We just added two new iPhone Games to the free iPhone games section of the site: Poker Solitaire and Astro-Blobs.
Poker Solitaire is a card game where you place 25 cards in a 5×5 grid to make 10 vertical and horizontal poker hands. You get points based on how good the hands are.
Astro-Blobs is a version of the Flash game at GameScene. The original game dates back to the early days of Flash, but the gameplay is well suited for the tap interface of the iPhone.
Setting aside MobileMe’s launch problems, I have to say I’m very disappointed with MobileMe.
Sure, it is push email to the iPhone. But only for me.com email addresses. As a business owner with my own domain(s), I want to use my own email address. There are several ways to do this with MobileMe, such as forwarding all my email to my me.com email address, but none of them allow me to easily reply to an email from my business address. This makes MobileMe email essentially useless to me.
Once email is out of the picture, the other features fall flat. Push calendar and contacts are nice, but they don’t really get me anything that syncing my iPhone doesn’t. iDisk is essentially the same as before, which makes it marginally useful to me. But since I produce media when making the fun games at GameScene.com and other sites, 20gb is not enough for a backup solution.
The most useful feature for me is the photo gallery, which is the same as the old .Mac. The ability to publish photos from iPhoto quickly and easily makes the $100/year cost worth it. But the photo gallery is still not all it could be. I’d love the ability to publish to a gallery directly from my iPhone camera roll. Right now I either have to email a photo, or sync with my Mac and use iPhoto to move an image to the gallery.
So, ways that .Mac could be great:
1. Allow me.com to automatically get email from another account, and also reply to emails using a reply-to of our choice.
2. Increase storage enough to back up a standard drive with system, applications and documents.
3. Allow us to access documents on the iDisk via our iPhone. You can already read Word, Excel, PowerPoint, iWork and PDF files in emails on your iPhone. Why not have a iPhone Documents directory on your iDisk where you can see these documents as well.
4. Instead of emailing photos to a photo gallery, allow iPhone camera roll photos to go directly there.
5. Add a Web-based blogging system, similar to Blogger.com or WordPress.com. Right now, the only option is to use iWeb and it isn’t easy or very functional.
I could go on. I can think of dozens of ways that MobileMe could be better, and none of them should really increase the fixed costs on Apple’s side. In fact, if I was in charge I’d position MobileMe to compete as a social network as well.
Playing around with the iPhone App Store this week got me thinking about Apple’s revenue streams. It seems that now, in addition to hardware, Apple makes a lot of money through digital downloads: music, movies, TV shows and now software.
In fact, Apple started digital distribution of iPod games a while ago in the iTunes Music Store. But only a small number of titles are available, and the development process includes making a direct deal with Apple. But the iPhone developer process is open to just about any serious developer. There are at least 500 titles available.
So, now that the iTunes Music Store delivers iPhone and iPod software, why not Mac software?
This should be an easy addition, and the pieces are probably already in place. Apple could start with their own applications, like iWork, and then let third-party developers get in on the act, with Apple taking its 30 percent cut. I’d bet developers would jump at the opportunity to distribute this way given that most software stores still ignore the Mac platform.
Come to think of it, they could do this on Windows. The iTunes Music Store, and even the iPhone App Store inside it, works in iTunes for Windows. Apple could become the largest distributor of Windows software.
This goes further than the PC and the iPhone. Apple already distributes to living rooms via Apple TV. So with digital downloads, Apple is taking on Blockbuster and NetFlix, they are already dominating retail music stores, and they could soon be challenging retail and online software stores. Apple could be the next Amazon.com, but for digital products only, which is probably the most profitable type of product — at least from a distribution standpoint.
So I still have my old iPhone. As I have plans to develop some iPhone Apps, it seems to make sense to keep it around. I could use it to test my Apps, without causing any problem in my new iPhone, which I rely on for communication.
Once you write off the phone as “worthless” it suddenly becomes extremely valuable. I pulled the SIM card out, to make sure there is no confusion in the system, and I am able to use WiFi to surf the Web, check email, play videos, etc. I can also use all the Apps I installed, and sync with iTunes to put must on there. It is essentially an iPod Touch with a camera and a mic. And that, in itself, is a very nifty device. If a Skype. application ever arrives, it could become my main office phone. Right now, it can be a Pandora streaming music box. I can use it as a voice recorder. I can pass it around the room with the Band App and someone can play drums while I play piano on my new iPhone. I could even use it to complete replace my alarm clock — I can set alarms, have it play music, check the news on the Web, and even my email.
The bottom line is that this old iPhone may just be starting its life as a cool gadget, not ending it.
So, with about 500 iPhone Apps available, you’d think we’d have a little of everything. But there are plenty of duplicate applications, like Sudoku, and tons of Apps that just mimic what we already could get from Web sites.
Here are some iPhone Apps that I thought someone would make for the launch, but they just aren’t there:
1. GPS Gadget: Just a geeky read-out of your location in latitude and longitude, maybe with a little memory so you can track a path. Basically, what a GPS device did 10 years ago, before they had maps. It would come in real handy for hiking and GeoCaching.
2. USB Keyboard: The iPhone has a dock, which goes to USB, which can then go to a USB keyboard with a little cable adjustment. It would be great to bring a super-thin Apple keyboard along and take notes at meetings and conferences without dragging along the MacBook.
3. Skype VOIP: I know they can’t make this work over 3G for legal reasons, but it should at least be available for WiFi. Another app exists that has you pay for calls. Yuck.
4. iPhone Camcorder: You should be able to record video with your iPhone’s camera.
5. Telnet/SSH: Every Webmaster gets a little uneasy when they are out of reach of a way to access their server through ssh. The “Terminal” application was my favorite on the SideKick, even though I never used it. I just liked knowing that I could get in if I needed to. There could also be a ton of uses for this very simple App.
