The First Phone I've Been Excited About In A Long Time
mattmaroon.com
mattmaroon.com
While investigating how to make the best UI, I've found that people's priorities come from their habits and not necessarily from their needs. At first this seemed kind of illogical to me. But if you think about it, before the iPhone, no normal people really could imagine a mobile browser as good as mobile Safari, so no one really put "a desktop experience web browser" at the top of their requirements lists for phones (obviously tech people did, but average people did not).
I wonder what would happen if you bought an iPhone.
Reading about the Palm, it looks like it's insanely based around the web, which is awesome.
I spend a lot less time talking on the iPhone because I have the ability to use txting/email/twitter/facebook much more easily (I know other phones offer these features, but the interface is nowhere near as intuitive). I barely surfed on my old phone and I feel I would die without a 3G network and Mobile Safari now.
I live in Canada so I am with Rogers/Fido - and to be honest, even though we get screwed on pricing most of the time, I haven't had any problems with network coverage. I get awesome 3G speeds at home and all over the city (I live in Vancouver).
I really like what the Pre has to offer, but I can't see myself moving away from this iPhone. If Palm brings me an unlocked quad-band GSM Pre I would likely drop the cash, but that's extremely unlikely so I'll just stick with my iPhone.
A dropped call at the wrong moment can cost a sales guy a lot of money; and a hard-core Blackberry user is not going to give up that keypad for a nice browser. For them, the importance of reliable, rapid communication with business contacts outweighs the pleasure of a good browsing experience.
With the Palm, you theoretically will get to have a keypad, a choice of carriers, and a nice browser (assuming the fact that it uses the same HTML rendering engine as the iPhone means the browsing experience will be equally good).
Hence his assertion that "Apple’s strategy has worked well, but it has major holes, and this Palm unit looks like it exploits them".
It may be a threat to the iPhone in the pro-sumer market (yeah, I hate that term too) also though, since it too has a full-screen WebKit based browser, a UI people are raving about, $200 price point, and potentially (jury's still out) awesome platform. And, most crucially, it will be on many networks. I like it's chances.
Call quality goes beyond just that too. There's the abysmal maximum volume. General sound. Etc.
It's a bit disingenuous to make declarations about how poor a product is when you don't even own one. It seems to be a common theme when he writes about Apple.
The iphone keyboard is a fantastic piece of design. I honestly believe that those who think of it as inferior just haven't tried using it for a few days. I actually think of the on-screen keyboard as one of the iPhone's key features, and the lack of it would discourage me from buying another phone.
I just don't believe it. I've had an ipod touch for nearly a year and it's just not there. I am twice as fast on the blackberry keyboard. What's your wpm on iPhone? Do you think it would be faster typing with a standard computer keyboard or a touchscreen keyboard on a tablet?
If you type really slowly, they might be roughly equivalent. If you are fast on the blackberry, there's no way.
I think you might be surprised exactly how productive one can be with a "touchscreen keyboard on a tablet".
This sort of information should be included in your article, too. It's an obvious hole in your article and you should probably have thought of it when you were writing it.
I don't know how many minutes if that's what you're asking. I don't think it's a hole in what is clearly an opinion piece that I didn't describe the exact length of time I spent typing on one.
1. My call quality is excellent in NYC. I get a dropped call maybe once a week. It's not even something I think about much. I see Verizon customers around me dealing with more dropped calls. 2. Email and SMS are fantastic. Better than my work-issued Blackberry. 3. Network. I have 3G almost everywhere I go, but I understand that this varies widely by geographical area. People without coverage obviously won't benefit much from an iPhone.
With regard to the Blackberry comparison, I'll flat out say this: I prefer the iPhone keyboard to the Blackberry keyboard. Plain and simple. Maybe I figured out the right places to touch the screen, but I type faster and more efficiently on the iPhone. I didn't make any scientific comparisons, but every time I'm forced to compose something on the Blackberry, I inwardly groan. My fingers and hands are not particularly small.
If you heavily use Exchange, I imagine iPhone's integration leaves something to be desired. I haven't tried it. However, IMO, Blackberry's Exchange integration through the Blackberry server leaves something to be desired, too. For example, I have rules set up in Exchange so that my sent mail goes into the same folder as the folder which contains the message I have replied to. Doesn't work on on the Blackberry.
2) You can find a litany of blog posts from people who switched from Blackberry to iPhone and then went back because they couldn't live without the keypad. You can also find people who share your sentiment too. Neither sentiment is uncommon or would lead me to believe that the person expressing it hasn't tried one.
3) Also tons of complaints about spotty reception even in big cities.
None of those three may match your experience, but they all match highly-publicized experiences of others.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seems like kind of a silly comment to have 25 points. I wonder if it were about Microsoft instead...
Could the Apple Newton recognize your handwriting? It was really accurate in the commercials!
A warning to bloggers: when you don't know what you're talking about but talk anyways, it's very obvious. And it hurts your credibility. I wouldn't complain about problems with the World Series of Poker in a blog post, and if you've never used Objective-C/Cocoa, it's best if you don't complain about it.
Palm devices (PDA and their foray into mobile phone market space) are notorious for their unreliability and low quality. Historically, they are poorly made and break rather easily. Back when I toted a Palm PDA in my work travels, it frequently had to be replaced. And I remember giant pallets of refurbished PDAs in Fry’s Electronics, where devices would be recycled for second and subsequent deaths.
Experience with Blackberry devices, I do not have, but my iPhone performance and reliability (other than on OS upgrade days) has been stellar. In fact, the iPhone is more solid that it was nearly 15 months ago. I have not even witnessed battery degradation yet on my first generation model. Yes, I realize there are iPhone lemons, but I’d assess the iPhone defect rate at a fraction of all those Palm products.
As it is now, you can still program apps for the App Store using web technologies through the WebView object.
I've heard other people complain about call quality with the iPhone, but only people in the US. Is this a US only phenomenon?
Surely this is down to the network, and not the handset. I know that doesn't help much if you don't have a choice of network, but I haven't heard of any UK users complain about call quality.
All in all my experience of call quality in the US on any phone has been abysmal, including land lines...
Also I think you place way too much importance on the app store. I doubt that many people buy a phone based on the apps they can install on it, obviously to hackers it's important, but for most people I'd say the app store is a sort of bonus they didn't know about.
I tried out a G1 yesterday, and although it looked quite nice, the keyboard is so small it's impossible to use :( Still thinking of getting one sometime, wondering how it stacks up against the iPhone.
Great to see some more competition though :)
Looks like the main problem is AT&T
I have to completely disagree with you here. The keyboard is one of the G1's redeeming features. I type much faster and make much fewer mistakes on it than when typing on my iPhone. It's especially better than all those phones with physical keyboards with weird non-standard layouts. YMMV...Just thought I'd offer a counter example to yours :)
How long did it take you to get used to it? Does it always take so much effort to register a keypress, or does that 'loosen up'.. :/
One thing I really like about the G1 keyboard is that there's a definite "break" when the key is pressed, so if I'm paying attention, I can tell when the key goes down. The physical feedback helps a lot for me.
I had a play with the G1 in the phone shop just out of interest (the disappointment on the shop assistant's face when I said I didn't really want a £35 contract but just wanted the pay as you go phone was quite shocking). It was most impressive and the keyboard was very quick to type on. Hopefully, since I'm under the impression that Android is freely available for manufacturers to use on their phones, we'll start to see some budget manufacturers (Huawei?) using Google's OS at some point in the next couple of years to give users a decent experience without spending loads of money on putting together a proprietary OS.
It's possible this is a 3G issue as all of the above ere 2G phones. But given the author's demonstrated propensity for writing things he's only heard about third hand, we might want to brand this entire line of criticism [citation needed].
iPhone: great internet device, questionable phone.
If you measure "appeal" by market share, then this is a tautology. If you measure appeal by some other method, it's almost certainly false.
It has a "notify me" button to register when there is more info. Since noone outside Palm has touched a Pre yet but we _all_ know about it, I think somehow I'll be kept informed either way ;)
(If we're dishing out opinions, I thought I'd throw mine in.)