By the size of it, it wasn’t a big surprise what it was: the 2.2 update (Froyo) had arrived. There aren’t a lot of obvious changes apart from some small changes to the interface, but most of them  seem to be under the hood. The much talked-about tethering (turn your phone into a WiFi hot-spot) is there, as are general speed improvements.

I also went to the market and downloaded the Flash player which means visiting a number of web pages is much more satisfying. In short, some new features, a bit faster, and nothing broke (yet) – I’m happy. Hopefully other Android users will be getting their updates soon.

What Apple is fighting is the commodification of a type of product, namely mobile phones and soon web tablets. This happened before to them: in the mid-1980s the Macintosh was quite innovative in terms of a user-friendliness, compared to the many of the personal computers available at the time. By the mid-1990s this had changed: Microsoft had created a “good enough” copy of the Mac experience with Windows and prices on hardware had fallen so that Apple’s products where quite expensive by comparison. The Mac continued to be popular in some circles, but had essentually became the Porsche that people bought calendars of before buying a Honda.

While the Porsche example is not perfect — people buy a high-end sports car for different reasons than they choose a phone — the challenges are not. Like Porsche, Apple has to protect its brand by demonstrating that there is a reason you are spending several hundred dollars on a phone. One of the ways it can do this by having lots of applications that are unique to the iPhone. One way to do this is make sure developers invest the time and money creating an iPhone application, and not spend that on writing for competing phones. The contract changes made last week which seem to be primarily aimed at Adobe’s Flash software are designed to ban technologies that would make it easier for developers to write applications that would run on several platforms, essentially making the iPhone’s offerings less unique. While I don’t anybody is going to be throwing their iPad into Boston harbour over this, it’s not going to help Apple’s image with developers any more than the ongoing issues with the less-than-transparent App Store approval process is doing. Short-term the effect is pretty nil, medium-term though it’s going to make the alternatives more attractive.

While the iPhone had become ubiquitous and in 2010 arguably still provides the best user experience of any smart-phone, its probably only a matter of time before someone, maybe Google, maybe RIM, maybe even Nokia come up with something good enough. Apple lost the PC market because it tried to be Porsche; Apple risks this happening again, but this time it’s not going to take 15 years.

http://yyztech.ca/reviews/book/mafiaboy-how-cracked-internet-why-still-broken

Why? Well there’s a few reasons:

• via its gMail interface, blogging is as simple as sending a text message, making it very immediate
• the restrictions (160-odd characters, no images, short urls) make tight writing a necessity
• you don’t feel like you have to write 2-3 paragraphs (that’s me) when you can sum things up in a sentance
• the social aspects – it’s not Facebook, but that’s probably a good thing – really if i want post an album, I can use Flikr
• the 3rd-party apps – there’s a whole host of things built on Twitter’s api, from search engines like TweetScan to Twitbin there’s a lot of interesting things being built around it.
• it’s fun

Blogging certainly has its place, but if you’re looking for something less formal- and quite possibly the way things are going, give it a try.

On the topic of phones, there’s a new series starting on CBC.ca next week, read about it here while fuming over the slow pace of adoption of phones in Canada – case in point, Fido is just now rolling out a G3 service, nice Flash animation, but we’ve got one phone for now.

The CBC series will will be hosted over at http://www.cbc.ca/technology/ and feature a number of industry people from Research In Motion co-founder Mike Lazaridis to Sir Richard Branson. Should be good.