Apple has also been pretty up-front that they would love a world where music could be bought without DRM and everything played together nicely. However, they also have to live in a world where the companies they are partnered with -- who provide the content (or in the case of the iPhone, the connectivity) -- threaten to pull their side of the deal if Apple does not keep things locked down.

I will almost guarantee you that the functionality in Amarok which allowed you to connect an iPod to almost anyone's machine and copy music on without resynching the library probably brought heat onto Apple from the content providers. "This must sync to only one library; if people can just pull music off of their friends' machines, that promotes piracy! Fix this, or we will pull our music after the next renewal."

Granted, we have no real way of knowing whether Apple would put their money where their mouth is if given the free reign to open everything up; they might quite happily sit on everything and lock stuff down. But there is some evidence (from their work on zeroconf and other open protocols, as well as their contributions to open source projects) that they might actually mean what they claim.

But at least right now, not all of the blame can be placed on them. (Just as not all of the blame for DRM issues with Windows can be placed on Microsoft, either.)

Honestly, the thing about the iPhone that makes it particularly interesting is not the touchscreen interface. Not even the multi-touch or the orientation detection (though, after playing with the iPhone's version of Safari, Opera Mobile feels limiting).

The thing about the iPhone that's made me start taking it more seriously as something /new/ in phones is that it is a /phone/. That sounds a little redundant, I know, but it's actually a huge thing.

Windows Mobile is trying -- and succeeding -- at being an anemic little handheld computer. It wants to be a computer like your desktop or laptop; you install software, you update, and so on. This is great, and it gives you a whole lot of power. BUT those PDAs tend to be PDAs first and foremost... understandably, as smartphones came along much later in WinCE/Windows Mobile development. Speaking as someone who has gone through the HTC Wallaby, then HTC Blueangel and then the HTC Wizard... the Windows Mobile phone app feels glued on. It is a phone program running on a little computer. It's just Yet One More Program on your phone.

In contrast, after having a chance to play with one for about two weeks, I'm pretty convinced that the iPhone is trying to be a phone rather than a computer. It is an undeniably *fancy* phone, as it lets you slurp down information (maps/addresses/directions, stock, weather, etc.), but it is still first and foremost a phone. This means it's not as flexible as one of the Windows Mobile devices as a portable COMPUTER, but it can be a better PHONE.

(I recognize that under the hood it /is/ another little computer, running a super-scaled-down OS X, but that is /not/ how it is presented to the end-user. And that's the important factor here.)

To use another analogy, from a usability standpoint it's like using the cordless phone that's sitting on your desk, versus using the Skype client software on your desktop computer. Both will get you to the same place -- calling someone -- and the desktop computer software has more power and options (instant messaging, find contacts, video chat, etc.). But the cordless phone is still /simpler, hence the increasing number of Skype handsets which basically act like cordless phones.

I completely agree that the iPhone's UI is not what people should be copying; it's pretty and all, but no, it's not necessarily all that revolutionary. The fact that it is an extremely functional phone is what should be copied; phones have been losing sight of being phones, and the revolutionary part -- though it pains me to agree it should count as 'revolutionary' -- is making the phone the center of the platform.

Windows Mobile's openness is great for extensibility, but the phone functionality needs some polish; that's what they need to take away from the iPhone Frenzy.

On the lighter side of things... why iEye? I would think it should be iBall!

Well, I gather (from their other filed patents) that the 'light up' feedback thing is in conjunction mostly with a new trackpad or with the supposed mouse with the touch-sensitive surface.

That said, and all other comments on companies involved aside... it seems to me that we've reached a point in general where people are pre-emptively patenting things in self-defense. In other words, companies who want to make something will patent it specifically so that if they make it, someone *else* (either a patent-holding clearinghouse, or a competitor) doesn't go patent it and then turn around to sue them. Which is not the way the patent system should be used, but seems to be what it's become.

FWIW, part of what happened was that we basically threw out the entire old Trillian code-base and started over with an eye towards learning from past mistakes. As a start, more code is shared between the various mediums now, and Trillian has a more abstracted, less-platform-dependent design.

Beauty of this is that all the mediums are portable; you just compile the exact same code over on Linux and boom, it powers the web version (be it the Flash version people have already been using, or the web-based version shown in the iPhone shots). This means we can maintain multiple variants of Trillian much more easily.

But this whole redesign proved a way, way bigger task than initially envisioned, and has eaten several years. Which is why we decided to change the dev process too, and handle the alpha more openly instead of the way we have in the past.

If Pidgin works for your IM needs, that's great too; we've actually contributed code to them before (bits of Trillian's Yahoo engine were turned open-source specifically so they could be contributed to Gaim).

It's not like there can be only one true IM app; friendly competition helps to improve all of the clients. :)

I can has iPhone?

Okay, seriously, I'm a T-Mobile customer right now, but I'm curious about the iPhone since I'd like to see about converting the web-based version of the instant messenger I help to write over to have an iPhone-compatible version. So, until we decide it's worth expensing one for the company, count me in as an entry. :)

More to the point, Apple's unlikely to license the OS to third-party hardware manufacturers without some seriously strong restrictions. Part of the whole reason Apple can make an OS which crashes less often is that they rigidly control the hardware.

On a PC, you can have all kinds of cheap random hardware from all over -- random generic $4 sound-card from Taiwan! -- and the drivers can be of really, really varying quality. This is a headache for Windows, because there's no way Microsoft can actually do a really intensive code-review on every driver out there. And plenty of drivers do have issues, especially in combination with other hardware. It is better than it was, but still a mess.

On a Mac, Apple controls the hardware so they can do far, far, more work on ensuring the drivers are really solid. It's easier to keep, say, 14 different sound driver options straight than 14,000 or whatever.

So even aside from the fact that Apple is a hardware company themselves, I don't see Apple licensing OS X to *anyone* without some serious restrictions on what hardware can be involved. And that wouldn't fly on desktop PCs, to say the least! It might be workable on laptops, but I can't imagine it would sit well with most laptop manufacturers.