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Quarterly results time, when the internet’s fancy turns to chicken-little predictions of how many percentage points this or that company slipped on which or what index of… who cares.

It’s not the first time we’ve mentioned this, and we’re certainly not the first people to have mentioned it. Yet, just like clockwork every 3 months analysts spout estimates and every blog and their commenters race to re-publish what in essence are meaningless numbers.

Cases in point: Apple and the iPhone.

Certainly, without much room for doubt or question, Apple’s market share and likely iPhone market share will be down this quarter. Newsflash: the market will likely be down this quarter. So if Apple is selling 1% or 2% less in terms of units, hellseven 10% less in terms of units, is that reason to panic?

If you’re an analyst or shockmedia type, likely “yes”, or if you’re manipulating stock for short term turnover rather than stable long term growth, “aye, ye scurvy dogs!”. But if you’re Apple?

No.

Historically, Apple doesn’t care about market share, they care about profit share. (They already own mind share, so we’ll remove that from the equation for now).

Apple is a public company that reports its margins, which typically run around 30%. Let that sink in for a moment. When Palm is selling millions of Centros and losing money hand over fist, when Nokia owns the international market and revenues plummet, when PC makers are racing each other to the bottom of the netbook price list to eek out razor-thin margins and gaining footprint only to hemorrhage cash, rumors of iPhone nanos and cheapo iNetbooks make as little sense for Apple as iSupply- and analyst-fueled headlines.

Sure, it’s nice for consumers to get low prices, but not at the expense of the companies going out of business and no longer giving us products or competition. Short term gain at long term loss isn’t sustainable. It’s the $0.99 fart app of the electronics space.

Apple reports earnings on April 22nd.

I was just listening to Dieter and Mike’s latest PalmCast, where they were crowing in duet about how sweet it was that the Palm Pre has an app that can book movie tickets and automagically add the movie event information to the Palm Pre calendar.

I know, I know. If they love the Palm Pre so much, why don’t they just marry it? (Dieter is, in fact, looking for a state that may allow it…) But they raise an excellent point — where’s the iPhone version of that functionality? Why can’t we push a button on our movie ticket app, or concert tour app, or tradeshow app, or whatever and have that slice of time booked off for us in our calendar?

While the iPhone SDK allows access to the Contacts database to do all manner of glorious, 3rd party app-powered magic, Apple has thus far not surfaced any APIs to do the same for calendaring. I don’t believe the new 3.0 SDK has announced any improvements in that area either.

What makes calendar so different? MobileMe and ActiveSync push both. Apple’s even giving Calendar some much-appreciated CalDAV and subscription love, with no CardDAV that we’re aware of for contacts.

We’re sure developers would appreciate it. We know users would adore it.

Anyone have any idea why we don’t have this yet?

Dieter briefly interrupted his CTIA coverage to text us pretty much the headline you see above. What combination of Las Vegas and mobile phone pressers zapped iPhone controlled robot dreams into his cerebral cortex we don’t — and don’t want to — know, but the idea itself… Awesome indeed.

With the new iPhone 3.0 SDK, Apple has opened the door to peripheral access via both the 30-pin dock port and Bluetooth with zero-config. The above video is an ingenious work-around for direct control, but with the new functionality promised this summer?

He. Wants. And we do to.

Lego, start your integration program!

It’s summer 2009 and iPhone OS 3.0 has just been made available via iTunes. You have it up and running along with next gen Twitter clients, instant massagers, RSS readers, and all manner of Push Notification-enabled apps ready to alert you the very instant anything new is piping hot and ready.

Then it happens. 20 new Twitter DMs. 3 co-workers IM you. Every tech blog you follow updates about iTunes not crashing this time. You calendar reminds you about that meeting coming up. And your entire FPS combat team all invite you to come join their game. Suddenly Push Notification is trying to pop up 30 text boxes all at once — while you’re in the middle of an urgent phone call.

How will you handle this, Apple?

Right now a single SMS pops up a message box that you either have to deal with right away, and if you dismiss it, it’s gone. If you forget what it was for… well, that’s tough. Imagine 30 of those, all at once. Will you even be able to hang up your phone call before canceling out all of them? And if you do cancel out of them, what chance to you have to really see and process alerts #1-29?

Both the Google Android with its top-down slider and the Palm Pre with their bottom loaded notification area provide a far less obtrusive and simultaneously more persistent — and dare we say more elegant? — notification solution.

Could you, Apple, have an improved system ready to drop on us in a future 3.0 beta? At WWDC? Or is that waiting on 4.0? And if you do have a way of handling it, what is it? What can you do given the current architecture, gesture library, and frameworks of the iPhone to better handle the onslaught of notifications you’re about to drop on us?

Pull down the topmost menu bar a la Android? Create a dedicated Notification app on the Home Screen we can launch to see, like recent calls, what we may have missed?

Maybe our readers have some ideas that can help. They certainly proved smarter than us on the Bluetooth toggle question. What say you, readers, any ideas on how Apple can prevent the notification equivalent of “ping death” befalling us come iPhone 3.0 and Push Notification Service this summer?

Last year, during the iPhone 2.0 SDK Event, Apple unleashed a slew of enterprise-aimed initiatives. Phil Schiller took the stage to showcase Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync licensing, as well as 802.1x, Cisco VPN, certificates, remote wipe, configuration tools, and more.

Schiller didn’t show up at the iPhone 3.0 Sneak Peek event (not until the apres-Q&A at least), and Apple didn’t announce something as spectacular as Exchange support this year. But was there anything compelling for businesses this time around?

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A while back Dieter asked for a fast way to toggle Airplane Mode on the iPhone — a triple click of the home button, perhaps. Yesterday he and I were talking about all the new Bluetooth functionality in iPhone 3.0 and the same point came up — right now, to turn Bluetooth on or off you have to:

Wake the iPhone, Slide to Unlock, (type a Passcode perhaps), (return Home perhaps), tap Settings, tap General, tap Bluetooth, and then toggle the ON/OFF switch.

That’s a lot of overhead, in terms of mental “work” and physical interactions.

With Bluetooth headsets, Stereo Bluetooth speakers, Bluetooth connectivity for accessories, Bluetooth connectivity of tethering, P2P gameplay and P2P app exchange, etc. a much faster way to flip the Bluetooth switch would be really appreciated.

Triple-click may not work in terms of usability, but surely there must be some other way? Maybe surface the ON/OFF toggle on the main Settings page, just before the drill down arrow? Jeremy thinks letting users add Settings shortcuts as icons on the Home Screen (like we can currently do with Safari bookmarks) would work. Anyone have any other ideas?

No, we’re not talking cut/copy and paste, nor MMS, video recording, or any other of the slew of major feature omissions tech pundits can’t go an article without kicking, dead-horse-like. (There must be songs and drinking games about them — enough already!) We’re talking the minor stuff, the small things, the tiny little tweaks Apple could roll out in a 2.2.2 or 2.3 OS update that would make our iPhone experience just that much better and more enjoyable on a day-to-day basis.

Apple has done it before, of course. Double-space to add a period. Double-tap Home to get to favorite phone numbers or the iPod app. Tap Home to slide back to the first/primary/main App screen. Having Apps update in-place rather than shoving them back to the first empty slot.

And they could do it again, perhaps even with minimal effort, and sooner rather than later.

iPhone OS 3.0 will be previewed next tuesday, March 17, but likely won’t be delivered to users until June or July. Here’s what we’d like to see from Apple in the meantime, after the break…

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I wasn’t at CES with CrackBerry Kevin and Smartphone Expert Dieter. I was at Macworld getting, you know, iPhone news. But even TiPb couldn’t ignore the Pre and it’s former-iPod/iPhone team designed goodness. So tempting is the Pre, in face, that we suspect iPhone and BlackBerry loyalists alike might stray from the fold to at least try it out come launch day (whenever that is). So, the question becomes, what to call them roving polygadetists? What matches up with CrackBerry or the Jesus Phone?

CrackBerry Kevin has been using Pre-Jects for a while now. TiPb has thrown around Pre-Verts. We’ve even carried the argument over to the Twitter (@reneritchie and @crackberrykevin — just don’t tell @backlon!)

Are we being Pre-Mature about the whole thing? Or Pre-sumptuous in not letting you, or much smarter and better looking commenters choose the name? We’ve even set up a handy, dandy poll in the forums.

UPDATE: Ah hellz ya! Dieter has got him a rebuttal going on over at PreCentral.net! Let’s get it on!

Apple decides which apps get approved for the iPhone/iPod touch App Store, provides little to no transparency on the process, prevents certain things like turn-by-turn GPS outright in the SDK agreement, and — though they’ve yet to use them — maintains black lists for GPS and malware that could remove any LocationServices or entire applications from iPhones everywhere. For this, and more, Apple has earned quite a bit of criticism — and rightly so in many cases.

What if Apple went further, however. They sell officially unlocked iPhones in several regions, like Hong Kong. They also have a program that grants developers tethering abilities for testing. What if, one day, people with unlocked or developer iPhones woke up to find the Paid section of the App Store gone. What would the community reaction be? What should it be?

Google, whose “don’t be evil” motto has been downgraded by management in recent years, is lauded for the openness of their Android Market (even though they’re known to have a kill switch of their ownl — to do otherwise would be irresponsible), yet our friends over at Android Central woke to find themselves in just such a situation this week. Paid apps. Gone.

We’re told it’s because of piracy concerns, that Google thinks developer units of the G1 make it easier for people to steal paid apps. Jeffdc5 on Twitter let us know developer G1 handsets could store apps on the SD memory card in addition to the on-device memory of the regular units, which could make them more pirate-able. However, we’ve seen that the iPhone — with no external memory — can have apps pirated as well, so is that readon enough? It smacks of the same “treat your customers as thieves” thinking that created DRM music, Microsoft Genuine Advantage, Sony rootkits, and Adobe invading our boot sectors…

Apple has already removed DRM from iTunes music, and has now removed product keys from boxed versions of iLife 09 and iWork 09 as well. It seems to be working out none too badly for them.

Openness is definitely A Good Thing. Maybe trust in your user base should be as well?

The iPhone, like the iPod before it (well, at least since the 3rd-gen iPod, when Apple switched from FireWire), uses a proprietary connector called the dock for charging, syncing, video and audio-out, and multiple other functions. A broad port with 30 pins for many purposes, having a proprietary connector gives Apple a lot of flexibility, but also — through their licensing program — a lot of control over who can make peripherals and what can be done with them.

During our last edition of the iPhone Live! podcast, Dieter flat-out stated that Apple needed to dump the dock. He pointed out that countries like China and regions like the EU are, or may be, making universal connectors like USB a legal requirement. One charger, one port, to rule them all. (HTC is already replacing the 3.5mm headphone jack, folding it into the mini-USB-like ExtUSB on devices like the Android G1).

The dock connector originally allowed Apple to keep FireWire compatibility and add USB when it entered the PC market. Over time, Apple has moved over to USB, and now with the iPhone 3G and later iPod’s, FireWire is gone completely and charging can only occur via USB. Since USB already provides power, provides data exchange, and technology like DisplayLink (which connects external displays via USB) show that an increasingly large range of connection types are becoming possible.

So, as technology marches on, as backwards compatibility is shed, and as standards like USB 2.0 (and in the future, USB 3.0) grow faster and more capable, is it time for Apple to dump the dock and go with the same port most everyone else is using (including Apple with the Mac)?