S/V Tavarua

Another thing that didn’t take long was spotting an iPhone up here at Lake Tahoe. Someone whipped one out last night at a restaurant in Tahoe City. And it certainly has that “I’ve got to have one” look about it. But as an existing Treo owner, there’s just not enough in it that makes me want to switch to AT&T/Cingular or sign a two year contract with EDGE to get one. There must be something wrong with me.

By most accounts, Apple nailed the gesture interface and the screen durability seems to have turned out better than expected. A few people are grumbling about their battery life, but overall people seem pretty pleased with the overall package. But I still don’t want one and here’s why:

1. EDGE is not EVDO. Surfing on a CDMA 1xRTT Treo is painfully slow. Non-trivial web pages (like the NY Times home page you see in many of the iPhone ads) can take upwards of 60 seconds to load. The Treo works okay for interacting with NextBus, but you’re not going to want to surf on an iPhone unless you’re on WiFi. Before Google Maps came out for the Treo, even the simplest mapping/lookup functions were painfully slow. Admittedly EDGE at 236Kb beats 1xRTT at 144Kb, but it’s not that much faster. OTOH, EVDO is 2.4-3.1Mb (we’re talking about twice a T1 here).
2. You can’t sync over wireless? This thing has Bluetooth and WiFi and yet it can’t sync wirelessly; you have to use the iPod-like dock. Which means you have to travel with yet another cable. (I’m assuming that you don’t actually need the dock, just the cable.) Hopefully this will get fixed (or should I say “finished”) rather quickly, but it’s a big lose.
3. One of the things I like about my Treo is the plethora of reasonable third-party apps. PalmOS is still the same sucky OS that worked just well enough to knock off the Newton, but I have a reasonable RSS reader, a reasonable IMAP/SSL client, an SSH shell, and a nice map of the BART. I am not impressed with the Web 2.0 development environment for the iPhone. It’s great that it supports what it does, but I’m severely bummed I can’t write real native apps for this thing. I’d probably buy one if I could. It’s a phone running Mach/BSD UNIX w/ Objective-C for god’s sake. How cool is that?
4. I need a phone that works overseas and that means support for replaceable SIM cards. It will be interesting to see how Apple approaches the European market which uses a completely different model than we have here. In Europe, you don’t buy phones under contract, you pay for the phone yourself and buy SIM cards for the countries you want a number in. You can roam, of course, but it’s also pretty common to just buy another SIM card if your roaming plan isn’t favorable to wherever you’re at. It sounds tedious, but in practice it works out to be a lot simpler and a lot cheaper than what we have to pay for minutes here in the US. The Europeans have this one right and they’re not likely to accept contracts from Vodafone or BT just to get an iPhone. Obviously between EVDO and this, I’ll take EVDO any day.
5. The headphone jack requires an adapter to fit most headphones. That’s very lame.
6. The Mail application doesn’t let you select and partially quote a reply. The only mode it has quotes the entire message (below) and apparently even that is not configurable to “off”. Seems the iPhone UI doesn’t export a cut/copy/paste metaphor, at all. Anywhere. Now while I see the beauty in this for many applications, it’s ludicrous to have a text-based application like Mail that doesn’t support robust text editing operations. If that’s the price we’re paying for not having a stylus, it’s too much. If not, than it’s a very serious limitation in something that’s essentially shooting for the title of ultimate smart phone. Who’s going to want to blog from this thing without cut/copy/paste?
7. There’s no AIM client. How can we survive without the hive? And why should we?
8. SMS and Mail are separate applications. Sure, so goes the Treo, but why?
9. Its camera sucks. Nokia’s N-series has great cameras. This is not even a good camera.
10. No VoIP. Nokia’s N-series has SIP and it works well. VoIP over WiFi. That’s a no-brainer.

Here’s what I think they got really right:

1. Georgeous big display with hardened glass and a sexy hand feel.
2. Form factor, in general. It’s the right size and the right weight.
3. Textual voicemail. Finally!
4. Landscape/portrait sensor. Finally!
5. Gesture-based UI. Goodness, but cut/copy/paste is essential for real messaging.
6. Safari/Webkit. The Treo’s browsers all suck. Blame PalmOS. I do.
7. It’s an iPod. Okay, some may not view this as a plus, but I do.

So I’m left vaguely wanting one because of the display alone yet the Reality Distortion Field isn’t doing its usual number on me and that’s because I’ve had a Treo for 2+ years and in almost every way except for having a real browser, the Treo (w/ The Missing Sync) is essentially the better tool, despite PalmOS, 1xRTT, and the less than gorgeous screen.

That said, if this phone had EVDO, I’d probably buy one just to have a real browser experience. Or maybe all it would take is just a real SDK. But given its current limitations and feature set, I’m going to wait for more iPhone v2.0 goodness before submitting to Steve’s cellular will.

But man, does it emote cool at first glance. Well done, Steve.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 9:29 am and is filed under geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.