
An interesting NYT Bits blog entry covers
Opera's mobile browser. Buried in the middle of the article is this quote: "Opera's engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won't let the company release it because it competes with Apple's own Safari browser." It also talks about Opera on the Wii and browsers in cars. A good read.
My Take: But back to the iPhone. As tempted as I am to just shrug it off, since Apple is free to run its App Store any way it pleases, as an enthusiastic iPhone user, I think Apple is shooting itself in the foot here, as it is with all the "competitive" apps being rejected. Apple does stand to lose some Google revenue by letting people use other browsers, but they have much more to gain by unleashing the creativity of the developer community and giving them the freedom to improve or replace core iPhone functionality. Hopefully competition from Android forces them to wake up.
Member since:
2005-06-29
I'm not sure why you got modded down; it's been my observation among people I know with iPhones that this is exactly what happens. I've had one co-worker return his iPhone 3G a few days after buying it because he had downloaded a bunch of the worst apps in the Store and they didn't work as advertised. He felt that he was throwing away good money on a toy phone, and went back to his Microsoft-based smartphone. I tried to explain to him that his choice of apps was the problem, to which he replied that they shouldn't offer the bad ones at all if they crash the phone. He had an excellent point.