[sc:mobile-category ]To much fanfare yesterday, Apple once again changed the universe… no wait, that’s not right, they didn’t do much of anything actually.
You might have noticed that I don’t talk too much about Apple, they’ve never really had products I wanted to buy, either due to their cost, limited features or significant locking. Yesterdays announcements really came fell in two one of two categories:
- Stuff others have already done.
- Stuff to lock you even further in to Apple.
Falling in to the first category are items like the camera access, notifications, wireless sync, over the air updates, twitter integration, iMessenger. The second category has iCloud and Match.
iMessenger actually falls in to both categories as its not cross platform and just like BBM is designed to ensure you and your friends all buy an iPhone. None of these first category features are really a great concern to anyone that doesn’t already have an iPhone.
iCloud is pretty much the Google vision of personal data. Give it all to the cloud and let your hosting company take care of it all. This to me seems like a really bad idea in general. It’s my data, why should I trust some external third party to have my best interests at heart? It get’s even murkier if you don’t live in the US, will Apple be hosting all that data in US? Does all my data now come under US government scrutiny?
Also it was mentioned that iCloud would sync up to 5 gig of data, what smartphone has only 5 gig these days? Will it cost more to sync the rest? Something that I haven’t seen mentioned yet is if iCloud will sync your music collection or if you have to purchase Match to do that.
And speaking of Match, exactly why would I spend $25 a year to get music I already own? Pretty much every smart phone comes with software to make it easy to sync your music to your phone already so why spend $25 a year to stream it (which eats your bandwidth, will likely drop out as your signal strength does and eats in to your data cap)? And of course it only supports what’s in Apple’s store, so that offbeat stuff you have from independent labels won’t be there for you anyway.
iCloud and Match are designed solely to lock you in to Apple, to make switching to Android or Windows Phone more painful. I’m sure it will be a great success 
.
Oh and one more thing, who’s got the pool going for RIM to sue Apple over IP infringement on iMessenger?
