While you seem to have some industry experience, I think you perhaps write off the iPhone a little too easily. I can certainly see some parallels with Apple's Mac strategy in the 80's, but they have done a lot of things right (from a dev point of view), and are seeing success accordingly. 100k apps and rising speaks for itself really.
I agree that the iPhone has a small marketshare of total mobile phones, however the vast majority of mobile applications (where a web app won't do), are targeted towards smartphones. As you can see on this graph, the iPhone is currently in third place with around 13% marketshare. Not insignificant, and not bad at all for just over 2 years on the market.
As another poster mentioned, Apple has made it very easy to sell and buy Apps on this device, so most people that own an iPhone will spend money on Apps. Contrast this to Symbian where it takes a pretty dedicated and sometimes technical user to buy and install an application.
So, in the "real world" the iPhone is quite a dominant force already. It may yet prove to be a fad, and the mobile industry does move very fast, but I don't think so. I am personally seeing an increasing amount of consulting requests specifically iPhone related, and interest from corps is sky high.
With regards to your Java point; J2ME is nice (sometimes;-), and it certainly has the largest install base of any mobile language, but the sad reality is that it is nowhere near "write once, run anywhere". For a cross platform J2ME mobile project, you will usually spend at least 50% of your project time porting and getting things running on devices that all implement it a little differently and have their own quirks. So supporting the majority of smartphones (Symbian, Blackberry, Win Mo and iPhone) will require a lot of specialised code anyway (unless you use a cross platform framework, but that has it's own drawbacks).
All iPod Touches and iPhones are essentially the same (barring some hardware differences like processor speed, bluetooth, etc), and an App written for one will almost always run on any other (I have had some obscure issues that crop up between different models, but nothing of significance). This is heaven from a dev's point of view!
Latency on GPRS networks (and even EDGE) is unnacceptable for real-time multiplayer gaming, however, network connected apps and turn-based multiplayer games can and do work.
3G is where real time starts to become a reality. The company I work at (Spectrum Wired) recently developed the worlds first real time multiplayer mobile sports game (A mouthfull I know:-). This game is soft-launched in Australia and currently rolling out around the rest of the world. With the 3G networks we were typically getting a latency of 150 - 300ms between the client and server, and with some decent prediction code this is quite acceptable for real time gaming.
So to get back on topic, yes it is possible to do multiplayer gaming over GPRS, but only turn based can really work well enough. For something like an MMO you really need a 3G network.
"At this point, I dont see any reason why a massively multiplayer world wouldn't give their user base a christmas gift, unless the dev team is made up of Grinches."
I couldnt beleive my eyes when I read this. Are you that close minded? or just stupidly insensitive? Not everyone celebrates your capitalist festival, and I for one, would never put any christmas features in a game.
Open you mind a bit and maybe dont be so quick to judge.
I dont believe you are giving credit were it is due, and I also dont know what phones / deals you have been looking at, but I think you need have a good look at whats going on before opening your mouth.
I've heard mobile carrier support is useless at best in the US, and globaly they are a very small player in the cellular world. This would probably explain why your paying so much for so little. And the games! maybe a couple years ago your comment on "lamest Arkanoid" could be justified, but certainly not these days. The nokia 60 series has a 100mhz ARM core, coding in c++ and optimising with ASM can get some impressive results. What did Quake run on when it first came out? (yes i know the differences in chip architechture, but clock for clock 100 mhz is still damn fast for a phone).
Your points are laughable and can only be explained if you are using a 1st generation phone.
Wake up and stop trying to slow the march of progress.
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While you seem to have some industry experience, I think you perhaps write off the iPhone a little too easily. I can certainly see some parallels with Apple's Mac strategy in the 80's, but they have done a lot of things right (from a dev point of view), and are seeing success accordingly. 100k apps and rising speaks for itself really.
I agree that the iPhone has a small marketshare of total mobile phones, however the vast majority of mobile applications (where a web app won't do), are targeted towards smartphones. As you can see on this graph, the iPhone is currently in third place with around 13% marketshare. Not insignificant, and not bad at all for just over 2 years on the market.
As another poster mentioned, Apple has made it very easy to sell and buy Apps on this device, so most people that own an iPhone will spend money on Apps. Contrast this to Symbian where it takes a pretty dedicated and sometimes technical user to buy and install an application.
So, in the "real world" the iPhone is quite a dominant force already. It may yet prove to be a fad, and the mobile industry does move very fast, but I don't think so. I am personally seeing an increasing amount of consulting requests specifically iPhone related, and interest from corps is sky high.
With regards to your Java point; J2ME is nice (sometimes ;-), and it certainly has the largest install base of any mobile language, but the sad reality is that it is nowhere near "write once, run anywhere". For a cross platform J2ME mobile project, you will usually spend at least 50% of your project time porting and getting things running on devices that all implement it a little differently and have their own quirks. So supporting the majority of smartphones (Symbian, Blackberry, Win Mo and iPhone) will require a lot of specialised code anyway (unless you use a cross platform framework, but that has it's own drawbacks).
All iPod Touches and iPhones are essentially the same (barring some hardware differences like processor speed, bluetooth, etc), and an App written for one will almost always run on any other (I have had some obscure issues that crop up between different models, but nothing of significance). This is heaven from a dev's point of view!
Latency on GPRS networks (and even EDGE) is unnacceptable for real-time multiplayer gaming, however, network connected apps and turn-based multiplayer games can and do work.
:-). This game is soft-launched in Australia and currently rolling out around the rest of the world. With the 3G networks we were typically getting a latency of 150 - 300ms between the client and server, and with some decent prediction code this is quite acceptable for real time gaming.
3G is where real time starts to become a reality. The company I work at (Spectrum Wired) recently developed the worlds first real time multiplayer mobile sports game (A mouthfull I know
So to get back on topic, yes it is possible to do multiplayer gaming over GPRS, but only turn based can really work well enough. For something like an MMO you really need a 3G network.
And people wonder why NASA is a monetary black hole.
Honestly, how hard is it to use a software solution with PC's, instead of wasting god knows how much on useless trinkets.
All the World War II games. As much as I still enjoy and play them, Im getting mightily sick of the ww2 theme.
I dont believe you are giving credit were it is due, and I also dont know what phones / deals you have been looking at, but I think you need have a good look at whats going on before opening your mouth. I've heard mobile carrier support is useless at best in the US, and globaly they are a very small player in the cellular world. This would probably explain why your paying so much for so little. And the games! maybe a couple years ago your comment on "lamest Arkanoid" could be justified, but certainly not these days. The nokia 60 series has a 100mhz ARM core, coding in c++ and optimising with ASM can get some impressive results. What did Quake run on when it first came out? (yes i know the differences in chip architechture, but clock for clock 100 mhz is still damn fast for a phone). Your points are laughable and can only be explained if you are using a 1st generation phone. Wake up and stop trying to slow the march of progress.