smog, most of the iphone's apps suck and are useless novelties. the ipod touch gains on the N8xx because it has a pocketable size and a telephony capability. Both have an "app store", just app manager is all free apps.

Look at the iPhone apps compared to Symbian apps. There is more useful apps for Symbian imo, and Maemo seems far ahead of both. As for the community, its just the American devs. Had the iPHone been in China and Russia where the real devs are (No offense, US and UK devs), you'd see more good apps. Watch how fast all the devs switch in the next couple years to the Nokia device portfolio.

@christ: I commend your enthusiasm, but can you tell us how familiar are you (really) about the apps available for the iPhone?

I notice you've been making bold comments against many products\technologies from assumptions you've made without first hand experience or knowledge (ie: about n800\n810, about iphone\touch, etc).

My interest here is for us to have discussion with factual basis, so we have a better understanding of what's OUT THERE. Whether one considers them as 'competitors' or 'options'. So we can have proper assessment of the market.

There's no point in talking trash against the competitor as far as I'm concerned, because all it does is lower your own standards.

Whoa, here we go again.
What "telephony capability" does the iPod Touch have that isn't available in the N8x0?

try to respect your competitor and learn their strength and weaknesses. Do you think any war (conflict) was won by just looking down to the enemy, downplaying any of their strengths? You only fool yourself that way.

Yet what you say might be the case for you in your situation. I can assure you there are tons of useful applications for my iPod touch. Many of which are mere frontends or compilations of data. Example: offline Wikipedia, a program to parse supermarkets for deals, a program to check train schedules and delays, a program to check bus schedules and delays, a program to manage your eBay, a decent RSS feed reader, a program to check traffic queues, a program to check weather (with map), a program which parses Rabobank performance and news, a program which allows one to get information about owner of number plate, a program which checks for cinema offerings & deals, convenient unity converters, stereogram, a program which allows you to easily download or buy an application, anatomy program, visual wifi scanner, a good soulseek client, seismographic data parser, astrology data parser, sushi review data parser, restaurant review data parser, flashlight, Myst, F1 data parser, fuel price data parser, pocket wine review, translator (online), NFSU, Zen Bound (puzzle game), find nearest ATM, Shazam, Rummikub, dictionaries, yellow pages, newspaper data parsers, monkey island SE, Spore, Fokke & Sukke comic, easy & visual interface for managing social network sites.

BTW, they all have a decent interface. What most applications do is parse data and function as abstraction layer. Together with Cocoa this creates clean, good interfaces. Some of these applications might cost a few bucks, but who cares, if it fulfills its role. Both N8x0 and iPod touch are pocketable alike, and both do not have telephony capability.

I generally hate wading into these "versus" debates but oddly enough, I can't help myself in this case.

So here goes. A bit of background. I used the original iPhone for 3 months (and still own it) and I have from time to time played with the App store. I've been a primary Symbian user for many years now.

With that out of the way, here's my take.

The App store has plenty of great games and apps. I don't think it's appropriate for me (or most other people for that matter) to determine how the apps on the iPhone compare with the apps on Symbian in terms of usefulness just because, well, I haven't reviewed the tens of thousands of apps on both platforms.

However, I will say that in terms of getting *easy* access to useful apps, the iPhone, until recently, very much had Symbian beat. And I think this had to do with the perception among some that the iPhone has more useful apps than other platforms. And also, because of the relatively closed hardware platform (I know the 3GS breaks the trend), it's resulted in a console-like dev environment that's created a thriving gaming scene. This is key. (Incidentally, if you had told me three years ago that Apple would be a key player in the mobile gaming scene, I would've called you crazy. Ha!)

Now, that's not to say that there aren't a whole lot of crappy apps in the App store. In fact, one company recently got shut down because they were making superfluous apps that did like one thing (for instance, an app that pulled images off of common websites for one celebrity). Why would they do such a thing? Well, their strategy was basically to push out as many new apps as possible and get the early adopters to purchase. By taking advantage of the fact that nobody had reviewed their app, they were able to constantly dupe customers into buying their crappy products. And they were earning several thousand dollars a day. I think they had pushed like over a thousand apps in a year or so (I'm speaking from memory, I need to find the article on TechCrunch). In order words, this company gamed the system almost to perfection.

That was a rather interesting phenomena. And I think there are app development companies that are also trying to mimic this. So basically, the very aspects of the app store model that spurred so much innovation and interest was also a driving factor into a lot of crappy apps being developed. it'll be interesting how this pans out with the Ovi store and just with the general mobile app development space.

Apps that have been updated after 2008. I'll start and end there. Namely Skype and Fring since they're out for both. Apparently - as brought to my attention since I had stopped waiting on a fix sometime last year - RTComm had been updated.

Pidgin is still stuck in 2.5.x when the desktop is at 2.6.2 - but that doesn't mean that the libpurple is that far behind. I guess.

In all fairness, the whole telephony slant though is not really a big difference in my opinion though.

I'd say games is the biggest difference.

How is the 3GS breaking the trend? I missed that news :-)

I see the importance of games, but really, if you look in my list you'll notice a lot of applications which abstract data. Ofcourse, many are specific to my country, but I suspect the same is true for a German or French iPhoneOS user. I'm really happy with those small little tools because they save a lot of time and effort, and some stuff is simply very useful to have with you (such as an offline Wikipedia). A smartphone is like a swiss army knife. But it has to be convenient to take the tools out; don't always want to start browser and search around on desktop optimized sites.

It's running the PowerVR SGX 3D accelerator, which has support for OpenGL ES 2.0. OpenGL ES 2.0 gets away from fixed function pipelines to programmable ones (similar to going from DirectX 7 > DirectX 8 if you're familiar with the API in the PC world).

I guess I should've worded it a little differently. Games written for OpenGL ES 1.1 will work just fine on all three iPhone models (as well as the iPod touches) so from that perspective, the 3GS doesn't break compatibility. However, if a game developer wishes to take advantage of the programmable pipelines for fancier graphics, then they'll have to eschew backwards compatibility or choose to create two rendering paths (one for OpenGL ES 1.1 and the other for OpenGL ES 2.0) to support all iPhone models. The latter option, obviously, takes more development time.

So technically, if you were to develop *just* for the 3GS, it's very much a console-like environment since the hardware is locked down. The thing is that if phone hardware evolves the way it does on the PC (i.e. new phone models with ever more powerful hardware keeps getting released every six months or a year), then the development path is akin to that of a PC games in the 90s and earlier this decade. You have to make a game that supports many different hardware combinations, from low-end 50 dollar phones to the latest cutting edge 400 dollar plus phones, in order to have as large of a market to capture as possible. This is in contrast to the console environment, where you have a single target platform to work with and you learn to squeeze ever more power out of the console as you develop titles over its lifetime.

Developing for the first two iPhones and iPod touches was akin to developing for a console. The hardware was identical, save for flash memory and phone capability differences between them. With the advent of the 3GS, the dev environment looks more like a PC where you have to figure out if you want to develop for the high-end only and get a smaller market or develop for the baseline albeit at the cost of fancier graphics or longer dev time.

Oh, I agree with your list. I just said "biggest difference" in regards to what's really 100% lacking imho.

Your list, quite impressive. And I agree with your list. I just know the likelihood of some, if not most of those "might" show up in one way or the other.