A few recent bits of interest about everyone’s favorite gadget.
Well, unless you’re Japanese, that is. Maybe. Last week Wired blogger Brian Chen posted a story about how poorly the iPhone has been received in Japan. His assertion: Japanese cell phones and handheld wireless gadgets are so far beyond the middling media services and stupid fart applications that we beknighted Americans love that the ultra-tech-savvy Japanese gadgeteers won’t buy iPhones, and the expensive service plans are too spendy compared to what the average Japanese teenager gets for his/her yen. His proof: Apple is putting on the big push to reposition the product to appeal to the market, including giving away the iPhone to get people to sign up for the service plan. Sounds plausible enough to me, but this Japanese freelance journalist/tech consultant says Chen is full of sushi. Hayashi says that Chen misrepresented some of the information he gave him, and while he doesn’t dispute that the iPhone doesn’t sell well in Japan, he says it’s less a case of hating the device as it has been a combination of weak media attention and loyalty to the DoCoMo telephone company, which is NOT carrying the iPhone. It will bear watching to see if the iPhone can indeed gain traction in Japan.
The “man stuff” website Gear Patrol offers up their list of twenty-five “must-have” iPhone apps today, and only one of them involves farting, belching or scratching, which, considering the source, seems very odd. Instead, they’ve actually got the good stuff like the Pandora app, AirShare (for transferring files between your iPhone and your computer over WiFi), Urbanspoon, and even a few things that only work if you have jailbroken your iPhone like Winterboard and iPhoneModem. There are even a couple that I had not heard about before that I am going to have a look at myself: RSS Runner (because trying to use Google Reader on my iTouch is unbearable) and Pageonce as an account/password manager.
The problem with the vast majority of iPhone apps is that after you play with them for a bit, they’re often not terribly useful. It’s like the early days of personal computers where anyone with half an hour seems to be able to gin up some twiddly little app and get it on iTunes. Luckily, the vast majority of these bits of software are free (a venerable tradition in the Mac world), and so there’s no significant downside to downloading and trying them until you find a few that you like. You might have seen the story a couple of weeks ago that 80% of iPhone users only use a newly downloaded app for one day and then never touch it again. Only one percent of users stick with an application long-term. Moreover, free app downloads outnumber the downloads for paid apps by almost 7:1, and even when people pay for the apps, they are only marginally more likely to use them after Day One. I haven’t gone through that much churn with trying out apps — there have been a couple of games that I lost interest in pretty quickly, and I deleted the Amazon app on my last sync because I’d had it for two months and never opened it one time. Beyond that, I have become utterly devoted to a few apps like Twitterrific, WiFinder, and the Facebook app, but could still probably drop a few that seem to just take up space. Killer apps are hard to come by on any platform, and the iPhone is still less than two years old, so the best are probably yet to come.
Here, for example, is an app that puts an intriguing twist on the concept of social networking on the iPhone: Distant Shore uses the conceptual notion of being stranded on a deserted island and occasionally finding random messages in bottles washing up on the beach. You can reply to the messages, but you don’t really know who you are communicating with, and new messages coming in continue to be random. It’s as if you had a random feature on Twitter where you couldn’t follow anyone in particular, but might receive messages from anyone at all, and you have no idea who is reading yours. Now, this could be REALLY interesting, or it could be the app that reveals the randomness and banality of Twitter for the non-existant communication it really is. I’m considering giving it a whirl just for the experience.
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