Web 2.0 and AJAX make for great iPhone games?

W

wco81

Legend
Well this is the third-party softare route for iPhone.

Not clear it even has a 3D in hardware and you probably can't tap into Core Animation.

Nor maybe try interesting things with the accelerometers built in to the thing.

It must have decent video capabilities, since it has higher resolution than current iPods, which should put it up there against other phones.

Maybe Apple will cut deals with certain publishers like EA to bring iPod games, adapted to the higher resolution and the multi-touch interface.
 
Yeah that's a real letdown. While such widgets are all fine and dandy, and you'll no doubt end up with lots of cool applications, I still think that's a really dumb decision. Every other platform (J2ME, BREW etc) out there has a SDK available for developers to freely toy around with, and it's not like that has somehow hurt those platforms in any way.

However, I'm 100% sure that just as we saw with iPod, certain parties will bring games to iPhone at some point, except of course should the iPhone flop :)

Ps. It's Web 2.0, not 2.9 yet ;)
 
Typo.

With the HW decoders, there's a good chance there's some 3D hardware on those things too.

Oh well, battery life is going to be a challenge as it is.
 
No I didn't.

Looks like there are plenty of early iPhone sites popping up already.

And those sites can automatically be used on any other phones or consoles or PCs for that matter.
 
Yap...

* No Flash
* No Java
* Webserver must support Byte Range
* Avoid frameset
* Best to wrap text in layers since this allows iPhone to zoom into specific segments
* Remember to use link media tag to load different CSS based on client type
* Use frame width to set screen width
* Run-time cannot use more than 8Mb (I think, but I am not sure anymore). Movies are sub-sampled to iPhone resolution automatically.
* Image size (resolution x 4) must not exceed 4 Mb
* Javascript must terminate in 5 seconds
* iPhone web browser is Safari, so everything else works the same
 
I am the opposite (but then again, I might change my mind ;-) ).
The demoes are impressive. I would like my current phone to work the same way. Considering that it's running on a cellphone, iPhone Safari performs admirably.

I am not too sure about the phone contract. I fear AT&T will try to take advantage of the situation.
 
I understand their Java hesitations, but to my knowledge Flash doesn't have the kind of security issues and other problems Java does, so I'm hoping they roll that in pretty quick.

It would certainly be a tremendous boon to the "stuff you do with it online," not only in watching videos but also in being able to play a metric ton of games and other "easier to put together in Flash" apps to use on that nice, large touchscreen.

Instant cottage industry, as whole lot of mouse/one-button type flash games could kick an iPhone-compatible version out the door right quick. (It's not like most of them are targetting a particularly high resolution, either...)
 
It'll be released on the 29th. I'm still waiting to see what the plans and restrictions are before I make any ultimate determination. That's been my major question from the beginning, and it's STILL not answered. If I can get away with using an iPhone without any substantial increase to what I already pay--and use it as a compelling Internet/WiFi device and a kickass iPod (just without the storage for video), I'd be more inclinded. (Heck, I'd be more interested if I could exclude ANY cell phone requirements and only use it as an good internet-enabled iPod. ^_^ )
 
You're just going to receive it, when there's suppose to be lines and shortages?

And then people who can buy them have to sign some restrictive contracts?

I know a lot of Europeans are down on it because there's no 3G support. But I was looking at buying prepaid SIMs for Germany and France and the cheapest UMTS is like 24 euro cents per MB.

On my Nokia E61i, loading a typical web page can be several hundred kB. So you surf to a half dozen pages and you could rack up several Euros just to view a few web pages on a small screen.

Are 3G charges more reasonable for postpaid mobile plans? Do people use a lot of 3G data?
 
I have an iPhone. :)

I also stood in line next to an Apple employee (who works on the iPhone OS kernel) who was buying one for his family. He indicated Flash and probably Java are coming, they just didn't have time to port the runtimes by June, they were in a major crunch to get the thing out.

on 3G: current 3G chipsets consume too much power and are not available in the form factor that the EDGE chipsets were at design time of the iPhone. EV-DO chips are even more out of wack. Apple would not sacrifice form factor to include EVDO/3G chipsets at this time. I would have loved 3G for browsing, but fetching email over EDGE works fine (Blackberry uses EDGE)

All I can say is, the browser and email client are fucking great, better than the N95. And the random access voicemail rules.


Stupid things:

1) can't use iTunes mp3s as ringtones!!
2) can't sync or download shit through internet
3) not all screens allow you to rotate them
4) no fast access to speedial (I would have liked something like double-click the HOME button to bring up the speedial)
5) no iChat jabber/yahoo/gtalk, only SMS (Apple employee smiled and said just you wait)
6) no MMS! (another firmware feature they ran out of time for)


Basically, the iPhone has some of the same problems as the PSP and PS3 launches: firmwares that are missing major functionality.
 
So it was rushed? In some ways I'm glad to hear that, it means I'll wait for revision two to come out or wait for a competitor to release their product that is much better. I was really wanting one and as time went by that want really died down hard and now its basically non-existent hearing some comments. A almost there device it seems.
 
Well, I really doubt competitors will catch up too quickly after Apple does their next firmware update. After all, who are the competitors against mobile OS X? Windows Mobile? Sucks. Symbian? Sucks. Embedded Linux? Maybe. BREW? Sucks. Most of the mobile phone operating systems with the exception of embedded linux suck ass. (BTW, the iPhone OS consumes 500megabytes of storage)

The iPhone is missing some software features which are very easy for them to add (MMS, Flash, iChat, etc) vs creating a mobile OS that can stand up against OS X. Designing an OS from scratch is alot harder, just look at terrible the first N versions of CE and Symbian were. Symbian is still an atrocious architecture, Windows Mobile is finally maturing, but if you're even done any C++ development on these platforms, you know how hokey they are.

But yeah, they'll probably be a revision with 3G 6-9months from now. I believe you'll see Flash alot sooner.
 
Interesting wrt Flash & Java just being a time issue. I really wonder if flash games will be sufficiently playable at all on it, let alone because for some people that might be a killer app.

You know what annoys me more about the iPhone, though? The 'teardowns'. How in the world can anyone conclude any information from that (except that Samsung is responsible for DRAM and NAND, that Skyworks has a chip in it, and that CSR and Marvell(?) are responsible for Bluetooth and WiFi respectively) is beyond me.

Given how the chips are marked (read: generally just by identification numbers and nothing else), many chips on the topmost PCB simply cannot be identified. And then the primary chip on the other PCB, which has 'ARM' marked on it, is apparently a System in Package, integrating at least one ARM core and Samsung DRAM.

I guess this means we won't know anything about many of the chips inside unless companies confirm it themselves, and they most likely won't. To make matters worse, the iPhone is high-profile enough to consider the possibility that some of these chips may not have been announced yet, or even perhaps completely custom and exclusive to Apple. ffs.

To make things even more complex, it's not impossible that the main SiP with the DRAM is a 3-chips package, or that the chip next to the DRAM is custom, or etc. etc. etc... You get the point. Sorry for posting this here, but I figured it probably wasn't worth a new thread - if anyone else is interested in actually discussing this, I could just move it to a new thread, I guess.
 
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