Iphone – Don't Believe the Hype.
For me the Iphone comes down to this point. Don’t believe the Hype.
Take this from PC World
“Think of mounting your iPhone on the dashboard, and using the iPhone’s GPS/Google Maps functionality to get to the mall, and then using some sort of iPhone……
An iPhone/GPS device looks to be yet another disruptive technology pairing by Steve Jobs and Apple’s talented engineers. It will be interesting to see how the device lives up to the promise, and how competitors scramble to answer the latest Apple broadside.”
What a load of crock… the N95 has had a gps for years now.. I know I use mine all the time. I send Twitter messages with embeded coords all the time. I geotag all my photos and put the non personal ones up on Flickr. Wow the Iphone is so new and cool. There are a number of mash ups around the trap for doing GPS stuff with your phone. BIG F”ING DEAL APPLE.
I think most journalists are being very lazy today. Oh lets read the Apple press release and call that news. It is not news.
And my being lazy today is to only put this one example in.
(Ok.. the other one is that everyone is talking about the 10 hours talk time, sure it is 10 hours, but only on 2g not 3g, that is 5 hours – details here http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html)
Sure the Iphone is a sexy device I will agree with that. But, and it is a big but, there are better devices out there. Touch is not the be all and end all and even then there are touch devices out there by people other than Apple. The reason that touch is not the be all and end all… Phones are 1 handed. You use one hand to make a call (ie speed dialing, texting e.t.c) so you can still pick your nose or drink your coffee.
Look at some of the issues with the Iphone. Fixed battery. Power users are going to find this a problem.Image the case you use your phone for a few months and the battery goes flaky (it does and will happen). Now in the real world you go out buy a new battery plug it and you are away. Time taken 5 minutes. In the mac world here is the case. Take you phone to mac shop if you are lucky get a “loner” phone. Wait a week or so, then get your old phone back. See this works with an Ipod you can do with out music. Can you do with out your phone for a week!
2Mg Camera, seriously that is not good these days as most entry level phones carry this size. Non upgradable user memory, most phones these days take mmc or similar cards to have more memory or apps stored on them (yes my n958gb does not upgrade and it annoys me). Also there is no front facing video camera so video calling is out… you might be able to do it in theory, but in practice it won’t work. (and I have already spoken to a few people that do use video calling and they were shocked at this).
Let the flame wars begin.
Why would someone flame you? A lot of what you say is true here …
Apple is really *really* good at both hype & spin … sad fact is that a lot of media doesn’t know any better when reporting on mobile.
What do you expect from “PC” magazine? 🙂
-sj
No flame war… but a few points :
1) Video call is pretty much dead everywhere, especially in Europe, after 6 years since the introduction of this capability in available handsets I still have to see anybody using it.
2) Sure 2MP are not comparable to the 5MP of N95, however why pumping up so much pixel count when the lens are just not there, it is a non sense. 2MP are perfectly ok for casual shots and most important the Camera application is way faster and easier to use than the N95 one
3) Settings: why Nokia had to do it in this way I never got it (by the way as I developer I owned every possible S60 device, starting with the 7650, and things went only worse from device to the next), setting a Nokia device is a nightmare for the average user
4) Touch screen is much more intuitive to the average Joe than it is a keypad and a multilevel menu structure like in S60. iPhone may be not perfect for everything but certainly the N95 is not an example of perfection
5) Why the N95 has to be so slooowww? Why having a few applications inside the Application folder take the phone forever to open it up?
6) Even if iPhone is wider than the N95, it is much thinner and a lot of people prefer to have this form factor rather than a brick in their pocket
7) Nokia is not changing much from device to device, keeps releasing basically the same with a few things modified; their innovation skills are long gone. Maybe it is hot air (and it is not, trust me), but should impress anyone that with only one phone model Apple is over shadowing pretty much anything else in the market.
8) And finally, as a developer after 8 years of Symbian/Epoc experience, S60/UIQ3 and so on should burn in hell, they are the most inefficient, un-intuitive and draconian programming system I have used. I simply could not believe what I was able to do using Cocoa Touch in one week, considering that I also had to learn Objective-C. Any developer will confirm that Symbian shoot themselves in the foot with that BS about signing, capabilities and so on. iPhone OS feels solid, mature, fast and feature fill. Would you like to read a contact from the phone book, hell, everything is a SQLLite database, just query for it, not in Symbian: you have a series of poorly documented interfaces, generally asynchronous (so you need to setup observers, calls backs etc etc) that require 2-5 times more code than the Cocoa equivalent. When Steve Jobs was displaying the quotes from people commenting the iPhone SDK, I can confirm that I had exactly the same sensation. XCode and the iPhone SDK are years ahead of anything I have seen coming out from Nokia labs. Nokia has waited until everybody was talking about 3D position sensors in the iPhone before revealing there was one in the N95 (and with a so-so feature set). Just look at the quality of the application coming out from independent developers, even the simpler ones are outstanding; even very simple applications on Symbian requires a deep knowledge of the OS which is really separated from the interface layer, not unlike the iPhone OS and Cocoa Touch.
Quick response to you Emanuele.
1 – I see people here in Australia using video calling alot.
2 – pixel count aside… auto focus alone is a big difference between cameras
3 – yes setting up a Nokia can be a pain I agree 🙂
4 – touch is all well and good, but a phone is one handed, end of story. you have to have really big hands to use a touch with only one hand. Not practical to send an sms whilst downing your morning coffee.
5 – organise your folders better 🙂 I do 🙂 and using the keypad as a short cut tool is very fast to get to any given application
6:- neither phone is pocket size.
7: the only difference between Iphone and iphone 2 is 3g and gps. big deal… and there are a lot of other touch phones on the market. Apple design, they do NOT innovate.
8: 250,000 downloads in 4 months, big deal, that does not a developer community make, esp given that there has been a number of updates to the sdk as well. Sure symbian can be a pain to programme, but so is everything else. And remember try and run a background task on the iphone if you are not Apple…Not going to happen. IM Clients, gps logging e.t.c are apps the iphone can’t have unless Apple says so. Two things I use on my phone all the time. And Nokia now have widgets as well. HTML, CSS, Flash, js all wrapped up in a single bundled zip file if you can do a webpage you can build a widget.