Gizmodo is reporting, and we have heard elsewhere as well, that the new Apple iPhone will be a closed system — i.e., like an iPod, not like a proper handheld smart device.

By contrast, all Treos and Windows Mobile machines have the ability to add programs from third party developers. Their usefulness is limited only by developer ingenuity and the phone’s owner. Apple, by contrast, has apparently chosen the opposite plan, where only they can decide what can run on the iPhone.

If this is true — and at this point is seems very much so — Steve was being very disingenuous when he said this thing “runs OS X.”

Laura Lemay put it this way, over on The Well:

From the further info coming out it doesn’t run Mac OSX — it runs something that looks like OSX but is actually a locked down, proprietary system similar to that of the iPod.

When us geeks hear “it runs OSX” we think we’re hearing “It’s unix, we can write apps for it and get a bash prompt.” But when Steve says “it runs OSX” he’s saying “it looks like OSX and has the same icons and interface whizzies you expect from OSX.”

Exactly.

It’s still a very nice phone, if it lives up to the hype, but $500 for a closed machine is more than Heathen will consider no matter who pays the bill. In fact, it’s overpriced by a factor of 5. There’s no chance at all of us adopting such a phone, Apple shiny-ness or no, for more than $100 if we’re limited to what Steve thinks is useful. No thanks, Apple. We’ll take another Treo and wait for someone else to do this properly.