It may be the calm after the storm, but the flurry of iPhone news has become a calm trickle. Most of the news these days is hackers working on opening up the iPhone for third party apps. I wish them luck, if only to see what some independent minds can produce in terms of new functionality and usability for the phone. Some of the most exciting products these days are born from minds who don’t have a mental lawyer interrupting their creativity, extinguishing ideas which may have the slightest potential for copyright infringement or negative revenue impact on a partnered corporation. It seems like an idea can’t even be thought at Microsoft without a lawyer first allowing it to be placed in their employee’s minds. I’m not saying it’s not a similar situation at Apple, but they at least seem to be attempting to use their corporate weight to change other corporations mind for the consumer benefit, like with DRM. I can’t believe that Microsoft, with all it’s billions in cash sitting in the bank, couldn’t do more than Apple to get the music industry to relinquish DRM. In any case, an open source platform for software on the iPhone is a very exciting prospect. And as a general concept (freedom to put open source and closed source software on your mobile device), Google seems to be the only big player trying to make it happen.
