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Tony's Dead, And The iPhone's, Uhh, Not

So, after two days of pondering over, and digesting blog rants about, the Sopranos finale (for the record: I actually thought the ending was pretty cool, Journey song aside, and yes, I do think it indicated Tony S. getting clipped), I've resurfaced to find that … the iPhone is not the Coolest Thing on Earth after all. (There's also no Easter Bunny, but I got over that oh, a couple of years ago.)

Unlike the original debut of the new Apple quasi-smartphone, which sent Apple shares on a climb they're still enjoying, Steve Jobs' keynote at WWDC in San Francisco on Monday failed to wow the crowd. Apple shares "fell as much as 3.5 percent," Bloomberg reported, "after Jobs announced the decision not to give developers a kit that would allow them to write specialized programs for the iPhone."

"Apple Might Have Blown It," reads today's headline on The Motley Fool.

I've written before about the iPhone's shortcomings – it's pricey, it's only 2.5G, it's not technically a smartphone, etc. Now the developer community is royally peeved because Jobs wants them to develop browser-based applications for Safari – not native apps for Apple's operating system.

"The OS remains closed to application developers," comments mobile and wireless analyst Jack Gold, "which is where the really creative work would be done."

Safari's Ajax capability gives it certain strengths over simple browsers, but Ajax tends to hog handset and network resources – a major issue since the iPhone will not run over 3G networks.

So now business users who wanted a broadband wireless device AND developers who were salivating over creating native apps for the iPhone are both disenchanted. Don't worry, though: there's still all those hipsters like Meadow Soprano out there eager to slap down Daddy's credit card for the Coolest Thing on Earth in a couple of weeks.

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