Tag Archives: iPhone

It’s the apps, stupid

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I’ve made the argument that the first generation iPhone wasn’t really a smartphone. It was just a really, really nice feature phone. As the lines between the two continue to blur–and some manufacturers ship the same handset with a smartphone OS under one name and an embedded OS under another–I think it’s worth pointing out what the difference really is. Smartphones are expandable, using third party software to do significantly more than they could fresh out of the box. With feature phones, you might get a lot of capability out of the box, but that’s also all you get. You can’t add new features later. Basically, smartphones have a native SDK.

The iPhone didn’t become a smartphone until the second generation. It wasn’t wasn’t the 3G radio that made it a smartphone, or indeed any of the capabilities it shipped with. What made it a smartphone was the App Store. The ability to easily add software to make the iPhone do different things, things Apple didn’t provide. The App Store is probably the single most important feature in the iPhone and iPod Touch, making iPhone a smartphone instead of a mere media phone, and the iPod Touch a PDA rather than just a media player.

This is a fundamental advantage over previous platforms, and a big part of the reason why the other platforms have been scrambling to catch up. Having the ability to search for, browse and buy applications directly on the device makes it so much more likely people will actually use third party software. I saw statistics back in the day saying that while people who used third party apps on the Palm typically installed dozens of them, over 70% of Palm users never installed even one application that didn’t come with the phone. A lot of them didn’t even know they could. The shiny blue App Store icon on the iPhone removes that limitation.

But there’s something else here that makes the iPhone and iPod Touch special. Not only are apps much easier to add to the iPhone than other smartphones, but the apps themselves tend to be of an average higher quality than those on other platforms. I know there’s a lot of fluff on the App Store, and I should point out that I haven’t purchased a single one of the myriad choices for providing artificial flatulence, but the apps I have purchased have all been more polished and stable than most (but not all) of the Windows Mobile apps I’ve used. On the whole, the average iPhone app is a more satisfying user experience than the average Windows Mobile app.

In the next few days, I’m going to spotlight some of what I think makes the iPhone stand out, and compare those apps to counterparts on other platforms. So far, here’s what I have in mind:

  • Tweetie in the iPhone vs PockeTwit on the Touch Pro
  • Birdhouse (a unique and excellent idea)
  • eReader, Stanza and Kindle, oh my!
  • What to do: Toodledo vs Life Balance vs Ultimate ToDos
  • Evernote on the iPhone vs Evernote on Windows Mobile

If you have any other ideas or suggestions for iPhone software you’d like to see me cover, let me know in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.

iPhone/iPod Touch first impressions

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(slathers butter on roasted crow; makes it go down easier)

(For the purposes of this post, I’m going to consider the iPhone and iPod Touch to be basically the same thing. I know they’re not, believe me, and I find myself missing 3G daily on the Touch, but the user experience for most things is pretty much the same between the two if you have WiFi, so I’m calling it good.)

(Enough with the parentheticals already and get on with it.)

As I mentioned before, I recently bought an iPod Touch. My reasons for stepping foot in the Apple ecosystem were many.

  • Too many applications I wanted to use (Life Balance, Stanza, Kindle) were only available for the iPhone, not Windows Mobile
  • I wanted to go back to a two-device solution (PDA and phone versus smartphone) so incoming calls wouldn’t interrupt podcasts/audiobooks
  • TV shows I wanted to watch, like ABC’s “Castle” were only available through iTunes
  • It’s so very pretty
  • Target (pronounced tar-ZHAY around here) had a great deal on the 8GB model
  • Windows Mobile on my Touch Pro was PISSING ME OFF

That last one probably should be weighted moreso than the others.

So I did it, I took the plunge. What do I think?

I think those folks at Apple might be on to something. Seriously, this is gonna be big.

What?

Okay, first, let’s take a look at my set up. I got the 8GB instead of the 16 or 32 because a) this is a “test run” of sorts to see if I want to move up to the iPhone, and b) I’m cheap. Or frugal. No, pretty much just cheap. Anyway, I got the 8GB version, but with no expectation whatsoever that I’d put all my music and video on it. Apple doesn’t make an iPod that big.

The second generation Touch has WiFi, but no (activated) Bluetooth. It has a Bluetooth radio, but no software to drive it. This will be “fixed” by the 3.0 firmware coming this summer, so I’ll have Bluetooth then. For now WiFi is adequate. I get around the lack of 3G by carrying a hotspot with me everywhere I go. Really. I use a program on my Touch Pro (and yes, I recognize the irony in buying an iPod because I’m sick of WM only to find that a feature of my WM device is all that makes the iPod actually useful, shaddup) called WMWiFiRouter to turn my Touch Pro into a hotspot. It takes my 3G EVDO connection and provides ad-hoc WiFi access to it, so as far as my Touch knows, I just have a regular hotspot that… follows me around. Hey, it works.

The iPod Touch is essentially a PDA, the successor to the Newton. In fact, anyone who used late-stage PalmOS PDAs like the TX or LifeDrive will find it a familiar experience. The home screen is a grid of icons, you use one app at a time (with minor exceptions for things like music) and get back to the launcher by pressing the home button again. In a lot of ways, I think the iPod Touch is what Palm was shooting for with the LifeDrive, but they just didn’t execute on it. The iPhone adds a 3G radio so you’re not tied to hotspots, GPS and a camera. Oh, and it can make phone calls, like anyone actually talks anymore.

First impressions

Holy crap, this thing is thin. The front of it is a solid sheet of optical-grade glass. The back, which tapers around to the screen so there almost aren’t any sides, really, is polished stainless steel. This thing has already hockey pucked, screen down, across parking lot asphalt (I’m used to A2DP headphones, not being physically tethered to the device) and the screen remains scratchless. Very impressed with the build quality, is what I’m saying.

Seeing the Apple lock screen in person tells me how good a copy S2U2 for Windows Mobile really is. This is the only place your wallpaper shows on the device but it does the job and it’s easy to get past while also keeping the device from pocket launching applications.

Once you get the device unlocked, you’re treated to the Springboard, the Apple homescreen. See if this sound familiar. You have a grid of program icons against a solid color background. You have four assigned to a row of “buttons” at the bottom that never change. And it’s called Springboard, the name of the expansion slot on the Handspring Visor. Why hasn’t Palm sued Apple for patent infringement?

Overall, the Apple homescreen does the job, but it’s hardly ideal. Even the ancient Palm had categories for apps, Windows Mobile has folders. On the iPod/iPhone, you have screens, labeled by helpful nondescript dots. I try to keep everything on each Springboard screen related around a central theme, PIM stuff on the first screen, media on the second, etc. but this is really hard to keep straight. And there’s no way to sort them alphabetically, so I’m not sure how people with eight screens of icons keep straight what is where. The new 3.0 firmware due this summer will add a little Spotlight magnifying glass in front of the first dot, making it pretty easy to narrow down what you’re looking for by typing. Really looking forward to that, hoping it’s as fast and intuitive as Initiate on PalmOS. For now, though, the Apple homescreen is barely contained chaos. But it’s pretty, so I guess all is forgiven.

The device comes with both calendar and contacts apps, and they work, but are nothing special. I’m kind of annoyed that the calendar app doesn’t use the little numeric badge over it’s icon to tell you how many appointments you have today, the way so many other apps do. These may have been revolutionary when they came out, but there are so many more functional rip-offs on other platforms now that it’s all kind of meh. Notably missing is a tasks application. I guess folks in Cupertino just do stuff when they get around to it. Me, I need a to do list. Fortunately there are lots of options in the App Store.

A lot has been said about Safari Mobile as the end all, be all of mobile browsing. I don’t know about that, but there are some things about it I do really like. Rendering speed is okay, and I got used to the pinch-to-zoom thing really quickly. What I really like is how Safari handles multiple tabs. Basically you tap an icon on the toolbar and you see snapshots of each page you have open lined up horizontally against a gray, neutral background. You can drag back and forth to switch between them, or tap the little red X in the upper left corner of each to close it. This reminds me a lot of webOS’s card system for multitasking, which just goes to show Apple had a good UI for running application management already and could have used this system-wide had they really wanted to.

The other thing I really like about Safari is that because the iPhone is so bloody popular, a lot of websites have iPhone-optimized sites that work basically like little applications (think Palm’s webOS apps written in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, but not running locally on the device). You can treat these as though they were local apps. Tap the bookmark button and you have the option to either bookmark the link in Safari or create a homescreen shortcut to it in Springboard. If you choose the latter, you get a nice icon on your homescreen that looks and acts just like a local application as long as you have internet access when you tap it. And since Safari supports multiple tabs, it doesn’t replace what you were doing in your browser, something that always bugged me about using web apps in Blazer on my Treo.

Not everything about Safari is so nice, though. It doesn’t reflow text at any zoom size the way Opera, Skyfire and other Windows Mobile browsers do, so you better be able to read relatively small text or be ready for a lot of back and forth scrolling if a site you’re reading has fairly wide columns. This is one of those “our way or the highway” decisions that still really irks me about Apple.

The music app and the iTunes music store work really well on this device, and as well they should; it is an iPod, after all. Control and playback is easy, and coverflow is actually kind of cool on the device’s wide touchscreen. And I love that I can doubletap the home button to bring up a little media control window in any app without quitting the app (come on, Apple, open up multitasking for the rest of us). But honestly what I’m most impressed with is how it handles podcasts.

You have to subscribe to podcasts in iTunes on the desktop, though you can access them ad hoc in the music store if you tap on a “Subscribe in iTunes” link in Safari. The device keeps track of your listening position in every podcast, and even displays a little pie chart in list views to give you an idea of how far you’re into each file. From each podcast listing, you can get more episodes over WiFi without having to sync with your desktop. And while you’re listening, double tapping the album art will bring up a scrollable, translucent panel with the shownotes. I really liked BeyondPod on Windows Mobile, but this is definitely the way to listen to podcasts.

I don’t have much to say about photos and videos on the device. The photo viewer is pretty bare bones, and frankly inferior to Windows Mobile offerings like HTC Album. About all I really use it for is setting my lockscreen wallpaper (which, btw, is replaced by album art of anything you’re currently listening to). The video app is also pretty spartan, but the playback quality is excellent. I’ve bought a few episodes of ABC’s “Castle” from iTunes on my desktop to watch on the iPod and they look amazing, just as good as TV. And at over 600MB for a 43 minute episode, it should. Sheesh. I can see why the 8GB model is the low end.

Speaking of iTunes on the desktop, this is also a mixed bag, and possibly the weak link in the Apple ecosystem. Syncing is very picky, especially about photos, and doesn’t tell you what went wrong or what file caused the problem when there is one. It just bombs out with a cryptic error message. I thought Microsoft had the market cornered on those. At least it doesn’t say PC LOAD LETTER. I don’t think I could take that. It also doesn’t seem to be bright enough to either use the hidden jpeg files Microsoft puts in folders for album art or download said album art from it’s own music store. Each file you buy from the iTunes Music Store has album art embedded in the file itself, so it will display on just about anything, which I like, but for CDs you rip you have to go to Amazon, drag the album art to your desktop and then drag it again into iTunes manually for each CD. Lame. I should also note that Windows Media Player 12 in Windows 7 can play Apple’s new unrestricted AAC Plus .m4a files flawlessly.

Okay, that’s probably too much for one post already. I’ll cover the App Store in another post, along with my favorite apps and why other platforms copying the app store itself might not be enough.

Starting down the the path to the Dark Side

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It’s time I just come out and say it. I have little to no faith in Microsoft’s ability to execute with the future of Windows Mobile. Specifically, upgradeability is a problem, and without that, new hotness features like the new user interface and app store are completely irrelevant for most Windows Mobile users.

While Apple, Google, Palm and even RIM are providing easy, free and in some cases non-destructive (leaves your data in place) upgrades, virtually none of the devices currently on the market, even those with more than enough horsepower to handle it, will be upgradeable to Windows Mobile 6.5. And upgradeability from 6.5 to 7, due out next year, looks similarly bleak. In the midst of a global recession while the competition is adding value to the devices people already have, Microsoft and their partners seem to believe that their users will be willing and eager to upgrade not once but twice to new hardware inside an 18 month window.

Microsoft, of all companies, should know better. Witness their current difficulty in getting users to upgrade from Windows XP. My company, a Fortune 500 corporation, just added Firefox as an option alongside IE 6 this week. The collective “thanks, but no thanks” from the user community they got for Vista will ring hauntingly familiar when people don’t line up to buy handsets based on their new operating systems. A deep recession is the worst time to pull what is likely to be seen as a bait and switch: Buy a hot new Touch Pro today, but you’ll have to buy the Touch Pro 2 to get 6.5, and then something else next year to get 7.

Conversely, other mobile platforms are showing far more good faith with their userbase. Even owners of the original iPhone will be able to upgrade to the forthcoming 3.0 firmware this summer, although their hardware won’t support all of the features. Palm has promised over the air, non-destructive upgrades for webOS on the Pre, fitting with their “everything in the cloud” philosophy. So taking a solid look around, I decided to try something else. The Pre isn’t out yet, and the Blackberry is still fairly primitive as mobile OSes go, not much more advanced than PalmOS Garnet. Y’all see where this is going.

No, I didn’t buy an iPhone. I bought an iPod Touch last Friday. The plan is to use this for a few months to get used to the Apple mobile OS and application experience, and then make an informed decision this summer to go one of three ways:

  1. Buy a third generation iPhone, or a refurb second generation (confusingly known as the 3G; I know why it’s called that, but still awkward) if the hardware differences aren’t all that significant (kinda hoping for an iPhone HD tho, mmm nummy 720p graphics)
  2. Buy a Palm Pre and either continue to use the iPod Touch for media (thinking primarily ebooks– eReader, Stanza, Kindle– and video from iTunes) and the Pre for everything else, or just the Pre and give the iPod to my mom if the Pre has eReader support at launch
  3. Buy a Blackberry Pearl and use it strictly as a phone, messenger and tether it over Bluetooth (yay, PdaNet!) to my iPod Touch when I’m out of WiFi range

Notice that none of those possibilities mentions Windows Mobile. While I’m hanging on to my Touch Pro until one of the aforementioned three possibilities emerges, I’m already acutely aware of how clunky and awkward it is, even with TouchFlo3D, compared to more modern alternatives.

Palm’s accident of timing

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It’s about time something went Palm’s way. And now, suddenly, everything seems to be going Palm’s way. They blew everyone away at CES, are getting tons of positive press in the national media, and now, their biggest rival in the mobile space looks primed to falter.

I don’t think anyone at Palm was rooting for Jobs to step down for health reasons, but the situation is what it is. Currently the mobile market is Apple’s to lose, but their hold is a lot more tenuous than it initially appears. No one has a lock on the still growing mobile market, no one has established numerical dominance, and Apple’s early lead in a field that has only just recently penetrated the consciousness of “normal” consumers could easily repeat their early lead in personal computing, and we see how that turned out.

And now, Apple is losing their rudder. Steve Jobs, the “tyrant with exceptional taste” that has driven Apple in all their successful years, is taking an indefinite leave of absence from the company. He says he’ll be back by summer, but given how much he’s publically underestimated his health problems already, many analysts think this is really the end of the Jobs era and he won’t be coming back, ever. As 2009 wears on, Tim Cook will officially lead the company he’s been de facto leading for a while now.

But there will be a difference. Cook may have kept the trains running on time, but Jobs was the visionary. Jobs was the creative force behind Apple’s big moves. Without him, Apple will have a tendency to coast, to continue doing what they know already works and stop innovating. (It’s worth noting that the internal force at Apple really responsible for two of their big Jobs 2.0 innovations, the first iMac and the iPod, is Palm’s Jon Rubenstein.)

So Palm may have an opportunity here to swipe smartphone dominance out from under a sleeping Apple. If the Pre really is everything people like about the iPhone and fixes everything people don’t like about the iPhone, Palm really could have the trifecta of industry-defining devices (Pilot, Treo, Pre) and take the lead as the company everyone else wants to beat. Before CES, I wouldn’t have bet that Palm could execute well enough to take advantage of that opportunity, but now I’m not so sure. Ed Colligan’s experience with mobile and the cell phone market combined with Jon Rubenstein’s knack for innovation and design are proving a tough combination to beat.

Palm Pre is close, but no cigar

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Don’t get me wrong. Palm’s keynote at CES was impressive (I wasn’t there, but thanks to liveblogging from gdgt, TreoCentral and cnet, I feel like I was). Palm’s webOS platform and Pre smartphone take the best of the iPhone and Google Android, mix them together and fix all their flaws. It’s an excellent smartphone.

And a year ago, maybe even six months ago, that might have mattered.

The mobile market is crowded and getting more crowded. The line between smartphones and feature phones is blurrier than ever, and might be eradicated entirely if Android fulfills its promise to become the dominant “feature phone” OS. Here in the US, the battle lines are drawn, with each major carrier having a preferred smart platform. Verizon has Blackberry, T-Mobile has Android, AT&T has the iPhone, and now Sprint has the Pre. And even there, Palm is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, hitching their wagon to a carrier that is best known in the last few years for hemorrhaging customers and money alike. The Pre doesn’t even support Wimax.

See, here’s the problem. The Pre doesn’t fit. It’s a great smartphone, but that’s not enough anymore. You have to plug into a whole ecosystem to make it work. Palm’s intent is for the Pre (which comes with Exchange OTA sync out of the box) to plug into anything, and it might work, but it’s a longshot.

I’ll be sticking with Windows Mobile for my smartphone needs at least for another year or so. Because I use Microsoft Office on my other PCs, sync my files with Live Mesh, manage my media with Windows Media Player, email with Exchange, manage my photos with Live Photos, etc. I use a Microsoft smartphone because I’ve already bought in to Microsoft services. And services are coming to drive device selection, not the other way around. And Palm, as cool as their new platform is, doesn’t supply services.

Maybe this is where their partner announcements will pay off. Facebook featured prominently in their keynote, as did Google. But can someone other than Google make a better Android than Android? I wouldn’t put money on it. Palm’s last fight will be a good one, they’ll go down swinging, but the ending is not in doubt.

Yet again, Windows Mobile trumps the iPhone

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image 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.

Google Android kill switch no big deal?

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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?