Dear Steve Jobs,
I am certain you have seen the YouTube videos and countless photos of children and toddlers demonstrating the ingenious simplicity of your iPhone. My two year old daughter loves getting a hold of my iPhone. She unlocks it, launches the Photo app, clicks and few times, and proudly shows us her favorite picture, “Big Daddy!”
My 1 year old isn’t quite so proficient, but also enjoys the iPhone in his own way. It turns out the iPhone is a fantastic toy for entertaining young children. I’m not normally interested in paying hundreds of dollars for a child toy but I have an idea that would certainly increase the sale of iPhones and the iPod Touch: toy mode.
Yes, that’s right. I’m asking for a way to turn my $400 phone into a child toy. The gist of ‘toy mode’ is to allow either of my babies to push buttons, navigate around, see my photos, read my email, and otherwise play. The catch is that in toy mode, they can’t change anything. No deleting Daddy’s email. No changing the minimum font size. No placing phone calls to my colleagues.
Imagine of how many iPhones you will sell when babies are teething on them and toddlers are dropping ’em in toilets because parents feel ‘safe’ letting them play with it unsupervised. The prospects of, or horror, actually having to use our old Palm or Windows Mobile phones will spur us back to the Apple Store.
iPhone software update 2.0 is supposed to have some kind of parental controls; might be they just answered your request (though I know no details, obviously).
What’s your take on the SDK and enterprise tools?
Perhaps iPhone 2.0 will have the controls I desire. Very shortly I will know and won’t be able to tell.
As far as the SDK, fantastic. SDK’s are hard to do well, and Apple took the time to release a full SDK, complete with emulator to test on and documented APIs. They even called in a variety of untainted developers to test and refine it. That is going the extra mile. I’m excited to start playing with it.
Adding the enterprise tools is also good news. For most of the time I’ve been employed by others, I’ve used Exchange via IMAP. Because of my profession, the Exchange admins are my peers so I can twist their arms if/when necessary to get Exchange to interact with my ‘rogue’ mail and calendar applications. I use Exchange now via IMAP, but doing so lacks the calendar and group contact features that ActiveSync brings.
Sitting in my desk at work is my Windows Mobile 6 smartphone (Treo 750). The simplicity with which it syncs up to an Exchange server and updates all your contacts, calendars, and mailbox really is useful. Palm OS has this as well on the Palm OS based Treo’s via GoodLink. It is a great feature, but not great enough to put up with the rest of PalmOS and WM6’s warts.
So I yanked that SIM card out of the Treo and dropped it in my iPhone. 🙂 Sadly, iCal/Mobile iCal simply don’t work that well with Exchange systems and iCal server (of which I’ve built several) is not yet up to the task. So, playing nice with Exchange is a great move by Apple. It will sell at least a million more iPhones and it also gives IT departments a way to transition to an Apple solution.
Now they can buy iPhone’s that will work with their current Exchange system and they’ll also work with any other truly open system they might be considering a migration to. Like an Apple XServe. Or Zimbra.
About that remote wipe feature; I hope I can use Exchange support without giving my IT department the ability to wipe my phone. If not, I won’t be using Exchange support.
I manage the contacts on MY iPhone, and I have my entire address book on there, which is hundreds of personal contact and a few dozen from work. I sync it with my Mac and I don’t want all my personal contacts synced to the Exchange server. So, it’ll be interesting to see how Exchange support is implemented.
Presumably the remote wipe feature is for work-issued (and purchased) iPhones; it does make for an interesting conundrum if you bought the phone. But isn’t the idea of remote wipe for when a phone has been lost or stolen? And wouldn’t the data still exist on the Exchange server?