The iPhone and is it tilting the table?

The iPhone is great and I will probably soon go and get one (distinctly envious of our Technical Director who has one, but one of the old models. So now is my moment!). But it looks as though I may be too slow off the mark for this month....

There is an interesting post at SiliconAlleyInsider about what will not be coming into the AppStore. There will not be an Amazon MP3 Store, a Skype, an Adobe Flash plug-in, or another browser (no Firefox), so Apple are tilting the table. They have created a great way of accessing the web, but they want to keep some competitors out. It will be an Apple-shaped web. Lots of talk about there being a market for an eBook reader on the iPhone, but I don't yet see it. Surely somebody will come through soon with one, but I doubt that it will be Amazon. They are trying to tilt the table with their own Kindle, and a Kindle emulator on the iPhone would be a monstrous thought.

If you want an eBook reader (or a digital magazine reader) on the iPhone, all you need to do is to subscribe to one of the publications on Exact Editions. The Exact Editions platform works fine on the iPhone. Clicking on a live phone number in one of our magazines will initiate a call. That could be quite important.....

Philosophically, I am resistant to the idea that one should 'tweak' a web application for some specific hardware solution. It surely is a mistake to create an eBook reader that only works on the iPhone. But there are ways in which the Exact Editions experience on an iPhone could be enhanced, so maybe we should be doing a bit of table tilting on our own account. Apple are very much at the cutting edge....