Apple’s iPhone 3G and the ubiquitous internet
One thing that Apple is about to do right, at least from their point of view, before another big gun will is the combination of 3G, a data flatrate, GPS and the ubiquitous connection to the net. And all those bits and bytes will float through the inner tubes of Apple.
Put all of this together and you’ll see how Google starts to look like an innocent kitten whose food was just taken away. But let’s take a look what Apple’s next phone will do.
Usually an application has to run to gather data from the internet. Apple doesn’t allow applications to run in the background of the iPhone. When you close the app, its state is gone for good. But what about, say, an instant messaging tool? IM doesn’t make sense when it cannot get data from outside. To get rid of this problem Apple chose to implement a different system to notify the phone’s OS. These notifications, for various applications at once to safe battery life, make their way through the net to Apple’s servers and from there to your iPhone.
This – more or less – permanent connection between the iPhone and Apple could potentially be a nice way – again from Apple’s side – to gather exact data about where you are and what you do. Location based advertisements, an awesome feature every company would love to have. I’ll promise you that Google will try to put something like this together when they launch Android.
Let’s just hope GPS can be disabled like 3G.
June 11th, 2008 at 00:28
[...] jinnyk wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptTo get rid of this problem Apple chose to implement a different system to notify the phone’s OS. These notifications, for various applications at once to safe battery life, make their way through the net to Apple’s servers and from … [...]
June 11th, 2008 at 00:54
Location-based advertisements are a benign use of tracking data when
compared with the possibility of realtime-tracking by the government.
Here in the US, AT&T has opened up its pipes to the government for a
long time. How easy do you think it’ll be for them to track the
movements of any iPhone owner, should they choose to do so, now that
the GPS chip is in there? It would be a trivial switch in terms of
effort.
But really, this applies to just about any phone with a GPS chip out
there, not just the iPhone. The funny thing is, if the government had
actually tried to get people to carry GPS devices so they could be
tracked, they’d have never succeeded. But people have readily adopted
them and have opened themselves to that possibility simply because
they got some benefits out of it as well. Interesting how that worked,
no?
:-)
R.
June 11th, 2008 at 00:54
Location-based advertisements are a benign use of tracking data when
compared with the possibility of realtime-tracking by the government.
Here in the US, AT&T has opened up its pipes to the government for a
long time. How easy do you think it’ll be for them to track the
movements of any iPhone owner, should they choose to do so, now that
the GPS chip is in there? It would be a trivial switch in terms of
effort.
But really, this applies to just about any phone with a GPS chip out
there, not just the iPhone. The funny thing is, if the government had
actually tried to get people to carry GPS devices so they could be
tracked, they’d have never succeeded. But people have readily adopted
them and have opened themselves to that possibility simply because
they got some benefits out of it as well. Interesting how that worked,
no?
:-)
R.