but most people are just like “Wow, big screen, sharp picture, I’ll buy it.”
I’m not belittling them, they just don’t care about the techy stuff like I do. And I’m sure I don’t care about some of the stuff they love.
You can see how iOS is evolving. Rather than have lots of openness and power features that may or may not be used, or may or may not be used properly, features are added slowly. Remember, once the genii is out of the bottle, it’s hard to get him back in. So if you add a feature, it’s hard to take it away, or even modify it extensively if you’ve made a mistake.
Originally, iOS didn’t expose any file system. Now we have “Open In” if Apps want to take advantage of it. We even have Apps like GoodReader that are like mini file managers where I can add any file I want to the App and then open it in any other App that can handle it.
To paraphrase Lincoln, you can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.
Just my .02 worth as usual.
Bob
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