Does the world need another blog post on the iPhone?  I’m gonna go with ‘probably not’ – but as in most big cities where a car culture doesn’t hold sway, we’re all about our mobile devices here in New York – it’s something to do on the trains we ride and the streets we walk, so maybe our smartphones matter a little more to us here.  With that in mind, here’s the first of a few posts on some thoughts I’ve had about my “leetle friend”…

1. no adobe flash
And don’t expect it anytime soon.  While I’m sure Adobe would be happy to whip up an iPhone/Safari-optimized Flash Player, it think Apple would rather sit back and see if the iPhone can’t instead help drive more adoption of their QuickTime platform for video streaming .  Although Adobe’s Flash is the ubiquitous video streaming browser plug-in, Apple’s Quicktime does a perfectly credible job of streaming video content in the open MPEG-4 format (witness the Quicktime-based youtube iPhone App).
If that’s Apple’s strategy, it appears to be working - content providers are coming around: hit the NBC.com site from your iPhone, navigate to a show, and you now can stream episodes in MPEG-4/Quicktime - despite NBC (along with Fox/Paramount) happening to also be behind the well-received (and Flash-based) Hulu initiative (on a wifi network, the experience is pretty impressive).

But speaking of streaming…

2. no streaming (or over-the-air 3G sync) of audio podcasts
While there are a few nice iPhone IP radio apps out there (Pandora and Flycast come to mind), what about podcasts?  With this shiny new 3G network we’re paying for, it’s a little disappointing to have to wait until getting back to the mothership (i.e. a computer runnning iTunes) to sync up and get the newest ones.

Streaming and/or syncing podcasts via 3G would be a Cool Thing (I’m never satisfied).

However, as is often the case when a seemingly obvious (and perfectly technically possible) idea remains unimplemented, dig a little deeper and you’ll find a business-side issue:  in this case, it involves AT&T - my guess is we’re just all on the internet with our 3G iPhones a lot more than they had planned on, so they’ve been caught a bit unawares… (take one exceptionally well-designed mobile device, put it on one speedy all-you-can-eat data plan, add water, and stand back…)

But there is at least one alternative:  Podspew, a website that AT&T and Apple can’t be too happy about.  While it won’t sync podcasts onto the iPhone itself, what it wilI do is convert a good selection of popular podcasts to simple MPEG-4 web links that the iPhone can then stream via Safari and Quicktime (totally subverting Apple’s podcast model, come to think of it).  It works well and is worth checking out (until they get that cease-and-desist letter, that is…)

At any rate, it’s probably obvious by now I’m on the internet a lot with my iPod , walking around and taking the subways here in New York City.   Which brings me to the next issue of battery life, but that has to do with chemistry and electrical engineering rather than with 0’s and 1’s (remember Dell’s pickup truck-destroying laptop? - that was at least as much about pushing the physical battery design envelope as it was about any manufacturing defects – but that’s another story).

Did I mention I love my iPhone?