Whatever you might say about the lack of an official iPhone SDK, there is something to be said for a controlled, tested environment.
Earlier today, my Nokia N800 died. Not in hardware, just refused to boot. what had I done? I’d installed Pidgin, MaemoMapper, XMaeme and a few other apps that weren’t endorsed by Nokia. Despite it being a Debian Linux machine, it refused to boot and there was no way to coax it back to life.
The only way was to re-flash it which meant I lost a few days work everything since my last backup. I didn’t lose anything I stored on external cards and I didn’t lose any mail, thanks to IMAP.
But yeah, pain in the butt.
I’m sure the N800 and the N770 before it have sold tens of thousands of units but I’m not sure they would ever outsell the iPhone – the hype monster of the modern era. And I’m sure there are folk out there hacking their iPhones now who really shouldn’t….
Hadley Stern of AppleMatters disagrees and maintains Apple is being arrogant. Maybe so, but it doesn’t make them wrong.
My N800 is working again and I did miss it. At least until I get an iPhone.