Why Third Party Mobile Apps Are Important
As far as true third-party applications go, Apple’s iPhone is closed. If you’re unclear why that’s a mistake on Apple’s part, here’s the root of the problem: innovation happens elsewhere. To illustrate this point, consider one of the innovations on the iPhone itself. That is, the virtual keyboard.
The iPhone virtual keyboard is, in many ways, superior to virtual keyboards found on other devices. It’s not perfect, of course, but it does represent a useful step forward. Now, because devices like the Nokia N800 are open to third-party app development, the N800 community can take advantage of Apple’s innovation. The guys at INdT in Brazil decided to write an iPhone-like virtual keyboard for the device. Check out the app in the video below:
It took them less than a week to develop, and it looks pretty nice. At first glance, it even looks like they might have produced a more usable keyboard than the iPhone’s. In other words, they didn’t just copy Apple, they innovated on top of Apple’s concept. The thing to note about this is that Nokia didn’t have to invest a single cent in a “virtual keypad” project to make this innovation happen. They made their device open, so that innovation could happen elsewhere. And it did. Today, less than a month after the iPhone hit the market, N800 users can take advantage of innovation that originated on the iPhone.
Steve Jobs believes that most of the important innovations in mobile will be software innovations. I think he’s right. The fact that the competition’s devices are open means that, unless Apple opens the iPhone to true third-party apps, iPhone is doomed to fall further and further behind the competition, no matter what software innovations Apple believes it can make itself. That’s why third-party mobile apps are important.
Asam Bashir wrote:
I’m not surprised it took them less then a week, how is that any different to the screen keyboard I have on an ancient palm I have? The iPhone’s key is the multi-touch gestures which allows a quantum leap in productivity compared to single tap ancient touch screens.
Where’s the smart driven dictionary and word prediction as well?
I’m sorry, I don’t see anything in that Video which even touches the iPhone or is even new technology. The only relationship I can see is that they’ve tried to copy the look and graphics, but you’re kidding me if you consider that as an iPhone threat. It’s still a stupid Nokia, and I’m still wishing my E65 stops crashing about 20 times a day and Nokia ships a firmware update…
Posted 31 Jul 2007 at 12:24 am ¶
simon wrote:
The thing I think is clever about the keyboard user interface in the video, is this… You get a visual feedback of what key you have pressed (by the key zooming out from under your finger, like on the iPhone); and if you have made a mistake, you have the option to slide your finger around to hit the correct key instead.
That’s pretty neat. Sure, this guy hasn’t implemented the smart dictionary and word prediction stuff yet. Give him a break - he’s only worked on this thing for a few days!
I don’t consider the N800 as an iPhone threat. My point is that I think Apple’s competitors making their open devices is a potential threat to Apple (only if they get their acts together, of course). I was using this keyboard app just as an example.
Posted 31 Jul 2007 at 12:26 pm ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
I agree on the point that Apple does need to move quicker and provide a proper SDK kit for iPhone for third-party developers, but I also understand from Apple’s point of view that it would need a very clever way of implementing third-party apps to make sure it doesn’t open the platform to malware. If Brazilian Nokia developers can move fast and produce a virtual keyboard in a week, then the Mac community moves even faster and ships the first ‘Hello World’ binary,
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/07/29/iphone-hello-world-binary-released/
Right now though this can’t be a priority for Apple, it needs to get out both the Euro and Asian iPhones fast, and also if rumours are true, it’s also been working in parallel on the consumer ‘iPhone Nano’ ..
Posted 31 Jul 2007 at 3:36 pm ¶
Gustavo Sverzut Barb wrote:
Hi,
As the author of the virtual keyboard demo, I want to make clear it was just that, a demonstration software.
As I wrote in my blog, the purposes were 1) experiment and find bugs with our infrastructure libs (EFL), 2) see how difficult (or easy) was to write something visual appealing as Apple’s keyboard and 3) try to evaluate if the keyboard was good as people say.
That resulted in: 1) about 2 bug fixes and 1 extra feature implemented — AS OPEN SOURCE, 2) easy enough to implement in less than one week and ridiculous few lines of code and 3) key zooming and possibility to change keys are great features, even without prediction and spell checker.
Notice that our screen is way bigger, then keys are larger and more spaced, diminishing errors.
Also criticized is the lack of prediction and spell checker. That’s easy, but would add more code than we need now, mostly managing some database or state machine of words, no big deal here… this would be present in any product I develop for real.
As for keyboard being just like others or iPhone bringing no innovation because those things are already present elsewhere: they did few things, but did them right. Keyboard is not that innovative, but is way more usable due the key spacing, zooming and ability to change keys (action on “mouse out”). I have not tried their phone for real, just seen marketing videos, but seems that common case are fast and intuitive, things that most phones lacks these days (personal opinion!).
BTW, INdT is NOT Nokia, we have close relationship, but we’re an independent research center.
Posted 01 Aug 2007 at 4:20 am ¶