It ain’t pretty but it works

“She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts.“
 – Han Solo

As a Win­dows Mobile user, I’m con­sis­tently amazed that peo­ple take the iPhone seri­ously as a smart­phone plat­form. Yes, my Treo has an old school 2003 inter­face and isn’t as shiny as newer smart­phones (includ­ing “black slab” iPhone wannabes like the Black­berry Storm and even WM devices like the HTC Touch Dia­mond and Sam­sung Omnia), but I’m also not ham­strung with arbi­trary limitations.

Let me give you an exam­ple. Apple recently released the 2.2 update for the iPhone, which finally allows users to down­load pod­casts directly to the phone if they’re on the go. Sounds cool, right? I mean, it must be really good if Apple was will­ing to kill a pop­u­lar appli­ca­tion on the app store because they were about to pro­vide the same func­tion­al­ity in a bet­ter, Apple-​sanctioned experience.

Only it’s actu­ally pretty lame. First off, it doesn’t let you down­load any­thing over 10MB over 3G, because heaven for­bid you actu­ally use that high speed con­nec­tion for any­thing where you could actu­ally tell the dif­fer­ence between it and Edge. No, any­thing over 10MB (and most pod­casts are) can only be down­loaded via WiFi, which means you have to stay at the hotspot while you down­load. So much for “on the go.”

But it gets worse. It also doesn’t sync what you’ve down­loaded and played with the desk­top, so there’s no way to tell your iPhone to check all your sub­scribed pod­casts and down­load the new stuff. You have to check each one man­u­ally (through the same Apple iTunes Music store that should, the­o­ret­i­cally, know what you’ve already down­loaded) and remem­ber on your own what you haven’t heard yet.

So let me get this straight. Apple pulls a pop­u­lar app from the app store because they’re going to pro­vide that func­tion­al­ity in the base OS, but then their solu­tion not only doesn’t take advan­tage of inte­gra­tion with other Apple prod­ucts (iTunes, music store), but also imposes lim­i­ta­tions on where and how you can use it? And iPhone users have been brain­washed into think­ing this is a good thing?

On my junky look­ing, out­dated user inter­face Treo, on the other hand, I can install the open source and free Beyond­Pod, which allows me to import my pod­cast feeds from an XML file or from Google Reader, keeps track of what I’ve lis­tened to and what I haven’t, down­loads new pod­casts both à la carte and on a sched­ule (I have it down­load every­thing at 3am while I sleep) and has no lim­i­ta­tions on how much I can down­load, when or where I down­load, and can even stream pod­casts instead of down­load­ing. It can also option­ally delete each file as soon as done lis­ten­ing to it.

Or, if I want a “slicker” user inter­face, I can use Kinoma Play. It can also either down­load or stream pod­casts when­ever I want, as well as play media from Orb, Audi­ble, YouTube and lots of other ser­vices, all from the same mod­ern and con­sis­tent user inter­face. Or I could use Pocket Player from Con­duits, which also… well, you get the idea.

The iPhone is a great basic media player and inter­net ter­mi­nal, but until has the power and flex­i­bil­ity of Win­dows Mobile, or even Palm OS, don’t tell me it’s a smart­phone. It may not be pretty, but my Treo gives me options, not limitations.