Reasons to hate the iPhone

Just seeing how strong the Jobs Reality Distortion Field really is. 🙂 And we did talk about the iPhone…

Last night’s Bristol SkillSwap relaunch at Goldbrick House had a new (for us) format with something Laura called ‘Talking Points’. 5 chairs, 4 people, discuss a topic, if you want to contribute you fill the empty chair and someone else has to leave. A bit slow starting but with an opening topic of (roughly speaking) ‘…is anyone (still) looking forward to CSS3‘ and a free bar courtesy of Siftware, things got up to speed pretty quick. Andy Budd from Clearleft in Brighton was the protagonist pointing out that CSS3 has been +10yrs in coming and still isn’t here.

There was a bit of a diversion about rounded corners and visual degradation and we never really got into the meat about what was better with CSS3.

There wasn’t a firm conclusion, except that if there are features that developers want to see, they should lobby the browser owners. It seems the W3C is set up to allow the incumbents to hold things up while they figure out the political and financial impact of any change. Despite falling market share, IE is still dominant and they’re not introducing any new features in a hurry for fear of breaking their existing bloatware.

Laura mentioned Safari coming to a future SkillSwap, so that’ll be a cool opportunity to hear their side of the story.

Elliot Jay Stocks from Carson Systems was up with should we support IE6? I think the beer was beginning to kick in as the discussion really picked up. Ultimately it came down to, if your clients’ target market are predominately using IE6 then you’re probably stuck with it. There were subversive ideas about intentionally degrading the web page for IE6 users but that was mainly left for personal pages and blog sites. According to Google Analytics, just over 52% of visitors here are on Firefox, 38% on IE and nearly 8% on Safari.

Matt Jones from Dopplr took the last slot on the eponymous iPhone. The displeasure was largely aimed at the demand for your attention that the iPhone makes of its believers. I’ve not used one (obviously) so this is all second hand but I can fully appreciate that you probably can’t just make a phone call, or listen to music, or surf the web without actively and completely focusing on the device and not the service. Leaving aside the potential iBrick upgrade – I’ll admit that I never ‘got’ the iPhone or the Mac fandom.

<disclosure>I am probably a HTC Fanboy, owning the XDA, XDA II and now XDA Exec, but they were all on O2 so I guess that cancels any geek cred I might have had.</disclosure>

My current HTC Universal is fine and only lacks built in GPS. WM6 isn’t the prettiest UI going but it does a good job of being a phone/MP3/MP4/Web/Office/etc service and the device doesn’t get in the way. The camera is a bit crap but then so are my artistic abilities.

All in all a fantastic evening, the iPhone thing was a great end to the proceeding.  I met Dan Hilton for the first time (his blog is not loading but there’s always Facebook), the conversation was lively and informed. Looking forward to the next SkillSwap!