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?

The New York Times website (which already does just everything pretty well) has recently starting publishing lovely 360-degree panorama images of select occasions, such the recent opening Olympics ceremony in Beijing or John McCain’s nomination at the Republican Convention.

A quick look at the HTML source code confirms it’s all done in Adobe Flash, the same platform Google uses for their new Street View panoramas. While the ability to drag around in Flash (or Apple’s Quicktime) is nothing new, Google Street View and the Times panoramas are impressive for other reasons: in Google’s case it’s the sheer ambition and scope of the project, and in the case of the NY Times panoramas it’s the quality of the photography and of the real-time processing of the individual composite 2-D images to create such an impressive faux 3D whole: it’s particularly striking to pan down from the main spectacle to the more mundane shoes, cables, and strewn paper cups of the adjacent photographers (you can also pan straight up if you’d like, and the Flash object is smart enough to prevent you from coming back down full-circle along the other side, upside down).

The Times also adds audio from the event, which is also nice, and leads me to imagine how incredible it would be someday if one could interactively pan around inside a streaming video rather than a static image (I know, I’m never satisfied ). Of course, while that would amount to a true remote virtual presence, the bit stream required to pull that off would be far beyond what’s currently feasible given the CPU cycles available on the average home computer, let alone the typical user’s internet downstream bandwidth (currently barely good enough for non-panoramic video).

But kudos to the Times and Google for leveraging the Flash panorama functionality so impressively, even if the technology’s been around for a while. Maybe the takeaway here is that the technological tools alone aren’t enough to make a media experience truly compelling – maybe making really effective media still also involves good old-fashioned human elbow grease at some point (i.e. Google’s spectacular ambition or the Times’ high production values).

I’d like to think so.