Joost released a new iPhone application that, at first, seems like a pretty cool idea. You can use it to stream any of the videos hosted on Joost to the iPhone and watch them wherever you are. Neat! Movies and TV shows on the go! Premium content, because you can only watch that cat riding a Roomba on YouTube so many times.

Well, not so fast.

Like seemingly everything else about the iPhone, there’s a fatal flaw or two that makes the whole thing kind of WTF. Like you can’t use it over cellular data. At all. Nada. WiFi only, so no watching on the bus or the train, but more to the point, let’s think about this. You can only watch it at a hotspot. Meaning somewhere where you’re stationary, probably sitting down. Maybe enjoying a yummy coffee bean oriented beverage.

Where you could just pull out your damn laptop.

Is anyone really going to try to tell me that watching videos on the 3.5 inch, 320×480 screen on an iPhone is a better experience than watching them on even a 9 inch netbook? Really?

So while this is a nice idea, it thoroughly misses the point. It can’t see the point. The point is, well, a speck.

Contrast this to Windows Mobile. Install the free proxy browser Skyfire, and just about any Windows Mobile device can watch streaming video from Joost, Hulu or, well, anywhere. And you can do it over cellular. On a train. Where maybe a netbook wouldn’t be as convenient.

Unlike other mobile browsers, Skyfire supports the desktop version of Adobe Flash applications so sites, including those that serve-up video and music, are rendered exactly as you would expect - just like your PC. You will instantly recognize the content, be familiar with the page layout — which is not true for most mobile browsing experiences. We support all that’s good about today’s web - not just Flash, but also Silverlight, Ajax, QuickTime and more. And even better: Skyfire evolves with the newest capabilities without you having to do anything.

Yeah, I thought so.

As you may have heard, Google has a “kill switch” feature in Android that allows them to remotely remove software they deem malicious from Android-based cell phones. While some potential end users are up in arms about this feature, the reaction from the developer community has been much more mild.

Some of the application developers for Google’s Android platform said they weren’t aware of a kill switch feature the vendor reportedly has put into its mobile operating system, but they weren’t too surprised either. "We’re not too concerned. We’re not making malicious apps. It should be fine and I totally understand why they’d want to do it," said Jeff Kao, co-founder of Ecorio, a Toronto-based developer.

Google Android Developers Not Surprised By Kill Switch - The Google Channel - IT Channel News And Views by CRN and VARBusiness

Josh Curry and I discussed this on the latest Maximum Geek (Episode 28, just posted), and we came down squarely on opposite sides of the issue. Josh sees it as an abomination, yet another way Google can get corrupted by the power they wield. Personally, I don’t see it as much different from Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool, which is installed with every copy of Windows that has automatic updates turned on. It gives Google a way to remove software that poses a real danger to phones or networks, but users have to trust that Google will use it only as a means of last resort. Most users and developers seem willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt on this, where the same people were much more alarmed when the secretive and heavy-handed Apple was revealed to have the same feature on the iPhone (it’s probably worth mentioning that while the iPhone kill switch was a secret uncovered by code inspection, Google spilled the beans on the Android kill switch themselves).

Go ahead and read Josh’s take and then let us know where you stand on the issue. Can Google be trusted to use this feature benevolently?