Saw this unbelievably wrong statement by Microsoft here.

“Mr. Watson added that by not using .NET, coding for the iPad and iPhone OS is far more costly, and that Apple has alienated a large group of programmers because of its programming language decisions.”

I used to develop .NET CF applications but the iPhone is much easier and more powerful. Objective C was easy to learn and I prefer it over C# because the code is cleaner and you don’t need to check for nulls all the time. XCode runs at the speed I think at, where as I found myself always waiting for Visual Studio because it hangs all the time. Even your users are waiting – .NET apps take 5 seconds to launch on a device, whereas Obj C compiles to native and launches instantly. Also the iPhone frameworks are much more than just objective C, there are classes for managing a navigation stack and its easy to make tables, .NET has nothing like this and need to do a lot of grunt work yourself. I’d say I can make an app for the iphone in a day that would take a month on .NET CF, and then the result I wouldn’t even be able to sell because the MS store is useless, developers are unhappy they haven’t received any payments yet! Visual Studio is £680 whereas Xcode is free. If you search for a programming problem about .NET CF generally all the stuff is from 2003, then people pretty much stopped being excited about it, whereas there is a ton of iPhone information.

So I 100% disagree with Mr Watson’s statement but I guess MS need to try everything they can to keep their customers now with the threat of Android taking the #2 spot. It’s an even easier switch from C# to Java.

Someone asked me what I’d use it for I said – it’s years ahead of anything else. I see them on coffee tables, in meetings and for travel. Multitouch on that size screen just makes it so simple and intuitive to use and the apps look great. Also I see it as quite a socialable device, pass it round people, can’t really do that with a laptop. Personally I’ll buy one just because I wanted an ebook reader, but I wasn’t a fan of the E-Ink taking 2 secs to change page and flashing black, and the new Sonys have fuzzy displays because of the touch screen layer. I also think the web browser and email will be great to use in the morning instead of using my phone.

Overall, can’t wait to get one, and to start building apps for it. Two-player board-type games I believe will be big, can’t wait to play air hockey on it.