First, I would like to start off by saying that a lot of this is just my opinion. Take it or leave it.
I started working at my current job in November 2007. After starting, I learned that that they would purchase an iPhone for you after six months of being there. This was when the original iPhone was out. Back then, the iPhone was a status symbol. It was an expensive phone that you'd usually only see business people using. I kinda flipped out when I saw that 20 out of 25 people working there had iPhones.
I've always had a desire to fit in and be cool. Read my Geek Blog to hear more about that. I was really excited to hear that the iPhone 3G was going to be released after my six months. I felt like I would finally be in the Mac is Cool Club... boy was I wrong.....
In short, the 3G was more readily available and significantly cheaper than the original iPhone. Everyone and their grandmother had one and still does. I really enjoyed using my iPhone until recently when Steve Jobs published his thoughts on flash. This was about the time when I was broken from my Mac Fan Boy phase. I'll admit it. I wanted to be one of the cool people with a Mac.
I downloaded 4.0 for my iPhone 3G. The phone just about died. The phone crashed during normal usage. It would take several seconds to open up text messages and games wouldn't run at all. The video below sums up just about all my issues. For real.
Everyone was expecting that iOS 4 was going to support Adobe Flash. I'm a rookie Flash developer and I was exited to hear that Flash Professional CS5 was going to allow apps to be compiled into iPhone apps. Getting a Mac and learming Objective-C was kinda out of the question at work. That's a steep investment to risk and I'm glad that the investment was never made on me. CS5 WOULD have allowed me to be a mobile developer. However, Apple decided to kick Adobe to the curb and said tough luck!
This is a quote from Steve Jobs in the article above.
First, there's Open. Adobe's Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe's Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
To develop an iPhone/iPad app you must have OSX and pay $200 a year to have your apps in the app store AND they are only supporting Objective-C compiled applications. Oh, and OSX only runs on Mac hardware and the apps you build will only work on Apple phone. JOIN THE APPLE CULT AND BE COOL! You can't easily build a Mac system from the ground up. I've heard you can make a Hack-N-Tosh, but I'll pass on that. Adobe Flash Professional is available on both Mac and Windows operating systems. That's more open in my opinion than the iPhone SDK. Adobe has a product. Should Adobe's product be free? Heck no! Microsoft has Visual Studio and is it free? Nope! Most premium SDKs and IDEs cost money! Which is a better hammer for a construction worker? A free rock that was found on the construction site? Or a Benford 2000 Framer's Hammer with gravity accelerated steel head? If you want to build something cool, most of the time you'll need to fork out some money to do it. Especially if you want to make money doing it.
The bottom line is that for something to be truly "Open" is to allow your SDK to be available on Linux, the IDE of choice is Eclipse or Vi and you have to compile in command line..... oh wait!!! Android does that!
At Google I/O back in May, Froyo was shown off. This is Android 2.2. This event definitely destroyed the MacFanBoy in me. Google showed off their collaboration with Adobe to allow Flash to work on 2.2. This event really pushed me to choose the Android OS for my next phone.
I spend a couple of months looking and trying to choose a phone. I looked at the iPhone 4 at the Apple store in Tulsa, OK. I looked at the HTC Aria several times and I looked at the Samsung Captivate (Galaxy S line). Once you become familiar with the Android os, you can change phones and not have to learn how to do everything again. If you get sucked into the iPhone OS, you are stuck with only Apple hardware. My biggest complaint about changing phones is learning how the new one works. I can learn Android once and be familiar with over a dozen popular phones on the market with different carriers.
The final choice was easy. Next time I'll go over the actual transition of hardware with some pros and cons from each. It's be less of a rant.
Oh and NES Emulators never hurt either ;-)
