[General Topics] deathMiata:
I will agree with ZeBoxx here. Go to the Wizard forum and you'll see many threads over the same topics on privately made third-party software. Many times it will be a user issue, but that ends up being the risk with that. The lokwiz threads are a great example, you'll have people with posts saying "I got this error, what do I do?" and sure enough they don't RTFM or look an the FAQ in the first post by machinagod.

markgamber: There may not be a WM5 app that kills or bogs down a network, but Steve Jobs is more or less battening down the hatches in the case there-of. Some of the spyware, malware, and virus watch sites have listed in their "top predictions" that with the era of mobile devices becoming more and more powerful that they soon will be a far more popular target. I could easily see someone making some sort of exploit for the phone to silently send out SMS messages or e-mails with things like a user's phone book, etc. Symbian has been a target for a few years with a couple of bothersome virus attacks, but if a platform is locked up and app writers must seek authorization to write apps... This makes for more secure development.

I can certainly understand that Apple wants to keep "damage control" relatively tight as when there are too many variables, it's hard to properly diagnose problems for users. It is the same standard that they run in their desktop/portable business, keep the chipsets in the same family or equivalent and customer service issues end up easier to diagnose.

Once again, the iPhone is not about what the phone can do. The iPhone's main point is how the phone does things.

Read this post: http://forums.clubsi.com/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/901633/page/0/fpart/3#Post896060

It may be from an automotive forum, but I think the guy has the right point.

Try explaining to a user like a 45 year old father or maybe even a 28 year old woman how to load songs on to a WM5 device, but instead of loading the songs to the device... they have to redirect to the storage card. That in itself is hard without any visuals! The iPhone will use iTunes to load songs, this will be nice to the average Joe because there won't be any intricate navigation of the device's internal storage system.

The voice mail is another interesting implementation. Most people are familiar of navigating through their voice mail and having to hit [7] to delete voice mails, [#] to skip messages, etc. With visual voice mail, there's no need to even go through all those prompts. You have the ability to listen at your leisure, rewind the message, selectively delete message (rather than navigate to the message you need to delete from your saved messages).

The web browsing is a nice first party solution. Many users are used to the WAP versions of websites on mobile devices. The WAP sites end up being crippled at times because they lack so much rich information. By having a full blown copy of Safari on the iPhone, being able to load complete pages will resolve that issue. The Google Maps demo on the Apple site demonstrates this well; the user tries to find a Starbucks within proximity of where they currently are and they can click on the phone number to dial the location. Users with data plans will find this to be nice as they will be able to locate restaurants within range in unfamiliar locales.

Again, the target is NOT the business/enterprise user... but it is the demographic that would consider buying a Sidekick, RAZR V3i/V3m/V3c, Sony-Ericsson Walkman Phones.