I'm going to go out on a limb here because I'm going to make it well known that I don't understand the craze behind the iPhone. I can appreciate the look and appeal of it to a degree, because I can understand that technology is cool and that Apple, with their interface, makes interacting with it different (therefore "cool" in the eyes of many); but what I cannot understand is the foaming-at-the-mouth for features that have already exist in other phones (like my iMate).

For example - PopCap recently announced that they're bringing out a version of Bejeweled just for the iPhone (you can read more about it here). To me this isn't news - this is almost sad that some find it even newsworthy. How long has that game been around and how long have I been able to play it on my smart phone? To make matters worse - you have to leverage Safari as the sole platform for developing applications for the iPhone. I just recently purchased Age of Empires for my phone so that I had something to play during my transatlantic flight to Italy - can that be done on the iPhone? Well, if it's all browser-based certainly it cannot (and can you imagine the minutes charged to my phone had I done it WHILE in Europe?). I'll admit I'm not sure of the physics behind how the iPhone plays the game, it's possible (quite possible) that it exists in some sort of cache on the phone, but - still - I would really like to see the implementation of something like Age of Empires in the Safari browser on the iPhone.

Plus, what's up with no flash?

Trust me, I definitely understand and appreciate the power of Web 2.0 and the new mindsight of moving tradiational, desktop applications over to the web (for quite a while that has been the point of many posts on this blog), but to me it seems like Jobs basically cut out of the iPhone a major feature and, through his legions, turned it around to something to marvel at.

If nothing else this reminds me of the time I got into a debate regarding PPC vs. Intel with a relative of mine. Months before Apple started the Intel transition he was tossing his hands about as to how great PPC was over Intel - a month after the transition started he was telling me how great Intel was. Seriously - I don't get it!