Thursday August 21, 2008
iPhone 3G I dumped my Treo 650 the other day for an iPhone 3G. The Treo was way long in the tooth and the 3G and the GPS receiver on the iPhone 3G made it irresistible to me. A few years after I graduated from college I worked for Pactel (later Airtouch) Teletrac and the concept of location tagging data has since been of interest to me.
A few things (none of them surprising) which are big hits are:
App Store - Great idea. What a PITA it was to get applications onto the Treo.
Use of Location - I'm somewhat surprised at how well some of the base applications use location.
Physical properties - This phone is the perfect size for me.
Number of free applications - Given the restrictive environment there are a lot of free applications which are more then toys. The Movies application by Jeff Grossman is a wonderful example of a fairly simple but really well done application which just rocks my world and uses location in a very natural way. The MarbleMash game by Jirbo is a neat game which uses the accelerometer nicely.
Quality of non-free applications - With most of the prices being below $10 I was surprised there was much of a difference between the free and non-free applications. I really like Absolute Fitness by Aqua Eagle. What a nice application which dovetails with the kinds of things I want to do with my mobile platform.
Keyboard - I'm very surprised at how well this works. I thought the lack of tactile feedback would make it really painful instead of just a learning curve.
And there are some things which are not big hits:
Battery life - I feel like I've taken a 1/2 decade step back. I have to worry about having a charger with me on day long trips. Turning off 3G isn't really an answer in my book. First off it doesn't seem to save me much. And if I didn't want 3G then I wouldn't have bought the phone.
Camera - A toy at best. At least as the software works at the moment it is primarily for associating pictures with contacts.
Multitasking - The platform appears to be underpowered for some of what it attempts to do. Having the App Store exit when you start a download is an interesting way of keeping you from continuing to try to use the Internet but that is pretty much a bandaid. Let the stuff I'm focused on get the machines resources and queue up the download to happen as possible. I vaguely remember Jobs commenting on their multitasking model as being superior during the launch of this product. That is just spin.
Visibility into failures - I just upgraded the system software to 2.0.2 (5C1) and the system seems more stable so this has taken a back seat. But before that I regularly would start an application and it would just exit. I would have no clue why. At one point I only had a few GB of storage left so I deleted a movie and one application started working again. If it was really just running out of storage somehow then it would have been nice to have been told that.
Keyboard - yea, it works better then I thought it would but you still don't get tactile feedback. I'll get use to it.
Lack of free applications - Above I was surprised at how many there were but there are still a lot missing. It was easy to find a free database application on the Treo. iDB Datamaster by Evince Technologies seems to me to be the closest but the list of data types supported is limited. They seem to have a bunch of complex types but not some of the simple ones I need (e.g. lists of strings). The killer to even trying to application was that when I sent them email they didn't answer.
Ability to Demo non-free applications - I understand this is an Apple limitations. Seems like a natural feature for a closed environment like this. It would have meant I tried iDB Datamaster and if it sufficed I would have bought it.
Programming environment - I want to write one off applications for my phone. Give me some basic scripting ability ala {Basic,Python,TCL}/TK or the like. I'll write my own specific database. I'll prototype things which I might then write natively for the platform. I'm going to San Francisco's Outside Lands this weekend and the Crowdfire concept looks neat. The capabilities of the iPhone 3G could play to trying to prototype an application around Crowdfire. But the startup cost of developing on this platform makes that impossible for me.
( Aug 21 2008, 04:02:21 PM PDT )
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My reasons for not dumping my Treo 650 for iPhone include:
No "To Do" lists on iPhone. The App store lists do NOT sync with iCal.
No mail message filtering. I have a filter on my Treo that only shows me "To or CC:" my email address. I don't want to see 150 messages a day on a small device.
No Memo syncing with a Mac memo application.
Tactile keyboard and one handed use on my Treo is great.
I already have an iPod and don't need the iPhone's iPod features. As a PDA, the Treo still kicks the iPhone's butt.
Posted by Jim Laurent on August 21, 2008 at 06:21 PM PDT #
I'm also overdue to upgrade from 650 to something slimmer, stabler, with better camera and battery life. I'm torn between iPhone and Nokia E71. The latter is even thinner than iPhone, has a real keyboard and well built; GPS and FM radio are nice to have, too.
OTOH the old Symbian platform and no touch UI are big turn offs. My main reservation with iPhone is TCO: both Apple and AT&T seem to shamelessly milk customers in so many ways. Still thinking.
Posted by artem on August 22, 2008 at 09:14 AM PDT #