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In a free capitalist society, or even preferably in a libertarian one, a company should be able to make a product and dictate how it works. Gillette does this with razor blades – their blades do not work with Schick razors, and vice versa.

Printer cartridges for a Canon printer will not work with an Epson, nor with an HP, Brother or Lexmark. This is how they were designed. They were designed as a system.

Of course, in a free capitalist society you should also be free to modify what you’ve purchased in any way you like, and if that means figuring out how to hack a device, you should be free to do that, too.

An excellent example of this happening is with the Sony PSP. Hackers have figured out how to run homebrew software on the PSP and a large community of coders has arisen to provide all kinds of software, from ways to run illegal copies of games, to legitimate software packages that are new games or other applications.

Of course, the iPod was also a closed system, but people figured out how to get into it, and run Linux or other programs on the iPod. People have done the same with games consoles, much to the chagrin of the companies that created them.

So, no matter what Jobs decides to do, once the device is out there in people’s hands, they will try to hack into it, and when they succeed, it will be a cat and mouse game as with Sony, PSP firmware and the hacker community – if Jobs does release a patch to close up a hole in the iPod that someone has created, the hackers will work to find another hole to exploit.

Jobs is also considering programs like iChat on the iPhone, a program that lets you chat with anyone using the iChat program at the cost of your Internet access – not at the per message cost that SMS text messaging imposes. Jobs tells MSNBC that “There’s no reason we couldn’t have iChat on here.”

In theory, iChat could also offer VoIP Internet phone capabilities, but to enable this, Apple needs to take into account Cingular’s need to make money from voice minutes, from phone calls.

Jobs is confident that the iPhone will succeed. He tells MSNBC that: “[The iPhone] is five years ahead of what everybody else has got. If we didn’t do one more thing, we’d be set for five years!”.

In this, Jobs may well be right. While Nokia has an Internet tablet of their own that still doesn’t have a SIM card slot to make phone calls, and Sony have had their P800, P900 and P990 smartphones on the market with touch screen functionality, along with Palm’s Treo range of phones over the past few years that have made extensive use of touch screen technology, none have been able to create a phone that works anywhere near as elegantly as the iPhone in Steve’s keynote.

The demonstration was breathtaking and awe inspiring, solving many of the issues I’ve come up against myself when using a mobile device as the replacement for a laptop computer.

There have always been compromises to be made with mobile devices when accessing email, surfing the web and easily accessing information. It’s for this reason that I carry around a laptop with a wireless broadband connection at all times. My laptop is even a Tablet PC, giving me incredible touch controls that I love to use.

Until the iPhone comes out and we can all use it ourselves, there’s no guarantee that an iPhone will replace the need to take a laptop computer with me. A full size, yet fold up Bluetooth QWERTY keyboard that incorporates an iPhone in either vertical or horizontal mode without obscuring any of the screen will be of use to me.

Whatever the eventual status of third party applications on the iPhone, Steve Jobs certainly knows what we all want. He has the same access to all of the blogs, online articles and views both pro and con that have been expressed in the days since his Macworld keynote.

Surely the next six months will see more than just iPhone approval from the FCC for a US release in June. We haven’t seen the full story yet when it comes to the iPhone. Steve Jobs is surely keeping a few surprises up his sleeve for the big launch day. More software, hidden features, expandability options confirmed and more. Six months is too long to wait!

Now that the existence of the iPhone has been irrefutably confirmed by Jobs himself, the speculation of what the iPhone really is, what it can really do and what its future is has only exploded and is unlikely to die down anytime soon.

So far, we only know what Steve Jobs wants us to know. For now, it would seem that when it comes to the iPhone’s future, the best is still yet to come!
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Alex Zaharov-Reutt  Apple  Browsers  Cellphones  Email  Gadgets  Internet  Malware  Mobility  Music  Security  Software  Tablet pc  Telecommunications  Viruses  Web  iPod  iTunes  wiFi