Microsoft, Palm, And Nokia: You Better Be Freaking Out!!

I’m still basking in the afterglow of today’s earlier extended iPhone Web Fondle.

Look at Microsoft with all of its alleged brains and, especially, money. Steve Jobs was quoted in the first PBS Nerds series as saying, “Microsoft just doesn’t have any taste.” The iPhone only emphasizes that.

And then there’s Palm, which has been living on the corpse of old ideas. That Treo has not simply gotten long in the tooth, it has died and has been rotting! Palm has been a maggot on its corpse. Palm, which started out wanting to revolutionize pocket computing, lost its direction, lost its will, lost its imagination, and now will ultimately lose its life as an independent company.

As for Nokia… Nokia! This has to be the greatest embarrassment of the three. They started out with a completely blank slate, tabula rasa, to design the next generation of web device. The result was that absolute garbage called the Nokia 770. It’s sequel, the N800, is no better. Both reveal the deranged thinking that is the bedrock of Nokia. What do they produce when given all possible choices? The same damned desktop-like UI that’s been around for ages and ages and ages! Including the horror of pull-down menus! This on a pocketable device! It’s become evident to me that Nokia has gained its global dominance not because its products were so good — but because its competitors’ products were just so damned bad! In the face of the iPhone, the creative bankruptcy of Nokia has been displayed for everyone to witness.

I’ve been reading a lot about the iPhone online. Many posts are it’s blah-blah-blah missing this blah-blah-blah missing that. Oh stop it already! Start concentrating on what its competitors are missing and the lists would go on forever.

The iPhone has started out fantastic and it will only get better from there. Its competitors are now revealed as worthless crap — and there is no way they will ever be able to match the seamless, smooth experience of the iPhone. (The HTC Touch and its TouchFlo interface? It’ll be sued out of existence for patent infringement. Beside that, it’s nothing but a shoddy makeup job on the underlying hideous face of Windows Mobile.)

I have to wonder about everyone who’s been compiling these lists of features missing from the iPhone. Do they really think Apple doesn’t already know these things? It’s clear what Apple has done: they’ve gotten the iPhone in basic framework form, without apparent major bugs. Adding everything that’s missing in its first iteration would have increased the probability of bugs and delayed its release. They now have the time to work on everything that’s missing — and I’m sure they have been for months. They can wring out the bugs, test the improvements, and then release an update that will leave all competitors even further behind.

Those of you who say you don’t want an iPhone right now — trust me, you will!