Microsoft's Ray Ozzie: "Apps Don’t Make Your Phone Special"

Well, I used to program the Atari 400, but people expect a little more these days. I'll bet the machine you played Tribes and Wipeout on had a larger screen than an iPhone. Compared to what more programmers experience on the desktops, the current crop of smart phones requires resource management in terms of CPU, memory, storage, and screen real estate.

People are used to more, and we need to do it with less time. They don't want to wait for loading screens, they want to load their smoothly scrolling images over the WiFi on-demand from Flickr while performing high quality interpolation to produce the thumbnails.

They want to rotate the device to CoverFlow, and we'll have to load all those images as GL textures and pay the CPU hit for rendering the text labels as they rapidly scroll through their caturday pictures, all the while downloading and caching images in the background to provide a seamless and smooth user experience.

I can't add loading screens (so I have time to preload/pre-render), or restrict my data accesses to loading to optimized textures I have on disk, or spend months (years?) working on optimizing out every CPU cycle. That's not what people want.

So yes, for the things people expect from our applications, we're up against serious resource limits.