bravo to jimEjr! Said exactly what I was thinking while reading thru these posts. We all have gotten to the point, and rather quickly I point out, of taking ALL the iPhones amazing features, robust intuitive user platform, out of the box thinking, sleek packaging, ect… Completely for granted. This is the new gold standard, and already we have moved on to the next complaint… Could any one of us really say 5 years ago that we could imagine something as slick as an iPhone being in our pockets? Or that we would take it for granted so quickly? I would like to voice my secret conspiracy theory now. I think apple is in contact with and has access to alien technology! LOL but actually that’s how far advanced the iPhone was, is now and will probably continue to be in the near future. It does everything well. of course there are drawbacks and complaints, but the fact that we can complain about features on this type of tech. Shows us just how far this has pushed us into the future! I can’t imagine having to do without the few little dissapointments on my iPhone everyday. Question: what would we have to fall back onto if every iPhone dissapeared today? Not preaching here, debate is wonderfull.

The question posed is whether Apple made a smart decision about the framework of their device. I agree with those making the point of “what is a widget?” A mini-app? A single-purpose web page? Does it really matter? It sounds like most everyone is in agreement that it would be nice on ALL mobile devices for the user to have the OPTION to run a few apps/pages/widgets simultaneously and to have some info be more readily available on the “desktop” or all the time. Maybe the answer is a scroller, maybe home screen customization, maybe a segmented desktop or a multi-function app… whatever the best solution, I’m sure we’ll all have our own opinions and preferences.

Before knocking the iPhone too much… let’s all acknowledge what mobile reality would probably look like today without it… pretty drab, probably not much different than what it looked like before the iPhone. If you don’t believe me, then why are all the competing smart phones now looking like and acting like the iPhone? It’s obvious no one, not even Palm was thinking out of the box. Whether or not Apple continues to lead, we’ll see. That’s not what is important.

What I think we should all appreciate now… iPhone owners & those that prefer something else… is that Apple absolutely disrupted the industry and awoken all players. What I think we can depend on is the new competition keeping things fresh for at least a few years. In one implementation or another, we’ll get widgets… probably even on the iPhone, though the probably won’t be called widgets.

Finally, to those complaining about the time it took for copy-paste on the iPhone or more stability on Pre or better battery life on WinMo, etc., my guess is you’re not developers, because if you were, you’d have a better appreciation for the time, expense, complexity, developer support and numerous other factors that have to be considered by Apple, Palm, RIM, Microsoft, and the others before just slapping in EVERY feature that all users want and as quickly as they want it. If you want all the features rushed, you’ll get plenty of other messy crap to gripe about.

and your point? did the video last 30mins? cause that’s how long the battery will last with 17 apps running lol

I’m fine with the way things are. Getting push notifications works great for me.

@Victor. Try Beejive IM. I was hesitant to pay for an IM app at first but Beejive is well worth it. The interface is intuitive, it loads and operates quickly, and the push notifications work very well. Beejive is well worth the asking price. It’s better than IM and all the free IM clients available. And if you jailbreak your phone, there are apps that allow you to respond to text messages without leaving your current app or unlocking your phone.

give me results

The type of widgets I’d like to see on the iPhone are Android type widgets. If the Hero can pull it off, I know the 3GS can…even the 3G should be able to.

Apple has no reason why they can not or should not put this into the 4th iPhone.

What Apple did made sense then.

All the rendering components have improved a lot, not just JavaScript as Rene mentioned, but also the video chips, and the processors itself (in the 3GS).

There are only now appearing pure widget engines that are not browser or javascript dependent starting to appear in some platforms. (Principally KDE4). None of these are mature enough or small enough for the iPhone’s tiny memory footprint.

So the only viable widget engine is still browser based javascript.

But at the time Apple was doing this, the horsepower simply wasn’t there. The advancements in the jave/javascript interpreters, processor speed, and memory, make the Pre’s Webos possible.

And if the code base could be inspected, I think you would find that there is a lot more browser based stuff in the iPhone than you suspect. I think the App store, the iTunes app, the Maps app are all thin wrappers around Safari. Remember when web-apps were going to be the big thing?

Although admittedly I would like to have the ability to run a chat application in the background. So I wish Apple would get on an iChat for iPhone and set up some kind of push notification/instant on kind of thing so I can check something in safari and still get messages Nimbuzz is supposed to do that but its implementation is terrible.

You know what I am saying?