Congratulations Apple, you made the iPhone less stable than Windows Mobile | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations Apple, you made the iPhone less stable than Windows Mobile

blogs.zdnet.com

50 pointsbdfh4227 comments

From the last paragraph:

I just have to keep remembering this is the early days of the iPhone and I suppose it is similar to the early days of the Pocket PC when stability was also an issue. I did cut Microsoft and Nokia a break back then when they were starting out and I’ll keep using my original iPhone...

If I only had a nickel for every news article that would be dramatically improved if the last paragraph -- the one where the author apologizes for the linkbait headline -- were moved to the top.

Windows Mobile is somewhere between 5 and 8 years old. The release version of the iPhone OS is all of one year old and version 2.0 is only a month old. If you don't want to be burned like an early adopter, don't be an early adopter.

Incidentally, the rate at which MobileSafari crashes dropped a lot, for me, when I installed iPhone OS 2.0.1. This article doesn't say whether or not the author has done the same. And I agree that 3G and GPS may not be worth the additional monthly fees and the reduced battery life... which is why I bought a 2G iPhone on eBay.

I think I have seen a lot less safari crashes. However, iphone apps seem to crash my phone a lot, and in particular, the app store crashes my phone about half the time I try to use it.

Agreed. 2.0.1 fixed a lot of things that were bugging me. I'm still not entirely satisfied with some things - it's a bit slower than I'd like, particularly when loading up music - but at least Apple's given me reason to believe that things will get better.

The first rule of Apple products is you don't talk about bugs or issues with Apple products.

Heaven forbid they release an unfinished, buggy product and we rant and rave about it to no end. (Oh wait, we'll save that for Microsoft products only - namely Vista).

Early versions suck. Whether in technology, ideas or anything. This issue isn't exclusive to anything or anyone.

Is the iPhone 2.* software better or worse than the unlocked iPhone?

This is version 2 of a year old product. It's marginally different than version 1, but significantly more buggy.

Huh? I had to reboot my Windows Mobile phone (BlackJack) every day, else the mobile IE would refuse to display any web page. Mobile Safari has yet to crash on me. Statements like this "you made the iPhone less stable than Windows Mobile" are useless.

It's just the new "twitter doesn't scale". They'll get bored and move onto something else.

Compare it with a Nokia N95, which I had before I got my 2G iPhone, and now wish I hadn't given away.

The N95 has a 3G antenna, and a battery that last for days, even with heavy use of it's Webkit based browser.

Apple releasing a 3G iPhone that has worse battery life than the currently terrible battery life of a 2G is fucking ridiculous.

Yeah, I have had this problem on two different Windows Mobile phones... one with WM5 and one with WM6. Why do cell phone applications all suck so badly?

amusingly safari crashed on me just as I finished reading the article on my iphone

Funny. Mine is as stable as my Macbook - eg very. But then I haven't installed any 3rd party apps, so maybe that's the difference.

Virtualization support would be great for 3rd party apps. You could have two tiers of apps. 2nd tiered apps would run sandboxed and virtualized, while 1st tier apps would run native with access to background processes. Certifying the 1st tier would be a lot harder, however.

a) Safari's unstable, and it's an Apple app

b) Any OS that lets user-mode apps break it has major flaws and needs to be fixed (and AFAICT no third party apps install drivers).

c) Virtualization is not a fix for b).

Agreed. I'm not proposing virtualization as a fix for stability specifically. I'm thinking mainly about security with stability as a pleasant side effect. The OLPC folks gave the XO laptop this capability to ensure 3rd party app security in what they thought could be the "largest software monoculture in the world." Turns out the iPhone is further along on that than the XO. (Blackberry is even farther along, but they seem to have avoided catastrophes. I wonder if the Black hats just haven't learned that it pays to be subtle?)

I'm just glad that people are starting to recognize that there are other mobile phone OS's out there. For a while there it seemed like everybody thought that the iPhone was the first phone ever to have computer-like capabilities.

Pretty senseless post. It's not really Apple's fault that he happens to have bad 3G reception in his area.

I'm not sure why I even finished reading this 2-page rant that was obviously not going to mention anything people don't already know by now. He didn't even bother making his rant interesting, funny, or concise.

From the post: The 3G has been very spotty, especially compared to the solid reception I am seeing on the Nokia E71-2, N95-3, and HTC Advantage.

From your comment: It's not really Apple's fault that he happens to have bad 3G reception in his area.

Cognitive dissonance on your part? He compares with other devices and says that Apple's iPhone is bad at 3G.

My mistake. I don't know why I read over that part. I guess I was biased since I haven't had any problems with 3G reception on the iPhone.

Edit: And I do acknowledge some of the flaws he mentions, but overall it just seems he exaggerated the gravity of the issues.

Erm, just don't download/update apps on the phone. Worked for me...

Hey at least it's more stable than Vista.

And hibernation/powersave probably works better than on Ubuntu.

Those aren't phones.

Apple are in uncharted territory. Providing an SDK to the iPhone is equivalent as allowing different sets of hardware running OSX. It would be interesting to see how long will it take Apple to bring the goods (if ever...)

Uncharted territory? I am not so sure it is uncharted for them - and it certainly isn't uncharted in the industry.

It's not at all equivalent to supporting different hardware. Providing an SDK for the iPhone is like providing an SDK for Mac OS X. In fact, it's exactly the same -- and the SDK for the iPhone (Cocoa Touch) is a direct derivative of Cocoa for Mac OS X.

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