Apple Falling Behind

Apple has been reluctant to implement Adobe's Flash Player into it's iPhone OS. Some users feel that since the iPhone was a success without Flash, the iPad will be a success as well. This is not so. The success of the iPhone was fine because we all were coming from cell phones with basically no browser. The most smartphones back then were in the category of the Blackberry. Anything was better than nothing. If I could look at the full version of a website and the flash was not appearing, I don't care, I can see a webpage.

Now is a different story. The iPhone is stale, and has not been refreshed in about 3 years. Competitors such as Google, Palm, and Windows are catching up quickly to the iPhone. Adding in features most requested by iPhone users. By the end of this year, if Apple does not revamp the iPhone dramatically, it will begin to fall behind.

Right now you have the Nexus One. It has a 5 megapixel camera with flash, HD video camera, 480x800 screen resolution, Adobe Flash Player 10.1 (by this spring), customizable screens and live wallpaper, choice of browsers and media players, and even a mic on the reverse side to filter out background noise. These features have all been requested by users since the launch of the iPhone. Yet, no sign of them in the upcoming iPhone.

Now comes the iPad. Everything we had hoped it would be, it is not. Video conferencing? No, actually not even a still camera. Flash Player? No. Multi-tasking? No. Customizable? Not a chance. So why the hype? It will be the same tablet 3 years from now with a camera.

I can imagine myself now... Sitting on my sofa. In front of my TV. My iPad in my lap watching Star Trek on my 9 inch screen. Then I get bored and decide to browse the internet and run across a few sites that have Flash, not yet iPad optimized. Ok, well there goes that. Let me close my eyes and listen to my music. No visualizations, so I'll just stretch out my earbud cord and place it on the table next to me. Wow, seems like a very exciting mobile device! Can't wait till March. I think I'm going to wait in line all night for this one.