When Pigs Fly! (Day 7)

My view of Apple has long been one of the “Kool-Aid Factor”, with Steve Jobs selling you something that you neither needed nor necessarily wanted.  I’m convinced that Mr. Jobs would gladly saw off your leg and sell it back to you – at a profit to himself, naturally.  Some of that stems from my long-held anti-Apple bias, but also from what I’ve seen from him over the years – namely, not a whole lot other than a slave-driver mentality and a “be the best no matter what the cost” work ethic.  Love him or hate him, Steve Jobs is probably both neurotic and slightly genius, though he’s done wonders for Apple Computers.  No doubt about it.

Anyhow, enough of that.

So, it was just over a week ago that, after much sweat + toil + tears, I switched to an iPhone and blogged about the experience.  After a few more days, I blogged again.  It’s blog-a-mania!  Part of me wishes that I would’ve had nothing but hassles and problems with the iPhone.  (That’s the anti-Apple part of me, if you hadn’t figured it out.)  The other part of me just wanted to have a phone that I could be happy with, and the iPhone seems to have satisfied that, for the most part.  Honestly.  I don’t have a lot to complain about, and the complaints that I do have are pretty nitpicky.

IT’S ALL RAINBOWS AND UNICORNS

That heading is a bit tongue-in-cheek, of course, but my experience with the iPhone over this past week as been overwhelmingly positive.  It turns on when I want it to, checks my email, browses the web, takes pictures, connects to wifi, makes calls, ends calls, uses my Bluetooth headset (without hassle), and so forth. 

As well as those other things, it turns out that I’m “messing with my phone” less than I used to, and I mean that in a good way.  With my Android phone(s), for instance, I felt like I was constantly fiddling with things – settings, volume, killing apps, freeing memory, and so on.  I felt like I was doing more work than the phone was doing, which gets old quickly.  With the iPhone, though, I’ve really been more focused on what I *do* with the phone, rather than the phone itself.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DETRACTORS

Well, I guess I was one of the detractors, wasn’t I?  Truth be told, I rarely had anything bad to say about the iPhone itself.  My beef was (and has long been) with Apple as a company, and thus my unwillingness to use their products. 

Yeah, I heard that <snort> in the background.  The irony is thick.

There are a few things that folks have knocked the iPhone for over the years:  lack of  multi-tasking, closed ecosystem, no physical keyboard, uncustomizable, lack of “copy & paste”, dropped calls, battery life, no removable battery, lack of Flash support, and others.  Let’s hit on some of these issues.

• Multi-Tasking:  So, the iPhone does NOT have true multi-tasking as we understand it.  If I’m watching a YouTube video, click the Home button, make a call, and then go back to the YouTube app, I’ll find that I’ve been bumped out of the video back to the select screen again.  The real question is this:  is that a problem?  Both Android and Windows Mobile (6.5 and earlier) have real multi-tasking, which is often touted as a “feature”.  In my experience with both platforms, though, it really ended up meaning that the user needed to work at keeping the apps killed or under control.  In fact, one of the first apps I would install on Android is “Taskiller”, with it set to ‘kill background apps’ – and this was just to keep the phone running reasonably snappy.  Sound familiar?  I’m basically trying to emulate what the iPhone does by default.

  When it really comes down to it, multi-tasking should be used in scenarios where it makes sense.  How many things can I really do at one time on my phone?  If I can do more than one thing, is it sensible to prefer that over snappy system response?  Personally, I don’t think so.  I’m also hearing that the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series will “multi-task” similar to the iPhone.  They’re being pretty much worked over for making that choice too, but I think it’s the right one – at least for now.

• Closed Ecosystem:  Yeah, the iPhone ecosystem is shut tighter than the Bill Gates’ estate.  Apple has always maintained strict control of their devices, and the iPhone is no different.  I wouldn’t expect this to change until Apple sees it really hurting their bottom line.  Until then, they get to call the shots on what people see, what people use, and (for the most part) how well it works.  I don’t agree with this standpoint, but I don’t disagree with it either.  It is what it is.
• No Physical Keyboard:  Apple certainly chose this for aesthetic reasons, but the truth is that their virtual keyboard works great.  In fact, I can probably type faster on the iPhone keyboard than I could on my old T-Mobile Dash.  I’m annoyed when trying to access ‘symbols’ to type, but even that works out over time.
• Uncustomizable:  Truth is, *every single iPhone* looks the same.  Sure,  it might have a funky case on the outside, or a wacky wallpaper on the unlock screen, but past that they are identical: a wall of colorful icons.  You can move the icons around, as I have, and even choose to have none on  your homescreen, but hardly anyone does that.  An iPhone looks like iPhone.  Is this an advantage?  Sure.  Apple knows what every iPhone user is going to have in front of them, so supporting it – both for the end-user *and* developer – is much easier.  The down side?  Well, it’s a bit boring.  In the Apple world, we would all have walls of icons, brushed metal status bars, and screens that suck into the trash can like a Ghostbusters gun.  I’d like to see Apple take their mastery of the UI world, and put it toward giving the end-user some real, creative control.  Now *that* would be amazing.
• Cut & Paste:  This functionality was added with the release of iPhone OS 3.0.  It’s handy and all that, but (honestly) I rarely have a real need for it.  Glad to have it, but the world wouldn’t end if it wasn’t there.
• Dropped Calls:  Mud has been slinging since day one on the issue of the iPhone dropping calls regularly.  Since my buddy Andy has seen about an 80% decrease in this behavior since jailbreaking and moving (back) to T-Mobile, I’m going to pin this issue primarily on AT&T and their bloated network.  That said, I *have* noticed that my iPhone drops signal more quickly than my previous phones, so there is something there that Apple should own as well.
• Battery Life:  I’m calling this a relative non-issue.  With most options turned on by default – push email, wifi, Bluetooth – every phone I’ve used has had pretty poor battery life.  The iPhone has faired as well as, if not better, than the MyTouch3G.  Figure out what you *need* to have on, and then turn off the rest.  Dialing back the “push email” to check every hour or so will definitely help with battery life.  Do you really need to have email *instantly* sucked down to your phone when you’re working at your desk – in front of your primary email client — for 8 hours per day?  Yeah.  I thought not.
• Lack of Removable Battery:  I hear that the next iPhone *might* have a user replaceable battery, but I’ll believe it when I see it.  In the meantime, the geniuses at Apple have to replace the battery for you – and at a significant cost.  That sucks.  Thankfully, the iPhone batteries appear to hold up pretty well, and most people I know go through phones so quickly it probably doesn’t even matter.
• Lack of Abobe Flash Support: 
  Steve Jobs claims that adding Adobe Flash support would absolutely ruin the blemish-free iPhone experience – both in performance, and in battery life.  I call “lame”.  Let users choose to run Flash if they want.  Personally, I don’t really care.  I find *most* Flash-enabled websites to be obnoxious, but “choice” is nice.  You know, choice?

THAT’S ENOUGH FOR TODAY

Alright.  Let’s stop beating this worn-out piñata and call it a day, shall we? 

All in all, my iPhone experience has been very good so far.  Not perfect, mind you, but very good.  I’ll rant about some of those things in a few days.

Thanks for reading.