Doctor Awesome: your source for up-to-the-minute commentary on last week's news.

First of all, today is a made-up-term day. Made-up terms are indicated by ^MUT (you know, for made-up term).

Today's topic: iPhone.
First reading: Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs, New York Times

Okay, he kind of gets it.

Look, OSX is cool, in terms of design, its Unixiness^MUT, and relative openness.

And part of why Apple is able to maintain a really cool operating system as well as a nice suite of first-party software is because they control the hardware. Steve Jobs knows this, and he's known it for years. In the early eighties, Jobs and Jef Raskin fought against expandability in the original Macintosh. Why? Because, quoting Hertzfeld's story, "hardware expandability made it more difficult for third party software writers since they couldn't rely on the consistency of the underlying hardware."

The video game industry is a demonstrative example. While the personal computer was once a popular target for game development, PC gaming languished in this decade. Why? PCs' expandability meant that they're not bound to the generational console cycle — the latest and greatest graphically intensive games were found on PCs with the newest graphics cards. But expandability is also a downfall — there were uncountable hardware combinations and game releases were plagued with bugs on certain pieces of hardware. Teams were developing for a moving target (as well as hardware that didn't exist during development). Not only is this a pain for development, it's a pain for tech support once the game is out the door (think software patches — you would buy a game at the store, install it from CD, and have to download a patch from the web site before you can even play).

Developing for a console, on the other hand, is a clear, static target. Every box is identical. Even Microsoft, the company that attempted to promote the PC as a viable gaming platform with DirectX, eventually jumped into consoles with the Xbox line. If you launch a game for a system, you know that that game will always work for that system.

So this is why, during the keynote, Jobs' "iPhone runs OSX" line got me so excited: a stable, featureful, well-designed hardware target for software development. Look at the thing — it's begging for novel apps: games, VoIP, a document reader, a sketchpad, and other things that I'm sure would be invented by the thousands of creative developers that would play with this in their spare time.

But late in the keynote, the Cingular CEO Stan Sigman comes out on stage, a bumbling dolt reading with a drawl from the cue cards he pulls from his pocket.

Apple had to work with these guys. And that's the problem with the iPhone.

Note two things: we were demoed iPhone versions of some major Apple software products: an iPod app for iTunes, a photo gallery for iPhoto, and a calendar for iCal. What's missing?

iChat. Despite iPhone's massive wireless connectivity and description as a "revolutionary Internet device," you can't communicate with anyone using iChat or any other IM service. Why? Because then you wouldn't use the bundled SMS app, which, of course, requires you to use Cingular's SMS service.

But that would be easy enough to solve by writing an third-party app. And Apple knows that. And so does Cingular. And that's why they won't let you.

Slashdot: No Third-party Apps on iPhone Says Jobs

Opening the iPhone to development would be a threat to Cingular's cellular phone business. The iPhone has all of the hardware necessary to route calls through VoIP. With massive wireless Internet available — see Google's plan to offer 802.11 throughout San Francisco — a VoIP-enabled iPhone user would rarely have to even use a cell tower.

I quote Jobs: "Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up."

Bullshit. Cingular doesn't want to see third-party apps because their revenue is tied to their control of an expensive cell network. How do they make sure this doesn't happen? Force Apple to cripple the iPhone.

The iPod and iTunes had FairPlay DRM technologies so that the record companies would be willing to sign on with the iTunes store, even though the technology can be easily circumvented. Similarly, any wireless provider that would sign up with the iPhone would require Apple to take measures to protect its revenue stream.

And that's why the Apple Shackle^MUT is imposed once again (side note: denizens of the blogosphere, please start using that term. I want to coin a net meme like my coworker's Google Bomb. The rest of you — you saw it here first).

Apple needs a partner to get this thing out, and, without any market share, is going to have to make concessions. But I hope that Jobs is stewing about all of this. I hope that Jobs is just making a temporary deal with the devil to gain a market foothold. I hope that Cingular's Glenn Lurie's recent statements (see story: Cingular: We Made Apple Bend) do a tremendous amount to sour the relationship, and Apple bails as soon as possible.

I mean, a geek has to dream.

Until then, you can call me on my barebones Nokia.