Borrowing a phrase from Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid!”, I twisted it to make it the title of this post: “it’s the apps, stupid!”. Basically, I have been thinking about what has kept me committed to the iPhone platform since I made the switch two years ago. When I bought my first iPhone in October 2007 (the original iPhone), there was no AppStore yet and the UI felt so revolutionary and intuitive that I didn’t care that there was no multi-tasking (still isn’t for any third-party apps), nor that I couldn’t install third-party apps at the time. At that point, we only had the web apps. Compared to the Symbian S60 UI of my phone at the time, the iPhone’s UI was leaps and bounds ahead of it.

Let’s jump to the present time, two years later. We have seen many other platforms come along sporting great UI’s and challenging the iPhone such as Palm with their WebOS, Google with their Android OS, and more recently Nokia with their not yet released Maemo 5 OS. These aforementioned mobile UI’s look great and can seriously challenge the iPhone’s, which in my opinion, will need a refresh soon to keep up with the newcomers. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the iPhone’s UI looks dated yet but Apple will have to refresh it at some point to keep up in the race.

HTC’s Android version (Sense UI) is hot and so it’s the Nokia’s Maemo UI running on the upcoming Nokia N900. There is no denying that. I really, really like some of the UI touches and niceties that we’ve seen so far, particularly from these two devices and also from the Palm Pre, so I asked myself this: Would I consider making the switch to one of these devices at this point and time?

The answer is: I don’t think so (this is not a definite NO and I could change my mind tomorrow). Why? The Apps, simply. There are close to 65,000 apps in the iPhone AppStore, compared to about 10,000 in the Android Market and a measly number in Palm’s App Catalog. While I know that more apps don’t necessarily translate into better apps, this is not the case here, from my experience. There is a lot of developer commitment to the iPhone platform at this time (this too may change, I realize), and that translates into a lot more choices when it comes to apps.

That being said, not everything is fine and dandy in the iPhone world and there are some things that make me really upset. Namely Apple’s arbitrary and anti-competitive rejection of apps like the most recent Google Voice rejection, currently being investigated by the FCC. I realize that the iPhone is a closed platform in many ways but I have come to accept and live with its limitations. Maybe tomorrow I will change my mind and switch to another platform but FOR NOW at least, I’ll stick with iPhone. After all, life is not perfect!

Here are two videos – the HTC Hero (Android) and Nokia N900 (Maemo 5). Check out their UI’s.

The official Gmail Blog announced today a couple of updates in the way Gmail handles attachments. You can now select multiple files at once instead of one by one, which was tedius. Also, you can now see a progress bar for all attachments in the message. I like this a lot…..keep the new features and updates coming Google!

Gmail has pushed a new feature for its email service called Offline Gmail. It basically lets you cache your emails locally on your computer using Google Gears thus providing you with access to your mail even when not connected to the internet. This can be very handy in many situations. One that I can think of is while on a plane with no internet access, you can still compose new messages, play catch up on unread messages, and best of all, you can search your entire email database!

As it stands now, the feature is being pushed to Gmail users in phases so if you don’t have it yet, don’t despair, it will arrive hopefully sooner rather than later. If you are one of the lucky ones that already have the option (like moi), it can easily be activated from Settings>Labs>Offline Gmail. After this you will see the “Offline” option and you can click there and install. Pretty easy, though if you have a lot of emails it may take a while.

Pretty neat Google, pretty neat!