Has Apple put mobile innovation back at least 10 years?

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Starting from the example of the classic Nokia N95 8GB (running S60 3rd Edition FP1) and then looking at the changes to the mobile world brought in by the iPhone and copycats, ending up looking ahead to Windows Phone 8 and future versions of Android and Blackberry, Ewan MacLeod has penned a storming (and obviously provocative!) Sunday read, pointing out the negatives brought into the smartphone world by the iPhone and the expectations of its generation: sandboxed applications, pseudo-multitasking, functions on rails, and so on. Do you agree?

From the opening to his piece:

Take yourself back to the days of the Nokia N95 8GB. It was a terrific handset: An excellent camera, super form factor, nice keypad — a true ‘Multimedia computer’.

Perhaps the best thing about those Symbian devices was that they could multitask properly. Hardcore Symbian developers could access almost every inch of the operating system’s plumbing to bring phenomenally useful services to users.

My most frequently used function on my Nokia Symbian devices was ShoZu. I wouldn’t shut up about it. This was (and still is!) a service that ran in the background on-demand. ShoZu would get your images off your Nokia really quickly. Many of my mobile friends had ShoZu doing an automatic upload. Snap a photo and boom, you’d see the little data indicator briefly switch on and off as the service sent your photo up to the ShoZu servers and then on to whatever services you’d configured (Flickr being a popular one). I opted for a little bit more control — so whenever I took a photo, ShoZu would immediately ask if I wanted the photo sent up to the internet. Again, if you pressed ‘yes’, that was it. Job done. Everything happened in the background.

You could get on with your day. I loved it.

Ewan concludes that we're probably stuck with the 'new' way of doing things, acknowledging that iOS does seem to have taken off(!), concluding:

There’s hope with Nokia too. Windows Phone 8 could change the game. I’ve also got my eye on Nokia delivering something entirely new to the marketplace at some point. Still. I am certainly thankful for Apple’s efforts over the years. It was really needed. The mobile industry has moved forward in dramatic steps thanks to their participation. 

The power user in me can't help but sympathise with his rant overall though. What about you?

Source / Credit: Mobile Industry Review