The iPhone

On the old blog I had a big post about the iPhone just after it’s introdcution and all the features I liked about it. Now we’re a few months further and some new things have come up in my mind, so time to write about them.

First things first, I still think the iPhone will be a success and the recent babbling of John Dvorak that Apple should pull the plug on it only strengthens that view because I mean, let’s face it, when it comes to developing and marketing a product, Dvorak knows its stuff

The phone itself contains a bunch a features that others [for now] lack.
The one I find most interesting is the Google Maps integration. Some providers already offer services to track where you are and give you directions from there to where you want to go (the Orange World portal has such a service) but none of them ever thought to integrate such things with Google Maps.
The fantastic thing about it is that you can index your own city, local stores, place you go, upload that information to Google (long live Google Earth) and it becomes accesible on the iPhone. Such data is already widely available but not for every town but if everyone contributes just a bit we’ll get there and the use of Google Maps with the iPhone will most likely push those contributions to another level.

Text messaging is another one I found interesting. It’s not an uncommon thing for a mail client to be able to organise your mail in threads or conversations so why not your textmessages, good thinking there. For the rest, there’s nothing revolutionary about it and I haven’t seen or heard anything on MMS and the iPhone yet

Visual voicemail… Well, I don’t know what to think about that one. Generaly when you listen to your voicemail you want to hear the oldest not listened message first and proceed to the most recent while deleting the other ones in the process so although it is nice to have random access voicemail I don’t think it has real extra value. At least, not for me, I hate voicemail which is also why I had it disabled, just call me back later or drop me an sms, or mail.

Push IMAP. Fan-tas-tic for me, just too bad it only is going to work with Yahoo (for starters). I have this increasingly anoying habit of forgetting to launch my Mail client so getting your mail pushed to your phone would save me one hell of a lot of trouble, especialy when I’m on the move. What I’m a bit less keen about is getting all the spam pushed to your phone too so Yahoo better have one heck of a good spamfilter because if it works like GMail it’s a no deal for me (GMail worked just fine but these days everything seems to get through on my account). My basic strategy would be to have a mail account of my domain forward it to my Yahoo which gets pushed to my iPhone. However, I don’t want all kinds of mail pushed to the iPhone, only the important/urgent ones so I need to figure out a way to filter them.

Safari, yey? Well, don’t know. I don’t like the rendering engine that much. It seems to load the structure first, then load images and CSS instead of doing this in the background and displaying it all at once like all the other browsers and it also feels slower compared to Gecko or Opera’s engine. I liked the way you can have “tabs” in the iPhone’s browser but a tab bar would have been just fine by me.

The iPod part. Great although I’m not so sure if I will use it. The 8Gb limit is just not enough for me when it comes to music on the go so I’ll always carry my own iPod with my anyway. What does appeal to me though is the picture gallery and the movies part. These are significantly better than anything I have seen on a mobile device and I must admit that the way coverflow is used to scroll through your media library is very impressive.

Talking about scrolling, what about the touch screen en Mutli-Touch? I love the idea, finaly getting rid of the stylus. I can control my P990i with my fingernail just fine but don’t try using your thumb or any other finger to navigate that device or use the onscreen keyboard, it just doesn’t work. The scrolling and zooming functions just baffled me and though the keyboard seems fine to use too I’d really prefer a handwriting recognition system just like my P990i but then the Multi-Touch way.
Furthermore I like the GUI design. It’s sleek and functional, just what you’d expect from an Apple product. It would be nice though if Apple included a theme or two as I’d prefer a more Aquafied UI.

Now all this is quite positive but there are a few things that caused me to raise an eyebrow, especially since there isn’t much known on the subject.

Widgets, why? Widgets on the iPhone don’t work like they do on a Mac. You don’t pull up Dashboard with a ton of widgets and then close it, they’re like mini apps you need to open one by one so I really fail to see the point. If they’d make a more Dashobard-esque application out of it allowing you to use Multi-Touch to zoom in on a widget and scroll through your widgets ala coverflow then YAY, but it’s current implementation is a no-no if you ask me.

Thrid-party apps, why not? I can understand Apple’s concerns about the phone’s stability but I find it rather strange because if you take that argument out of proportion then Apple could just as well say, no third-party apps on Macs because it might render the system unstable. To be honest, I’ve seen my webbrowser and my phonebook on my P990i crash more often than PuTTY (which hasn’t crashed) where the webbrowser and the phonebook come built-in and PuTTY doesn’t. If they’d just publish some guidelines to which iPhone apps need to adhere and some kind of cap-crash test they need to pass before they can be installed on the iPhone I don’t see the problem. Furthermore, Apple won’t be able to respond to all the customers wishes if they’re the only ones developing software for the iPhone which might put people off and buy a Symbian or other type of smartphone that can run the software that has those few extra features customers are looking for.

Connectivity. The phone has bluetooth, GSM/GPRS. EDGE and WiFi 802.11b/g which is great, fantastic but what the hell happened to WCDMA/HSDPA? All recent and upcoming smartphones support the new 3G networks so why the hell doesn’t the iPhone? I can’t find any logic explanation. Granted, Cingular has an EDGE network but they offer 3G services as well, why not leave the customers with the choice instead of binding them to a data service they might not want to use. Honestly, for me, GPRS is fine on the go but if I ever upgrade that it is going to be to 3G and not to EDGE. The advantges of EDGE over GPRS are to minor for me and 3G is much more widespread than EDGE is.

Camera. I can understand that Apple didn’t see the need to include a camera in the first iPhone model but I do find it stange. All competing devices have a camera, so why not the iPhone and second of all, why include such an elaborate Picture Gallery with the iPhone if you can’t take pictures with it. Fine, it’s nice to be able to show of your holiday pictures on the iPhone but still.

Those are the few things I don’t get for now on the iPhone. They probably have all very good reasons but I just can’t see them.
Needless to say I can live with those minor anoyances. I don’t use EDGE but GPRS so bite me if the phone doesn’t include 3G and I don’t use my P990i’s camera that often either, I don’t think it would bother me if it didn’t have a camera.

There are two things though that do cause me a bit of a concern.
Actualy no, that’s not true. There’s once things that really bugs me about the iPhone and there is one other things that causes me quite some concern.

The thing that really bugs me is iPhone + iTunes. I find it perfectly logical that to sync your media content with your iPhone you’d use iTunes. What I do not find logical is that you’d manage your contacts, messages, backups etc through iTunes. iTunes is a media library and audio player, not a sync center, that is called iSync. When I want to sync contacts or apointements I expect to use iSync, not my media player, the same thing goes for backups so I really hope those things can be done with iSync just as well as with iTunes.
On the other hand, I do understand why Apple chose to use iTunes to do all this. If the iPhone is going to be targeted at Mac and Windows users it only makes sense to use iTunes. iTunes is already quite widespreak amongst Windows users especialy because of its integration with the iPod and the iTS and it can save Apple a lot of hassle and time just implementing those few extra iPhone options in iTunes instead of developing an extra sync application for Windows and adding that stand-alone app to the iTunes+Quicktime bundle. It really probably just is a psycological thing, people just tend to like to manage everything from one central interface where I prefer separate applications targeted at specific actions.

The one thing that really scares me is the introduction of the iPhone in Europe. If Apple plays it well it’s bound to be a success but there are a few dangers.
Europe doesn’t have one gsm operator for the whole of Europe. It has lots of little operators in each country. Most of these operators can be regrouped in a few groups, Orange, Vodafone, KPN/NTDoCoMo, T-Mobile/Deutsche Telecom and then there are still a few loose ends… The problem is, there isn’t a single provider that is available in the whole of Europe. Their best bet would be to team up with Vodafone or Orange because those two can be found in most European countries but then comes the other hitch, the dataplans.
Orange has a general reputation of bad coverage and I haven’t heard much about Orange’s GPRS services and dataplans that make me smile.
Vodafone on the other hand has a very high-quality top-notch network but when it comes to the dataplans Vodafone is terribly expensive, a big rip-off if you ask me.
So here is the deal for Apple. They need to find a provider which has a network in most (if not all) European countires and that offers dataplans at reasonable prices.
When it comes to reasonable prices, I’d scream T-Mobile of the top of loungs, their Web’nWalk dataplan is the best I have seen so far.
But, aren’t I forgetting something? Yes I am! EDGE, god damn it, EDGE! There are very few providers (to my knowledge) in Europe to have an EDGE network. In Belgium that would be Mobistar (Orange Group), in the Netherlands that would be Telfort (KPN) and I’m sure that quite a few European countries have one provider that has an EDGE network but they don’t all belong to the same major player such as Orange.
Furthermore, a lot of EDGE providers have said that they will upgrade their network to HSDPA which means EDGE will be phased out and probably unavailable in a year or two.
So what is going to happen? Will they introduce the iPhone in Europe with a GPRS dataplan or will the European iPhone support 3G or will they pick a separate provider per country (something Apple has already said it is not willing to do) just for EDGE support?

To answer that question, I don’t know. It would make sense to me that Apple waits just a bit an introduces a 3G iPhone in Europe but on the other hand, 3G dataplans are still very expensive so if they want to resort to their, one iPhone operator for Europe plan they’re bound to fall back on GPRS which would be a bit of a shortcomming.

To cut a very long story short. I like the iPhone. It has a lot of features I miss in other phones and boy will it wake up some people over at Nokia, SE and Motorola. It does though lack a few things all its competitors have and I’m really curious how Apple is going to market and introduce the iPhone in Europe.
For now, the only thing we can do is wait but please, Apple, enlighten us, what’s the iPhone going to be like, over here?