We’re still pissed off about this. Deal with it.

First, Jobs on the iPhone:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “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.”

The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

Actually, Steve, that’s all bullshit, and in fact a small telephone/computing device is exactly what I and others want. And the whole “it won’t work if you put software on it” thing is a damned lie; I don’t recall Treo or Windows Mobile people having this problem.

Mark Pilgrim has more, as does Open the Future; the latter suggests that regardless of how wrongheaded this is, Jobs may be digging in his heels on the “no outside software” point. The Steve isn’t known for backing up when he’s been wrong, so we’re pretty sure this means the iPhone will remain a crippled, useless thing instead of what it could have been.

Great job, Steve. Fuck you.