Opinions - page 25

Outside of the iPhone brouhaha, much of the buzz at WWDC today has been about whether the system-level support for Microsoft Exchange e-mail and calendaring in OS X Snow Leopard and various encryption options for Mac and iPhone would finally allow Apple to make serious in-roads in corporate America. Well, at least if corporate IT guys will give them a chance, that is.

In spite of Lonnie’s optimism, I think Apple is just as far today from mainstream adoption in big business as it was yesterday and pretty much every day of its entire history. As I’ve written before, the Steves founded Apple in large part because they thought that the IBMs and HPs of the world were holding back the potential of computers to transform our society.

Consequently, the organization’s entire self-image and frame of reference over time has been that big business is all too willing to adopt mediocre technologies based solely on a reputation for reliability. Macs have long provided superior tools for creative endeavors like graphic design and video editing, which is why Macs have a huge niche in corporate marketing departments, but the same can’t be said for other business pursuits.

Apple has a huge opportunity right now to make serious in-roads in the enterprise market while corporations resist upgrading to Windows Vista and don’t yet know whether or not they can trust Windows 7. But Apple won’t make big gains unless they take more drastic measures, three of which I outline below. Bear in mind, I’m not saying this is what Apple should do, just that this is what it would take to succeed in business.

Start making cheap computers with standardized parts.From the early 1990s until the sale to Lenovo, IBM’s ThinkPad line of notebooks defined the look, feel and attitude of computers for business. They were black, rugged, and nearly identical in industrial design. A machine from 1999 looked pretty much the same as one from 2003. Corporate IT managers loved ThinkPads because people generally couldn’t tell if their co-workers had a newer or better machine than theirs — the exterior was always a constant. All that, and frequently replaced parts like batteries and power supplies were common across the decade. If it worked on one, it worked on another.

Recent years have seen the trend that IBM began extrapolated upon in the corporate market. These days, it’s not just that corporations prefer to buy identical machines for employees at all levels — they’ve also chopped their budgets for PCs dramatically while increasing spending on servers and data centers. And that means that low-cost strategy players like Dell and HP are winning with large-screen machines for less than $500 (or significantly less at large volumes). If Apple wants to even think about competing, it would need to get cheap quickly and make compromises that the company has diligently avoided over the years. And do you really think business wants a line-up of laptops without replaceable batteries? Not in this galaxy.

With or without Steve Jobs, Apple has the best lineup of hardware and software it has ever offered.

All in all, the WWDC keynote showed that Apple is paying attention to all the right things. It’s got a great line-up of affordable hardware that’s fast, feature-packed and environmentally friendly. The software loaded on top is designed for user-freindliness and ease of use. And Apple is no longer alone: it has thousands of partners in software and hardware who will push Apple’s platforms in new directions.

And while Apple is making a stealth enterprise play by supporting Micorosft Exchange, it’s not devoting features or resources to taking on Microsoft head on. Instead, Apple is concentrating on its core market: home users. And it’s got a killer lineup for consumers, especially in software.

* The new iPhone 3GS is a killer device. The speed bump, better camera and digital compass (which will enable a raft of amazing location-based services) will tempt iPhone users to upgrade in droves. The iPhone is becoming finally a true mobile computer, and no one has anything that comes close.

* The $99 iPhone is the Palm Pre killer. Who now will pay $199 for an iPhone-imitator on Sprint, when the original costs less than half the price?

* The new MacBook Pro laptops running Snow Leopard are the best laptops on the market, bar none. Even if other laptops have good hardware, Microsoft’s Vista is their Achilles heel. With a great built-in battery, memory-card slots and the return of firewire, MacBooks will sell like hotcakes. Netbooks be damned. The real computing market — and most of the money — is in laptops, and Apple’s got the best available.

* Snow Leopard looks like a great upgrade, despite the lack of whizbang new features. Instead, it will offer upgrades in all the right areas: Web browsing, better multimedia, easy of use and speed. Snow Leopard has tons of little touches that will add up to an extremely polished, consumer-oriented operating system that focuses on the things consumers do — browse the Web, watch videos, and communicate with friends. That’s why things that seem small and minor — like today’s WWDC demonstration of easy video editing and uploading in QuickTime — really counts. Apple is focused, as usual, on improving the user experience. And unlike Vista, Snow Leopard delivers.

* Green. The new MacBooks are rated EPEAT Gold — the highest standard of energy efficiency, green production and recyclability.The importance of being green can’t be understated. There’s a huge shift in consumer attitudes, especially among Apple’s educated, upscale demographic, who are demanding environmentally-friendly products. Being green is a huge selling point, and Apple now offers some of the greenest hardware.

Image credit: MacRumors

If there’s any reason for a business to shun Macs and the iPhone after Monday’s upgrade announcements at WWDC, it’s got to be because the IT department is on the take or it simply doesn’t want its employees to use the best computers and smartphone on the market.

Perhaps flying under the radar among major announcements of upgrades to the company’s notebook computer line, Apple offers with OS X Snow Leopard — and the new iPhone OS 3.0 — significant improvements to a few areas of special interest to business customers that should enable Apple’s devices to make greater inroads to acceptance in the enterprise market.

Chief among them, of course is new seamless integration with Exchange, the Microsoft mail/contacts/calendar service used by the vast preponderance of enterprise customers today.

The WWDC demo by Craig Federighi, VP of Mac OS Engineering Monday showed how easy it is to add an Exchange account using Snow Leopard, with the OS supporting auto-discovery of Exchange servers, with all email/folders/to-do lists being automatically populated and Spotlight immediately able to search all data. Quicklook even lets users preview MS Office documents through Mail, even when Office isn’t installed on the Mac.

Event invitations can be accepted or denied right through Mail. iCal and Address Book automatically have all appropriate data once Mail is setup. One or more contacts can be dragged & dropped into iCal to automatically create a meeting and Calendar events support resource allocation, including people’s schedules and room availability.

What more does the IT department want?

How about data encryption for the iPhone, the ability to locate a user’s mobile device on a Google map using the new Find My iPhone service on MobileMe and remote secure data wipe for phones that are truly lost?

Apple has always been looked upon by enterprise interests as a maker of things for creatives and other ‘unserious’ users, but Monday’s announcements surely throw down a gauntlet in the matter of those who are serious about their computing and communications going forward.

In April, I got terribly excited about Flight Control, an air traffic control arcade-oriented ‘management’ game. The premise is simple: drag aircraft to landing areas. The reality is an intense arcade game where game over is a blink of an eye away.

Recently, I’d heard rumors of updates. But with the original game such a fantastic, simple and polished production, there was the worry that it’d be ruined under a pile of new features. That worry went away on playing Flight Control 1.2, which keeps the original’s gameplay intact but introduces two new airfields and new craft.

The beachside resort is the first new airfield, adding water landings to the mix. Initially, this seems little different to the original game, but the number of craft ramps up rapidly and the revised landing layout is tougher than the original’s.

The real star, though, is the intense and absurdly tricky aircraft carrier level. Military jets move just a tad faster than anything else, and you’re soon not only juggling that, but also a surprising twist when you realise what happens to landing areas on a moving ocean… Frankly, we’ll be shocked to see 10,000+ landing scores on this map for some time to come.

Overall, this is a triumphant update—a classic iPhone game made even better. The fact that it’s still under a dollar [App Store link], for a game that betters most other handheld titles out there, just goes to show what great value Apple’s platform can be for gamers.

TIPS: If you’ve any tips for dealing with the new airfields and getting high scores, please post in the comments below.

Image credit: The iPhone Blog

The iPhone Blog reports that OS X iPhone 3.0b is now throwing up error messages when you try to ‘redownload’ an app you’ve already bought. You get the option to buy again on your ‘iDevice’, or you can download again for free in iTunes.

Already, forums are up in arms about this (well, forum posters, given that forums haven’t quite arrived at a state of sentience), bitching about Apple being Big Brother and hating every single one of its users. However, it seems like the change is down to users ‘sharing’ apps amongst several Apple devices.

With some devices and games—especially those specifically designed for network play—one might argue that multiple purchases can be somewhat unreasonable from a financial standpoint. (For example, you see plenty of $30+ DS games with broken or severely restricted wireless modes, a problem that magically goes away when every gamer has a cart.) But with the vast majority of App Store games being by indie devs and costing under five bucks (and many of the best costing under a single dollar), it’s easier to forgive being ‘forced’ to buy a copy for each device you own.

We’re now less than two weeks away from the keynote of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, where Apple is widely expected to demonstrate a next-generation iPhone for the first time. I won’t run down all the anticipated features here, but suffice it to say that we’re looking at largely incremental updates on the hardware side: faster processor, more RAM, more storage, and maybe a programmable magnetometer to enable true turn-by-turn GPS. It will be the iPhone, but better — and almost certainly not a worthwhile upgrade if you already own an iPhone 3G, since it will also benefit from the release of iPhone OS 3.0.

But the world hasn’t stood still. For the first time since the announcement of the original iPhone, there are legitimate competitors all around, many of them even approaching Apple’s thinking in creating a holistic ecosystem of supporting software, third-party development and services. There are three big threats to the rise of the iPhone right now: Palm Pre, mass availability of Android, and the Zune HD platform. Hit the jump to get the full story.

What it was: A trackball-controlled arcade classic, released by Atari in 1984. You had to guide your marble through six perilous courses. Think Super Monkey Ball’s granddad, with a penchant for Escher and isometric projection, minus the monkeys.

What we’d like to see: Although there were, at the last count, 46 billion iPhone ‘marble rolling’ games, most of them suck, and none hold a candle to Mark Cerny’s Atari classic. Since other Atari games have made it to iPhone relatively intact, there’s no reason why Marble Madness couldn’t make an appearance, perhaps with the choice of of tilt-based controls or a virtual trackball, as per our mock-up above. How about it, Atari?

UPDATE: iPhone gaming website Slide to Play reports that a tilt-controlled Marble Madnessis due on the App Store “in the next couple of weeks” and will include bonus tracks, content and modes. No trackball, alas.

iPhone applications and the increasing popularity of smartphones, driven especially by growth in the developing world, pose the greatest threats to the long-term relevance of mobile search engines such as Google and Yahoo, according to a report Monday at TechRepublic.

Jason Hiner, Editor in Chief of the widely read technology web portal, argues that a personal experiment he’s undertaken using his Apple iPhone leads to the inescapable conclusion that “trends [in mobile computing] add up to bad news for Google in mobile search because it translates into fewer people needing its search engine,” offering several pertinent examples of his own behavior in addition to statistics about the growth in smartphone use over the past year that bolster his thesis.

There’s little argument that iPhone changed the mobile phone game entirely with its arrival on the scene two years ago, as all the major mobile handset makers have since come to market with their versions of touchscreen smartphones to compete with Apple.

In addition, Apple revolutionized the environment for mobile software development by creating the App Store, which both provided a brand-new arena for software developers to work in and suggested a model for distribution that had previously been limited to the distribution of entertainment titles through the iTunes music store. Apple’s competitors Blackberry, Google (Android) and Microsoft (Windows Mobile) launched App Store-like marketplaces in response.

But does all of this development, do all of these trends in mobile computing spell the eventual end for search as a relevant tool on mobile platforms?

Certainly Google’s voice search functionality adds to its relevance and appeal on a mobile device, but as Hiner argues convincingly, limitations of mobile device screen sizes and challenges related to typing on small handsets do make traditional desktop search functionality far less appealing in the mobile environment.

What do you think? Do you use Google less on your iPhone? Should Google be worried about the trends in mobile computing as a great threat to its core search product? Let us know in comments below.

With WWDC09 now just weeks away, rumors and predictions regarding what Apple may reveal at the highly-anticipated, sold-out developers conference in San Francisco are sure to spread like a California wildfire.

Anyone interested in being on the right side of such talk would do well to consider the logic and analysis out Thursday from John Gruber, the well-placed author of the blog Daring Fireball, who isn’t prone to talking about things he doesn’t know a little something about.

Citing “information from informed sources,” Gruber believes the processor in the next-generation iPhone is going to be the kind of upgrade to make people crowd around and go, “ooooh!” He looks for Apple’s processing secret-sauce to better the speed of current iPhones by 1.5 times, similar to the bump in performance experienced when Mac users got hands on machines with the first batch of PowerPCs, or PC users moved from 486 to Pentium machines.

Follow after the jump for more of what Gruber expects and how likely his expectations are to be met.

Gnh! That’s pretty much the sound we made, surprisingly loudly, on reading Gruber’s ‘Regarding Eucalyptus’ post. The gist? App Store idiocy strikes again! The specifics…

It seems Apple, not content with plumbing the depths by rejecting Tweetie for a rude word being in the day’s Twitter trends, has now rejected an e-book reader, because you can potentially read ‘objectionable’ content on it. Gruber sums things up nicely, calling this the “shittiest and most outrageous App Store rejection to date, and that’s saying something”, and we agree wholeheartedly.

As Gruber notes, Apple’s got a bug up its ass regarding the fact that you can read Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana on Eucalyptus. (Won’t somebody think of the children?) However, you can read this on a few other apps, too—you know, apps like Kindle and Stanza and, er, Safari. So Apple had best get ready to kick those off the iPhone for warping our fragile little minds.

But there’s more! What makes matters even worse is on reading the developer’s blog, it’s pretty clear the approvals process is even more broken than we all thought. Had Apple made a mistake and rectified it (see: Tweetie), fine… Dumb, but fine. Here, though, it’s pretty clear Apple keeps rejecting the app again and again for precisely the same utterly asinine reason. When the developer argues his case, it’s like shouting at a brick wall— a particularly dumb brick wall.

Far be it for us to say that perhaps ‘reversals’ for Tweetie and the NIN app actually came from Apple caving to dreadful publicity. But, hell, if the way to get a perfectly good app into the App Store is for a whole bunch of blogs to kick up a fuss and show, yet again, how the App Store approvals people seemingly have the combined intellect of a drunk, lobotimized woodlouse, we’re happy to do our bit.

iPhone game developers must contend with an arguably small but extremely dedicated and fast-moving population of app pirates on the voyage to the Land of iPhone App riches, according to iCombat developer Miguel Sanchez-Grice, who suggests giving away free “lite” versions of an app could be the most effective strategy for the smaller developer.

Sanchez-Grice ‘s shooting tank game was immediately popular on the App Store thanks to coverage in gaming and gadgetry venues, which came about because of its resemblance to Combat for Atari and Wii Tanks games. The developer said he considered the nature of the pirate challenge prior to launching his 99¢ app. and while he chose a path very civilly inviting pirates to support his work by buying a legit copy of the app after reaching level 5 of the 20 level game, he understood he could only hope to “maybe convert a tiny fraction of those users into sales.”

His experience with the pirate community showed hacked versions of his game in use at an astounding ratio of more than 5:1 over paid apps in the first week of release, with cracked apps being posted to Twitter within 30 minutes of the official game going live on the App Store.

“The goal behind launching an app isn’t thwarting pirates, it is getting users and generating sales,” Sanchez-Grice  wrote, suggesting game developers “leave the ‘making a point’ anti-piracy measures to the big guys.” With competition so fierce for getting noticed in the App store, he concluded “any attention is good attention.”

In the end, the first-time developer concluded the best strategy for dealing with pirates may be creating a free “Lite” version to give away alongside a more fully functional and fulfilling paid version.

“I think the best solution is to create a version akin to a lite version of the app for pirates. It is no good to shut off access to your app completely, but it also doesn’t get you very far to give away the core value you are offering to the paying user.”

Apple is indeed working on a version of OS X to power a tablet device more robust than an iPod Touch yet still more limited than the operating system that powers the company’s line of notebook and desktop computer systems, according to Gene Munster, the widely followed Piper Jaffray analyst.

“We expect the development of such an OS to be underway currently, but its complexity, along with our conversations with a key company in the mobile space, leads us to believe it will not launch until CY10,” Munster said (meaning 2010) in a note released to clients Thursday.

Many in the Apple universe have long predicted a tablet device to compete in the growing market for netbooks, smaller, less-powerful – and less expensive – mobile devices designed for surfing the Internet, watching movies, reading and composing email and other “computer-lite” activities.

Not a few people will be disappointed if Apple fails to launch such an offering in the current year, but Munster implies that such a market, while growing fast, remains relatively small and believes Apple has plenty of time to get its entry right before joining the fray.

Credit: Dystopos, used under a Creative Commons license.

Wal-Mart is busy re-vamping the electronics departments in 3,500 of its giant retail stores, in a move to both fill the void left by Circuit City’s recent bankruptcy and to compete with another electronics mega-chain, Best Buy. But some believe it’s also actively lobbying Apple to become a distributor for more than just iPods and iPhones.

Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart is widely perceived as a low-end discounter whose vast properties are largely filled with the cheapest, most useless junk Americans could dream of importing from China, which makes Barclays Capital analyst Ben Reitzes’ opinion that Wal-Mart is angling to one day carry Macs all the more disconcerting.

Speculation over Apple’s interest in expanding its fewer than 10,000 worldwide distribution points comes amid recent data indicating that Microsoft’s advertising blitz over the past year has succeeded in re-positioning devices that run the Windows OS as value propositions in the computer world.

But this Mac user wonders whether a move into retail’s hoi-polloi might cost Apple more in the long-run than it would gain from the increased revenue that would surely come from the greater retail exposure a distribution deal with Wal-Mart could represent.

There has always been something satisfying, from the user perspective, about the panache of owning an Apple product; in many respects – as mythical as the concept of an “Apple premium” might in reality be – some Apple owners believe they get more for their money, and are willing to pay for the sense of exclusivity the company’s limited distribution network provides. Similar perceptions have maintained the public’s high regard and brand loyalty for companies such as Bose and Bang & Olufsen for years.

If the demands of a rebalancing global economy and of shareholders’ inexhaustible lust for profits cause Apple to seek a different path it would be a real shame, and likely signal the beginning of the end for the company that once implored the world to Think Different.

The first question that should leap to mind is: “Why on earth is CoM reviewing Windows?” Frankly, for many professionals, we have no choice. Many of us have to use Windows software in the course of our jobs, or at a minimum use web applications that require that bane to open standards developers everywhere: Internet Explorer.

There’s no easy way to do this, so lets just rip off the band-aid and see if there’s a scab underneath.

Image credit: MobileGuerilla

It must be a measure of how divorced from reality the US financial establishment has become when one of its most venerable voices discounts $20 – $45 million as ‘not a lot of revenue.’

That’s the figure range Jeremy Liew, an analyst at Lightspeed Venture Partners, estimates would be Apple’s take from sales on the first 1 billion iPhone and iPod Touch applications downloaded through the iTunes App Store.

Leaving aside for a moment the 15:1 – 40:1 ratio range of free to paid apps Liew pulled out of thin air to arrive at his estimates, it should be noted that the Barron’s writer reporting on Liew’s analysis allowed that the App Store “is significantly changing the way way people think about mobile devices, and has triggered a response from Research In Motion (RIMM), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Nokia (NOK) and Palm (PALM).

If true, Liew’s figures would mean Apple is seeing a revenue boost of roughly 0.1% from the App Store, but the mere numbers do not account for the intangible benefits to Apple’s public awareness or the number of hardware sales being driven by the venture. The company, and Steve Jobs in particular, always said the App Store was never intended to be a big profit generator, that it was rather a vehicle for helping the iPhone change the way people think about mobile computing.

By that measure, Apple’s take from the App Store is incalculable.

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Image via Innovation 2.0

Yesterday’s news that the Federal Trade Commission was investigating whether occasional collaborations between Apple and Google constitute anti-competitive practices is all the rage this morning. Apparently, a 1914 law makes it illegal for a person to sit on the boards of two companies if it will reduce competition between them. Apple and Google share two directors between their boards — so the only question is whether their presence has reduced competition.

And honestly, the answer is not at all. If anything, having Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the Apple board has made it more awkward as Android has started to diffuse into the market. Even though Google’s apps for the iPhone are among the best on the device, the proliferation of iPhone competitors from Le Goog is setting up for a head-on collision between Mountain View and Cupertino.

According to experts, even if anti-trust violations were determined, the likely upshot would just be for the directors to step down from one of their two boards. No biggie. But the case highlights that American business law doesn’t really understand Silicon Valley. Out here, it’s only natural that you would simultaneously compete and collaborate. You share secrets and then try to use them against each other. It’s in the DNA here. But the law, as they, is blind.

Myst, once upon a time the world’s most popular graphic adventure video game, has arrived at the App Store. The $6, 730MB piece of mobile bloatware, requiring a whopping 1.5GB of free space on Apple’s iPhone or iPod Touch, isn’t likely to revive the title’s popularity, in this reviewer’s opinion.

Even the trailer demands nearly an egregious seven minutes of a curious person’s time to sit through, an eternity in our fast-paced modern world. Over a minute and a half to get past the credits?

This is a group of developers who must think very highly of themselves indeed.

Adding iPod connectivity as standard equipment on their vehicles could save American automobile manufacturers from extinction, according to recent research by Jacobs Media.

The study conducted among 21,000 listeners of rock-music radio stations from around the US suggests high-tech features play an important role in the vehicle-purchase decision and that carmakers should not miss key opportunities to include and market such features to consumers.

The study asked prospective vehicle purchasers to rate the most desired features and options relating to entertainment, music, and information. Nearly half (47%) of the respondents said iPod and other MP3 player connectivity was “very important” to them, ranking above satellite radio, GPS, DVD player, and HD Radio.

The finding that a large percentage of consumers are considering American cars – coupled with the fact that so many respondents want iPod connectors, – presents opportunities for American carmakers to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, according to Jacobs Media President Fred Jacobs.

“The automakers are struggling to generate sales in a challenging economic environment,” Jacobs said. “but outside of KIA’s new commercials for their Soul, iPod connectors are not in the sales proposition. It’s a missed opportunity. Satellite radio and GPS won’t move the needle – but iPods will.”

[MarketingCharts; Thanks Dave]

What it is: Think social media is a kick in the pants? Big twitter and Facebook fan, are you? Well, you may want to consider upping your game with Foursquare, a newish social media app/game for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Foursquare feeds the social, yet competitive spirit in users, who leverage the location-aware functionality of Apple’s mobile devices to let friends and others on the network know where they go, what they do and what they dig in 12 major US metropolitan areas (so far).

Why it’s good: The built-in gaming aspect of Foursquare lets users earn points for checking in at different places around the city and giving tips on what makes those places so cool (get the curry duck at Thep Phanom, for example). By hitting different spots and making combinations of recommendations, players can unlock “badges” and become a “Mayor” of their city.

By keeping up with and adding friends, users get to leverage the collective knowledge about a city into lists of cool things they have done and cool things they want to do.

Users can check in by logging on to accounts through a mobile browser, directly from within the app itself or by texting their location from a mobile phone.

Whare to get it: Foursquare is free and available for download now at the App Store.

The near-term economic horizon appears to be surprisingly bright in the Apple/Mac universe, according to a survey released Tuesday by MacTech Magazine.

Despite recent dismal numbers from many sectors of the economy, 90% of respondents in “the Apple market ecosystem” polled by surveyors from MacTech believe 2009 will be “almost as good as or better than 2008”; 62.8% reported feeling good or great when asked about the Apple/Mac segment.

“The MacTech team decided to survey those in the market after seeing two significant trends starkly contrasting the general U.S. economic news,” said Neil Ticktin, Editor-in-Chief/Publisher, MacTech Magazine. “It’s been easy to get wrapped up in the bad news of the U.S. economy, but the reality is that for the Mac and Apple markets, things are strong and expected to get stronger.”

MacTech’s own advertising results and forecasts appear to support Ticktin’s optimism, with the magazine seeing a 13% increase in ad revenues 1Q09 over 1Q08.

A news editor from another well-known technology-focused magazine told Cult of Mac Tuesday, “after an abysmal holiday season, ad sales for the June issue look to be the best EVER!” MacTech’s Ticktin added “our staff has heard from many MacTech advertisers how well they are doing despite the economy.”

The sunny outlook from Apple-land certainly contrasts with anecdotal sentiment Cult of Mac gathered Tuesday night at an AdTech after-party in San Francisco, where several attendees reported a very down-beat vibe from the bellwether digital advertising conference.

Yahoo also reported Tuesday plans to cut 5% of its workforce in the wake of a nearly 80% drop in profits in the first quarter of 2009, and media guru Shelley Palmer said at the post-AdTech gathering in San Francisco he gives the economy 10 months to show its hand as far worse than anyone believes it is today.

What it was: Zenji was released by Activision in 1984, tasking you, as a rolling face, with turning each level’s maze green. This was done by rotating maze sections and avoiding the patrolling flames. The simple gameplay was engrossing, and, like many puzzle games, it’s stood the test of time.

What we’d like to see: Retro games are steadily making their way on to iPhone, and it’s a perfect platform for classic ‘pick up and play’ titles. Zenji’s simplicity and immediacy could make it a hit on the platform, and the simple controls could easily be replicated on iPhone via various means (swipe or tilt to move, twist or virtual button presses to rotate).

Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s CEO, has been calling on Apple to see about extending the carrier’s deal as the exclusive US service provider for the iPhone, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Having already received a one-year extension of its original two year deal, with its current exclusivity protection set to expire sometime in 2010, AT&T is reportedly seeking to sweeten the pot somehow to keep Apple’s revolutionary mobile device out of competitors’ hands for another year.

Well, of course. AT&T added 4.3 million iPhone subscribers in the second half of 2008 alone — about 40% of whom were new customers, according to the company. In an era when landline customers are dwindling rapidly, anything that brings in new wireless subscribers is a good thing for the phone company.

But is the AT&T exclusivity deal good for anyone other than AT&T?

From Apple’s perspective it’s likely good insofar as it keeps things simple, having only one behemoth service provider to potentially screw up the tightly controlled customer experience around which much of Apple’s mystique has been been built. And to be fair, AT&T appears to have done a reasonably good job of deploying iPhones in the field. As the Apple spokeswoman in the WSJ article was quoted, “We have a great relationship with AT&T.”

But how about the consumer? Even if technical issues cannot be overcome that prevent iPhones, as they are currently manufactured, from working with Sprint and Verizon’s CDMA-based services — and surely they could be overcome in this day and age — having a choice between AT&T and T-Mobile is better than having a choice between AT&T and not using an iPhone at all.

Many people howled furiously about AT&T being the exclusive US provider when the iPhone was introduced in the summer of 2007. Looking back, it’s now easy to see how revolutionary and wildly transformative the device was; it was likely a good strategy for Apple to reduce its integration bandwidth to a single carrier in each market where it deployed the phone because it could have turned out to be more problematic a transformation than it actually was.

But now Apple has many millions of happy iPhone users the world over and it knows how its device performs in the field. It’s time for Apple to reclaim dominion over the user experience with its mobile communication device. And the single biggest change that would add to customer happiness (other than video recording capability and Flash functionality) would be to open it up up and let customers choose whatever service provider they can stand.

There are a number of excellent reasons to be bullish on Apple (AAPL) stock, according to Wall Street analyst Shaw Wu. Despite already having risen 45% on the year, Wu believes Apple could bake another 25% or more of profit into its share price, based on expectations around what the Kaufman Bros. high-tech analyst calls “several catalysts in the months ahead.”

“We anticipate [Apple’s] new iPhone 3.0 software to ship” in time for the 2009 WWDC in June, Wu said in a report released Monday. He’s also expecting consumer interest in Apple to remain strong with the introduction of new iPhone hardware, also in time for WWDC.

The expected launch of Snow Leopard should be a further catalyst for the Mac business, which has already seen a boost from recent desktop refreshes (iMac, Mac mini, and Mac Pro). “And last,” Wu said, “the potential for a new form factor, perhaps Apple’s answer to the netbook, with a large screen iPod touch-Mac hybrid” could end up pushing AAPL from its current $119 price to something more like $152.

Less than a month ago, on March 24, Wu removed Apple from his “Focus List” citing the appreciating stock (then up only 19%) and the fact that “many of the product catalysts we were looking for, namely the new iMac, have occurred.” But that was at a point just after the overall stock market had been tanking since January; in the last several weeks the market’s been on a tear and some in the financial analysis business believe the worst of the “recession” is behind us.

For a little more perspective on the inscrutable science of stock price analysis, recall that less than a year ago, when Apple was opening its AppStore and releasing the iPhone 3G, Wu and many other AAPL analysts expected the company’s stock to go as high as $225. AAPL had already topped out just over $200 prior to the AppStore launch and nose-dived to well below $100 by January of this year.

USA Today ran an article Wednesday saying the Skype for iPhone app is “raising concern among public-policymakers and consumer advocates,” who are irked that Skype calls are limited to WiFi and not permitted to access cellular or 3G networks.

I’m reminded of nothing so much as Lewis CK’s appearance on Conan O’Brien’s show, in which he pointed out how amazing things are in today’s world, and yet no one is happy.

Are Apple and AT&T actually “trying to handicap” Skype, as implied by Chris Murray, senior counsel to Consumers Union? Is there an “urgent need” for Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to revisit the rules and regulations for wireless voice services?

I’m no fan of Apple’s “walled garden” approach to the AppStore, nor do I love the fact that AT&T is my only service provider option for using iPhone in the US.

But in just over 24 hours of playing with Skype on my iPhone, I feel confident in saying Skype doesn’t need congress’ help in its competition with AT&T. If people will have a little bit of patience, Skype and other VoIP service providers will soon be providing them with communications services and calling options they couldn’t have imagined just months ago.

The cat is really out of the bag now, so just find a good WiFi connection and enjoy your free Skype calling. It’s only going to get better from here on out.

After a decade of being the clear leader driving market trends in computing, Apple’s influence could wane in the post-Steve Jobs era, according to a thoughtful piece posted Tuesday at TG Daily.

Industry analyst Rob Enderle describes Apple’s amazingly diverse impact on wider market trends:

* The iPhone immediately became the gold standard for mobile phone manufacturers, resulting in an explosion of new devices and innovation across every mobile software platform;

* Apple created integration between power and graphics in computer processors that would not have been possible without the company’s commitment to OpenCL, a framework for writing programs that execute across CPUs and GPUs;

* Apple’s focus on design and higher margins resulted in the introduction of products such as the recently released Dell Adamo, a PC notebook designed and marketed to emulate Apple’s attention to every detail from the packaging inward, down to the absence of stickers promoting Microsoft Windows and Intel;

* The elegance of the user experience in Mac OS X virtually doomed OEMs’ embrace of Linux to a competition not with Apple but with Windows, an outcome which will affect the introduction of Google’s Android when it comes to market next year as well.

In short, Enderle writes, “Apple is at the core” of all recent change in the computer industry, that “as a result Apple’s efforts, the products we will see from a variety of vendors will be vastly more amazing than they otherwise would have been.”

None of the above is really subject to debate. Enderle goes on to question whether Apple can keep it up in the post-Jobs era, however, and this writer disagrees. Follow the jump to find out why.