Vodafone is – surprise! – not too happy about the exclusive deals Apple has been making with cellphone carriers. In Germany’s case, that would be T-Mobile, the cellular subsidiary of ex-monopoly and -state-owned enterprise Deutsche Telekom. They now claim to have achieved an injunction at the Landgericht Hamburg. Good for them.

Good for me?

If I were a potential customer, yes. Vodafone argues that the device should be available in an unlocked fashion, thus making it work with any carrier. (Yes, you can achieve this with hacks, but that’s not the same.) This has previously been achieved in France, albeit for legal reasons, and at a premium price. It goes without saying that more carrier choice would benefit a customer, even if it does come at a premium price.

That said, I’m not a potential customer (at this point). So, is it good for me as a shareholder? Probably not. I’m convinced that Apple hates to partner up with other companies just as much as Microsoft does, so the fact that they do in the iPhone’s case means that they found overwhelmingly good reasons to do so. Whether it’s about the ability to implement features exactly the way they wanted to (particularly Visual Voicemail, which requires some technical changes on the carrier’s end), the added revenue through sharing deals, or something else entirely: Apple must have thought this through thoroughly, and must have found that going this quirky, unusually and potentially damaging (particularly PR-wise) path has benefits that outweigh the downsides. Thus, being a business, their choice was likely the economically smarter one, which means that shareholders indirectly benefit from it, even if only in theory.

Let us also not ignore the hypocrisy of Vodafone. You think for one second that, if they had scored the deal (it’s not as if they hadn’t been in the race), they would have still advocated “customer choice”? Or that, had T-Mobile not revealed a moderately successful first day of sales, Vodafone would have still cared? Vodafone has found that it’s worth having a slice of the cake that is German iPhone sales and that they can disingenuously wrap this into “customer-friendly” PR. Good for them. Good for customers, even, if they win.

Though, with the abysmal state of Vodafone’s EDGE network in Germany, you’d find yourself roaming T-Mobile regardless.

FSJ just nails it.

Consortia don’t work because nobody can ever agree on anything and everyone always wants to push the group in ways that advantage themselves and disadvantage everyone else. Reason #2 — the only companies that join consortia are the ones who are too stupid or shitty to make a great product on their own.

Also, via DFLL, Derek appropriately wonders on Google and vaporware.

AppSnapp exploits the TIFF security hole in Safari on iPhone/iPod touch 1.1.1. Instead of doing anything macilious, it helps you in multiple ways, including allegedly patching said hole.

Via fscklog and ars technica Infinite Loop.

John Gruber’s “Let the Tea Leaf Reading Begin” is excellent, but omits something, as far as I’m concerned. Significant portions of the article are spent on the premise of problematic JavaScript performance on the iPhone being a large reason for UIKit-based apps instead. However, he bases this on outdated information:

Iconfactory developer Craig Hockenberry [..] wrote a splendid weblog entry titled “Benchmarking in Your Pants” regarding the lackluster performance of JavaScript code running in MobileSafari compared to compiled Objective-C code running in a native iPhone app.

True that, and it is a splendid overview of JavaScript performance indeed – but it’s also based on iPhone software 1.0.2 (or perhaps even older). iPod touches (finding the right plural for these is tough) always shipped with 1.1, and iPhones now run 1.1.1, which, says Apple, has “Improved performance of JavaScript.”

Of course, Apple doesn’t specify by how much and in what areas performance has improved, and I personally have no way of testing. But the “Javascript on the iPhone will take about 80 times longer to run than it does on the desktop” claim may not be valid any more.

Second is this. For a completely new market contender to achieve 2% share within less than four months, and to have 82% customer satisfaction with their first product (i.e., to get so many things right the first time), is impressive. It’s extraordinary. It also puts into question the claim that the iPhone is more fluff, hype and marketing than actual substance: the efficiency of commercials is metric that’s entirely different from the ultimate satisfaction from a person who has actually used the product.

Finally, allowing Web apps to store information locally (beyond the scope of a cookie) is of interest to many a developer. Speculation that Gears, Google’s solution to this matter, is coming to the iPhone has been rampant, but now the WebKit team has presented an even sweeter solution. Safari hasn’t been too fast about merging in changes from the WebKit development trunk (delays of over a year aren’t uncommon), but this nonetheless points to official support for storing data on the iPhone using nothing but JavaScript in a Web app. Eventually. And the implementation looks excellent: the built-in database browser even includes a text field to let you run SQL queries.

With security and other issues worked out, this should hopefully make it into – semi-educated guess – Firefox 4 as well.

So thinks Francois Joseph de Kermadec, anyway. The basic argument: because some people are so eager to get full access to the iPhone’s OS – to access the file system, install applications and learn to build apps of their own as well, whether out of personal interest or merely curiosity – , the OS’s security model is thoroughly tested as a positive side effect. And since those innards are quite similar to the ones in Mac OS X, Mac users are likely to benefit as well when security holes happen to be found in the process.

Win-win.

(The same holds true for WebKit in particular: find a parsing bug, security hole, etc. in any WebKit-based browser, and all others will eventually benefit. That obviously includes Safari on Mac OS X, Windows XP and Vista, the iPhone and the iPod touch, but the same engine is also used on, say, Nokia’s N series cellphone browser. Moreover, Qt 4 will move to it, so Konqueror 4.1 will run it, and Epiphany and other GNOME projects have been toying with it as well. Yes indeed, there’s a a lot of WebKit buzz these days.)