Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Thoughts on the iPhone…
Engadget has posted what I would consider to be the most comprehensive and balanced review of the iPhone I have seen on the web so far (and believe me, I’ve read lots of them during the last week). If you have any interest in the iPhone at all, you owe it to yourself to go through this three-part piece that examines just about every aspect of the device’s design and functionality.
I, myself, visited the local Apple store this weekend, where I had a chance to briefly play around with an iPhone demo unit. I was going to publish a rather detailed post with my thoughts, but now there isn’t really much I can add here that isn’t already in the aforementioned review; in fact, I found myself agreeing with almost everything in there.
What I will say is that I think the device met the expectations that I had for it going in. For better or for worse, I’ve always been more of a functionality-over-form kind of person, so while I really do believe that the iPhone is a beautiful piece of engineering with the slickest UI I’ve seen on a mobile device yet, I simply can’t ignore all the shortcomings like many others can. I could live with a software keyboard if I had to, and I could give up 3G for a slower EDGE connection too, but there’s still so much missing from the iPhone that we have come to take for granted on our Symbian, Windows Mobile and Blackberry smartphones.
If I had to sum up my thoughts in one sentence, I’d say the iPhone is a fantastic iPod, a great mobile browsing unit, a decent phone, and a rather poor productivity device, but one that brings them all together in a refreshingly appealing way.
What do you think?
Related Posts: Apple iPhone: Not Quite Flawless…
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One thing I have always missed on Symbian, WinCE or Blackberry phones is proper support for Mac OS X. The iPhone has that going for it.
Don’t Symbian Series60 phones sync with Address Book and iCal via iSync? I always figured that would work pretty smoothly since iSync is part of OS X, but I’ve never tried, so maybe I’m wrong. I also remember lots of folks back at Google using their Blackberries with Macs.
On the other hand, I do see how using WiMo devices with a Mac would be a pain since there’s no official sync tool for them from either Microsoft or Apple. That’s a shame, and it definitely needs to be remedied.
I believe that the UI coupled with the Safari browser makes it a compelling productivity platform, particularly for web 2.0 productivity apps. I have posted a detailed defense of this position here:
http://blog.2glue.com/productivity/2007/07/mobile-web-20-p.html
Bottom line, if you use web based productivity tools, you can’t afford NOT to switch to the iPhone.
I’d buy one, if it was free.
@Erik, that’s actually a very good point. I think if you’ve already switched over to exclusively using web apps for productivity tasks, then the iPhone would suit you well because of the desktop-like browsing experience.
With that said, I’m curious to know how well the transition is working out for you. I’ve always felt that rich client apps and web apps are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. My ideal setup consists of client apps running on the desktop that synchronize up with a central server, which then provides a good web-based interface that you can use when you’re not at your own PC.
I feel like the benefits of such a “hybrid” model are even greater on a phone/PDA - you have a client app that synchronizes over-the-air while the device is on your pocket so that the information you need is readily available as soon as you need it. Because of the low bandwidth and high latency of EDGE data networks, you have to spend time waiting for each separate web app to load in the mobile browser every time you need to look something up. Consider the number of times you access these apps during the day, and you realize that the amount of lost time quickly adds up. Haven’t you experienced this?
I should mention that I do find the topic of your blog (mobile productivity) to be very interesting. I’ll be following your posts to read about your experiences with the transition, because I know I’m personally not ready to switch exclusively to web apps just yet. :)