THE IPHONE HASN’T ARRIVED IN EUROPE yet, but it doesn’t feel that way. A week or so ago, I had to repeatedly hit “Mark all as read” in Google Reader to get rid of gazillions of posts that had “iPhone” as their subject matter. Tiresome.

I do appreciate Apple’s genius in creating fanboys. There’s engineering skill and design inspiration in all their products that’s easy to like. That said, Apple may be one of the last proud members of the Old Skool of marketing: the company knows best. Damn, the “smartphone” doesn’t even come with an SDK! Shouldn’t Apple, by default, give us the taste of their own dogfood?

Yes, iPhone is “cool”, mostly as a fashion / lifestyle item; perhaps Apple should label it as such and nobody would gripe that it’s a black box device with little “hackability” potential. Armani doesn’t provide source code to his suits either.

But we living in Geekdom want our source code with everything, don’t we?

With cellphones, it was first about using it as it came, then came J2ME and smartphones that brought new possibilities and choices, but the manufacturer was still in charge. This can now change.

Having written about my ideal “hacker’s smartphone” before, I was happy to realize that FIC is shipping its opemoko-based dev kits as of today. Sure, it won’t generate headlines a 1/1000th of the magniture that iPhone has. But revolutions don’t always announce themselves with gunshots and fireworks. This may, just may, be a beginning of a true democratization of the mobile phone market, just as Intel’s x86 processors have done for the personal computing market. It is based on the assumption that any assumption about the device’s use is inherently incomplete, that users will always come up with new needs that the manufacturer hasn’t even considered, and opens up platform access to any developer.

This is exciting, CRM 2.0-ish if you allow, and I’d love to see some community-marketing effort from FIC in the near future so that the promise of the concept can be verified and tested in the real world.

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