Jim Panttaja

The iPhone has the attention of many of us this week. The 20-minute video on the Apple website certainly provides a good overview (I suggest only viewing it in small mode), as does the article in today’s Wall Street Journal (a transcript appears at Just Another Phone Blog on blogspot).

One item pointed out in the Wall Street Journal article is the lack of Flash support. This means that applications written in Flex (for example, the Sapias Mobile Resource Management services) will not work on the iPhone - for now. This should be easily fixed by Adobe and Apple.

Since third-party development is limited to Safari, I assume that Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) will not work on the iPhone. AIR is looking like a good development environment for occasionally connected applications.

From watching the examples in the video, the iPhone is not location aware. There is an example of finding a sushi restaurant, and then getting directions to it. The starting location is chosen from a list of bookmarks. Although the iPhone does not appear to have a GPS chipset - it could still determine location (AT&T has to be able to provide the location of the phone in support of E911 - so somewhere that location is known). But it doesn’t appear to take advantage of that information (from the demo - or other articles I have seen).