Additionally, some of the ‘non-mashup’ native applications mentioned before like the flight sim and professional music synthesizer are rmore akin to full blown PC/Mac desktop Apps – not constrained mobile specific apps that I’m typically used to.

Having been a fan of the mobile open OS’s and the 3rd party developer community for years, comparing some of the ‘closed OS’ Apple apps/mashups and their direct equivalents in J2ME, Symbian C++ or WinMo, is a bit depressing. Apple have built a next-generation (mobile) platform where developers can create innovative “joined-up-services” quickly that also happen to look very nice and generally seem to ‘just work’, as listed in the post. Perhaps the future of Apple’s mobile ambitions is in the SDK.

I’ve been trying to convert a close relative to use mobile data services for years, showing them how to pick up email, browse the web and do other interesting stuff on their mobile. To my frustration, the aforementioned was politely enthusaistic but never really bothered to even attempt trying to set up and use these apps, fleeing back to the familiarity of voice calls and text. It wasn’t because of any potential hidden cost of data uasage, rather the whole experience of setting up and using these apps was very poor and ‘technical’. The change ? A missed episode of BBC Spooks streamed on the iPhone iPlayer native app with little or no instruction. The S60 WRT version, I’m sure, would not have had the same result.

I look forward to a direct comparison of an n-gage and iPhone version of the same game.

Spelling of ‘both’ now fixed. I was in a hurry, in my defense!