Over a week after the launch, it is a duty as a blogger to mention the iPhone. I am not going to explain how great it looks and feels, and I am not going to talk about the latest iPhone hacks. In fact, I will react on an old Steve Jobs quote that I saw on a (very good, but subscribers only) Harvard Business Review article, and that in fact comes from a New York Times article:
We define everything that is on the phone. You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.
When I first read this quote, together with the surrounding announcements (no downloadable native apps, no Java), my application evaluator side was not very happy. But then, I realized that the iPhone’s application model is the Web 2.0 application, with nothing local (or at least, not much). And that, in turn, can be very good for the future of Java Card.
As I have already mentioned, the favorite view of the phone, from a Java Card point of view, is the browser. As Java Card applications are servlets, if the phone browser is a secure subsystem with a few guarantees about what it displays, then we can be in a fairly good situation. And in such a configuration, the iPhone just becomes the perfect phone.
Applications on the SIM card can even help the iPhone, by providing a way to interact with the most critical applications even with no or little connectivity (which is hard to achieve in a pure Web-based application model). More generally, Bandol can provide an alternative framework for Web application persistence, in addition to their security side. This persistence model can even be more general, but that’s another sotry.
True, this is really an opportunity for Bandol. Now the business model for instance could be that some online webstore wants to dump a servlet into the SIM. But how to get the servlets onto the SIM? If midlets are not allowed and no API defined to access the SIM only the operator and Apple can load servlets onto the SIM. I see some contradiction between the iPhone’s application model and the business model for Bandol.
Application downloads into the SIM remain (mostly) under control of the operator. This model is unchanged by the iPhone. Apple may have the opportunity, through their exclusivity deals with operators, to get some control on this content, but this is quite unlikely, since they don’t control the SIM card.
In that particular case, the operator has all cards in hand: either they allow enough third-party content into the SIM card (as desired by the end user), or they miss the opportunity.
The most interesting thing remains to see whether or not the iPhone model is a success, and whether or not it is copied by enough manufacturers to make it significant. We’ll see.