iPhone Passion

In an interview given to the nytimes, Steve Jobs confirmed that people won’t be able to install third-party apps on the iPhone:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

This is bad news for independent developers, looks like only Apple and its partners will get to develop software for the iPhone. Really bad news, I was already looking forward to develop some cool drag&drop games for the multitouch screen. Well.. with a bit of luck, maybe we’ll at least get to use already-existing Dashboard widgets. After all, Jobs greatest concern (besides making shitloads of money) seems to be the well-being of the network provider(Cingular, in our case):

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

(msnbc)

Also, Jobs doesn’t seem excited at the thought of letting people freely install their own ringtones onto the system(or make custom ringtones out of their iTunes songs). Plenty of money in sight? Definitely.

What can we say? The man is a hardware genius. If he is a bit evil on the side, we still may forgive him. As long as the iPhone will live up to its promise