Full disclosure: I don't have an IPhone, or even a Blackberry. In fact, I don't leave my phone on much. So I've only seen others use their IPhones.
I was talking with my wife about the Pre this weekend. She was a *big* fan of the Palm Pilot, which was wonderful for her to use, but a nightmare for me to support as I'm the Help Desk of our household. She was intrigued about the Pre, and our conversation hinged on the number of Apps that the Pre has vs the IPhone.
The idea of thousands of Apps out there for the IPhone is overwhelming for me (even more so when I read that there are currently more than 48,000 of them for the IPhone alone!). I hear of users who spend time checking out apps: they try one out for a few days or a week, then delete them. When I think that the Pre actually has a lot *fewer* apps out there, that actually sounds like a good thing. Do I want to pick from Apps out there that most people have downloaded, then deleted? Doesn't that just waste my time? Sometimes, too many choices can be a bad thing.
Michael Learmonth has a great post in Advertising Age on Apps. Among other things, he mentions that there's a facet of this that I'd never considered: Apps are not easily patched after release. I work at an e-commerce company, and patching code after a build is always challenging.
Given the constraints of limited patching & single release development, I wonder how App technology will change. Will vendors co-brand their products to create their own brand? Will marketers share the press with their development partners? How will Google's Android factor in vs. Pre & IPhone development?
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