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.

We all love great customer service and companies owning up to their mistakes and acknowledging issues, don’t we? We’re all too quick to point out when this is not the case and so I’m posting this.

Last night while trying to access Netflix Watch-Now on my XBox 360, I kept getting timed out. Initially I thought it was something on my network but I received this email from Netflix today apologizing for the inconvenience and offering a link to apply a small credit my account. Big kudos!

In keeping with the “push” theme that I’ve been on lately, now SportsTap has updated their iPhone app to include push notifications for your favorite teams and sports. I have had a chance to test it out for a couple of days and it works very well.

I have my app set up to notify me about my favorite baseball team: the New York Yankees. The app sends me a push notice whenever the game in which the team is playing starts, changes score, or ends. The notice happens within 10-15 seconds of the actual score change. I was able to determine this by watching one game while testing how fast the notifications would arrive. Not too shabby and the app is FREE from AppStore.

Umbrella is a nice little app written for the iPhone that tells you simply whether you should bring your umbrella or not when leaving the house. It takes advantage of the iPhone’s push notifications service to display a message at a time specified by you.

You set your location and tell the app at what time you want to get the push message. You can also tell it when you want to be notified in terms of rain probability. For example, I have mine set to only notify me if the probability of rain is 35% or above.

It’s definitely a nifty little app and I have certainly found good use in it. I recommend it.

Taptu is a very cool app designed specifically for mobile search. It is very well designed and very easy to use, I may add. I had the priviledge of being selected for the beta testing and have been playing with it for some time. It is now out of beta and can be downloaded from the iTunes store. It does a very good of returning iPhone-friendly search results. You can also add sites or searches to your “Favorites” (bookmarking), share links via email or email the same link to yourself.

One great feature I like is that clicking on the Taptu icon next to the search box brings out this sort of springboard with specific search locations, i.e, Wikipedia, Games & Apps, Blogs, Twitter, etc. Very cool and clever! See some screenshots below. Oh and best of all, it’s FREE