I was part of a winning team that took home the first place prize and handsome cash reward for our internal iPhone competition here at Blast Radius, and I don’t even own an iPhone.

The goal was to form a dream team; pick an existing client; and design a game-changing iPhone app that they couldn’t live with it, and also to motivate us to build more apps/games on our own. So far Blast has produced 1 iPhone app commercially — iMotivator for Jordan’s Flight Club. And, I’m sure we’ll see a lot more iPhone apps being developed here in 2009/10 as demand heats up; hopefully it will pick up for android as well.

The competition was open to the Blast offices around the world with two stages: proposal and prototype. In the second phase, we produced a functional prototype leveraging box2d for our iphone game with various marketing and social media hooks.

Even though the iPhone doesn’t support Flash, Flash did play a major role in the success of our pitch. I was able to animate a complete game experience as if our game was real; very compelling to our judges. Its such a shame that the iPhone doesn’t support Flash — our game really doesn’t need objective c — we could create the entire thing in Flash and have it run on both phone and desktop — wishful thinking — which is one reason I’m more excited by the android platform after hearing Adobe’s promise to bring Flash 10 to android by 2010.

In Canada, we have these nasty 3 year phone contracts which are very expensive to break and I still find myself somewhat on the sidelines until I get a smart phone. I’m ready to purchase one but not at the price of breaking my existing contract to do so. In meantime, its great to have free tools available for both iPhone (xcode/interface builder) and Android (eclipse plugin) with virtual emulators.

When my contract ends next year, my plan is to get iTouch and then something like an HTC hero ( or which ever model supports android, Flash 10, and G3 — more dreaming ;-D ) and then get the best of both worlds.