Ten Questions I Still Have About iPhone Software

More iPhone Software Questions

6. Are there any killer apps out there? The Apple II's killer app was Visicalc-which was a third-party program which didn't exist when the II was released. The IBM PC's killer app was Lotus 1-2-3-which was a third-party app which didn't exist when the PC was released. The Mac's killer app was PageMaker-which was a third-party app which didn't exist when the Mac was released. You get the idea. There are going to be a lot of really nifty iPhone apps written in the years to come-even more so given the incentive of the iFund announced today. Is there a program yet to be written that'll turn out to be the phone's defining application? I don't have a clue, but I hope so.

7. Will the iPhone be a killer gaming handheld? The demos of Spore and Super Monkey Ball we saw this morning were cool, and it's clear that the phone packs the video and audio punch it needs to enable a sort of miniature approach to immersive gameplay. And a lot of games are going to be a lot of fun when you interact with them through touch and joggling the whole phone. You could see developers latching onto the iPhone as a major gaming platform--and gamers buying one instead of a Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. What the phone doesn't have, though, is anything like a standard set of game controls. Is anyone going to miss a gamepad or two and a bunch of buttons? How will we play Galaxian on this thing?

8. Will it be a killer productivity device? There's no question we'll see attempts at word processing and spreadsheets, but it's less clear whether it's going to be possible to do really good ones with the on-screen keyboard competing for display real estate. And while the Exchange support is a major step forward for business applications, the iPhone remains a device without a to-do list, something that's essential to my productivity, at least, as my e-mail and calendar. (Side note: PC World uses Lotus Notes, so the Exchange support won't help me a bit in my real-world workdays.)

9. Even with Exchange, are there all that many IT people out there who will love the iPhone? The plaudits for iPhone as a business device this morning came mostly from organizations with strong ties to Apple-Genentech, Disney, Stanford University. I'll bet that there are plenty of businesspeople who'll try to convince their companies to adopt the iPhone, or who will plunk down their own money for one. But I still have trouble envisioning workaday IT guys becoming advocates for a device with such a high entertainment factor. Or to put it another way, if iPhone starts to chip into BlackBerry's dominance in the workplace, I think it'll happen very slowly, and probably through indirect routes rather than scads of enterprises buying thousands of iPhones in bulk

10. Whither 3G? The biggest elephant in the room this morning was the fact that the iPhone remains a 2.5G phone in what's increasingly a 3G world. We know that a high-speed iPhone is scheduled to show up sometime this year, and that the combination of true mobile broadband and third-party apps is going to have an exponential effect on the potential of this platform.  I'd love to think that Steve Jobs is planning a June event to roll out the iPhone 2.0 software that will end with a "just one more thing" involving the 3G iPhone.

That's a whole lotta questions. if you have answers to any of them--wild speculation or logical deduction are fine--or further questions of your own, I'd love to hear them…