Nor is it the re-imagining of the Apple Newton. Nor is it a PDA. In many respects, the iPhone isn’t a product: it’s an experience. Technology forecaster Paul Saffo is quoted in Wired remarking that “This is the next home for the mind.”

I’ve previously written about the issues of Getting Things Done, trying a variety of ways of managing and tracking my work. The 3” x 3” sheet of paper is currently my favourite, and I use Apple Mail and a variety of web applications to support my work. This is where many desktop and mobile applications get it wrong. I’ve used Windows Mobile devices and I’ve used Palm devices. I’ve also used Unix-based devices such as the Sharp Zaurus. The basic applications are too simple, and the advanced ones cram in too many features. Both types of applications suffer from desktop-like look and feel, and constrained user interfaces – the constraints imposed by the operating system and/or the development kits.

A long time ago, I wrote a WML front-end to a website, so one could use a mobile phone to browse products and make enquiries. I later wrote a simple Java application for mobile phones that would allow people to record and view travelling directions. I sold three copies! During the development of both of these I wondered why I was having to re-purpose existing applications for mobile devices. The answer, at that time, was simply that mobile devices didn’t have the computing power and the networks couldn’t support the bandwidth requirements.

..which is where Web 2.0 comes in: Web 1.0 was built by programmers and technologists. Web 2.0 still retains these people, but they’re getting wise and more mature. As a result, there are attributes of Web 2.0 that are common across applications: not only in visual presentation, but in ease-of-use. Other technology, such as CSS and Ajax has been properly adopted to improve the ease-of-use, whilst making applications rich enough to supersede many desktop applications. These combined technologies also reduce bandwidth requirements.

This is why the iPhone’s adoption of Mac OS X and, critically, Safari is so important. Safari brings the current generation of applications and designers to the iPhone. Don’t believe me? Here’s a list of web applications I use:

• Basecamp
• Backpack
• Google Reader
• Google Spreadsheets
• Wikipedia

I also get the majority of my news, music reviews and technical documentation from the web. When the iPhone launches in the UK, I’ll get one just for these applications and I’ll wave goodbye to newspapers. Notice I didn’t mention phone calls or music.

The iPhone’s applications and widgets use a greater range of font sizes, with contextual buttons and displays. If you’ve seen the launch keynote you might have noticed one other thing: no menus. The simplification of presentation, together with the astonishing multi-touch gesturing makes operating the iPhone stunningly obvious. Web 2.0 shares similar objectives: the ability to pick up an unfamiliar application and use it effectively right from the start. No manuals required. On a mobile device this is critical.

There is concern that the iPhone doesn’t support 3G networks. Steve Jobs did state at the launch that it would do, but many blog commentators seem to be ignorant of this. However, I’ve never considered buying or using a 3G phone, because of the prohibitively expensive data costs. The Wired article mentions that the current wireless ecosystem isn’t ready for video web streaming. But this misses the point: wireless will be everywhere, soon, and it won’t need to be via satellite. It will be via 802.11n (up to 540Mbit/sec, 50m range) and 802.11r (allowing fast seamless handoffs between access points). This will consign 3G, 3.5G and 4G to areas where physical access points are not available. That’s why the iPhone detects and automatically performs transitions between Wi-Fi and mobile networks. And, when the Cingular 2 year exclusive tie-in expires in 2009, I predict that we’ll see VOIP on the iPhone.

We’re therefore getting closer to everything online. The iPhone is the first personal device that recognises this. Will the iPhone technology be open to software developers? If Safari is a full version (and based on the New York Times demo, I believe it is), and there is support for Flash and PDF, then there’ll be a raft of web applications that will already work with the iPhone. But the iPhone has another trick:

Widgets. Mac OS X already has widgets: little applications that perform very specific functions, such as weather forecasting and stock tracking. There are thousands of widgets that people have developed for Mac OS X. The kicker is that these applications are developed primarily with HTML layouts, CSS and Javascript (and Javascript means Ajax too). Sounds familiar? Apple have provided two other things that increase the opportunities for widgets – a set of Javascript libraries for common application requirements, such as session management, preferences and windowing, and the ability to hook into Cocoa, thereby providing access to the richness of Mac OS X if required.

I’ll bet that Apple will make widget development open and there will be a technical note documenting how to migrate Mac OS X widgets to the iPhone.

But what about the corporate environment? Many commentators think that Apple will not make inroads into the corporate environment: there’s no obvious support for Exchange, the iPhone is too expensive and who’s going to buy a mobile phone for a corporate environment that is so obviously a personal device? My answer: the corporate server is dead. When you have everything online, there’s no need for it. The richness of Web 2.0 applications and the adoption of widgets means that many applications don’t need to be hosted on PCs and data doesn’t need to be managed in-house. Amazon’s S3 and Elastic Computing Cloud are evidence of this. Many corporations now use Google Mail. So far as businesses are concerned, the iPhone isn’t for businesses borne before 1995 that haven’t grown to embrace this new way of working and thinking. This means that these people won’t get it. Sorry, it’s not for them.

The more I think about the iPhone, the more I believe this to be a landmark device. It provides a vision for the way we will work, play, interact and live with one another. It signifies that Apple is thinking about the future more than the present. This is indeed the start of ubiquitous computing.