I got an iPhone
Surely enough, I got an iPhone. Before its launch, I said that I would have waited for at least the second generation of the device to actually buy one, but my lust for this sexy device quickly ate all my guilt for shelling $500 briefly after I tried one at the Apple store in Pasadena. Having been working on Blackberries for quite some time, I was curious to see how the iPhone would stand up in a comparison.
First, let’s acknowledge that the PalmOS platform is dead. Palm is switching to Windows Mobile…what a pity. My first Palm was a PalmPilot 5000 back when it still was US Robotics and for that time, they were great.
Another important fact we need to acknowledge is that the stylus is dead. Nobody wants to fiddle with it anymore, it was cool during the late 90s but now it’s definitely out.
Let’s also rule out two other players: Windows Mobile and Symbian. The latter is supported pretty much just by Nokia which also owns it…unfortunately there are so many handset makers now that Nokia doesn’t have the muscle anymore to impose its own OS. They missed their chance. I like Nokias, they’re very well engineered, they also used to look good, but lately they just look too dorky. They have a nice eclipse plugin to develop for their phones, all based on ant…it impressed me, in the template project there’s also a ‘bloetooth deploy’ target that worked just out of the box.
Window Mobile, it’s getting more mature but I still can’t stand its clumsy interface. I probably got traumatized when I gave up my palm to get a WindowsCE device and suddenly what I was doing in 2 seconds on my palm, took minutes on WinCE. I guess to have a Win32 API is good because you can find a lot of people who know it, but the Win32 API is so ugly and unpleasant to work with, that I doubt will take over the mobile world. Main reason is, windows crashes a lot, and it’s hard to tolerate that on your phone.
This leaves us with the Blackberry and the iPhone. Let’s talk about the Blackberry first.
Blackberries are nice devices. They used to be pretty ugly, but they worked like a charm, efficient and reliably. Both signs that their design was led by an engineer. They use a pretty clean Java API which is pretty slow, but it’s also easy to learn, and a free development kit can be downloaded from their site. Their interface is a wheel (or trackball) combined with a keyboard. Basically, the wheel/trackball allows you to operate the device with one hand only (which may be enough if you’re looking for an address, or you need to find a phone number or make a call). The keyboard is small but not too small, you’ll soon be able to type pretty fast. Some models (the 71xx) don’t have a full keyboard but they use a variant of multitap/predictive text that I personally hate. Predictive text is tailored to english, which makes writing in any other language very painful. Email works like a charm and so does the address book. There are many additional applications available. It’s a mature platform. And now they have some sexy models too. Not very good as an MP3 player though. There are models with GPS too, which could be handy.
You can also use the iPhone with one hand for many things. The on-screen keyboard lacks tactile feedback so it’s worse than the Blackberry but you get so much real estate on the screen!!! There are some devices with a big screen and a sliding full keyboard but they’re also pretty thick. If you type a lot of stuff, you probably want a device with a real keyboard.
The user interface will leave you breathless though. It looks good, and it’s so easy to use. Screen gets dirty easily though, since you need to slide your possibly dirty fingers on the screen to do pretty much anything.
My Yahoo Mail worked out of the box, but there are so many features that are missing. The email client is very weak, will just show you a certain number of emails, and you cannot search in your whole email archive. You don’t have a decent instant messenger (Yahoo!, MSN, Skype) probably because At&T doesn’t want you to go through your unlimited data plan, but wants you to use SMS (so you pay per message).
The iPod works well.. but you can’t download songs directly on the phone. That’s retard, at best. I would guess that’s one upcoming feature. Also, the phone is locked. I have an italian SIM card but I’ll have to use another phone to use it…so in my next trip there, I’ll need 2 phones, and 2 chargers.
YouTube on the iPhone was a slight disappointment. While it looks OK, just a small subset of videos are actually available for the iPhone. They are not cached so if you exit the player, and go back again to watch a video, you need to load again…a pain if you’re on EDGE and not on WiFi.
There’s no development kit out yet, and no info on how to create your own applications. That SUCKS!!
Well, my overall opinion is that while the Blackberry was built for business, the iPhone was built to be your buddy. You use your blackberry to organize your work, while you use the iPhone to organize your playtime.
Blackberry has many useful advanced features - search in the address book, in the emails, sync with corporate email, reliability - that you don’t have in the iPhone.
The iPhone may not be the best performer at work but it’s damn cool. It does a decent job as a phone, an excellent one as an iPod, but it’s not an open mobile computing platform. I hope this will change!!
Add comment August 8th, 2007
