News from the front

iPhone, for all the jesusness it has, is definitely not a social phone. The apps’s access to the network and the outside world is too crippled to allow really interesting real-time social things. Sure, it can do Facebook apps but until sync services come into full effect and actually deliver over the air sync and data push nothing is going to happen on that side.

Android, on the other hand, is everything iPhone is not. It’s open, allows full network side and proximity networks. Or will, somewhere after 1.0.
Google’s decision to ship minimal bluetooth and no xmpp on 1.0 makes sense from a platform engineering standpoint but kills a lot of the launch buzz for 1.0. No flash mobs, no meme p2p, no real life mmorg.
Pah.

Nobody cares. Really. It’s just another crappy winmo phone and it’s more expensive than an htc.

You blew it Palm.

In the wake of the movements of T’Mo and HTC around Dream and the announcement of an A-Phone about a month from now I was starting to write about Google wasn’t making with the software. And just to prove me wrong Google drops the v0.9 SDK which actually might look like the finished thing.

The UI is definitely OK and usable both with a touchscreen and hard keys. Apple here clearly has an advantage by controlling the hardware, Android tries to accommodate all the imaginable phones and that usually doesn’t end well. It’s kind of ironic the way two of most prominent features on both Android and iPhoneOS, the browser and maps are pretty much the same on both sides. Both use a browser based on Apple’s WebKit (even higher irony, the lean webkit was seeded by Nokia) and both use Google Maps. On Android’s side using Google Maps is part of the whole google-in-your-hand approach which on the iPhone using Google Maps is underplayed. The same way, Google is pretty happy with WebKit but doesn’t go into big efforts to make sure everybody knows the code comes mainly from Apple. So, what’s actually different ? Each side plays on it’s strengths, the iPhone is quite obviously a mobile phone strapped onto an iPod while Android enables people to access the Google cloud from anywhere and eventually make some phone calls too.

At the end of the day the iPhone is much more all around polished and Android will allow a lot more stuff but users on both platforms will be starting the same browser to check gmail and google reader and find something on google maps. Gmail/Gtalk/Gcal is be better than mobileme while the iTunes experience will be excellent until someone does an app for Android that grabs music right off amazon. iPhone will sync seamlessly, Android will have a bunch of sync and push and pull apps for different and sometimes amazing things while iPhone will be stuck with an apparently crippled push service. Oh well.

I wish Google didn’t chose Java for Android. It’s just damn annoying. Google owed it to us to make things much more interesting by using something like Python or, to make things really interesting, Javascript. Relearning Java for Android is almost as annoying as learning ObjC for iPhoneOS.

On a final note, where’s search ? Palm invented 10 years ago. I pressed search on my PalmIII and it searched all through my apps. How can that not be possible in 2008 ? Apple, you got spotlight. Google, well, you are google. This shouldn’t be all that difficult!

The only operator in Portugal that’s not selling the iPhone is trying to make up for it by touting stuff like the Samsung Omnia as much much better. That’s kind of like starting with a lame donkey, slaping a red saddle on it and trying to pass it on as a racing horse.

This may seem a bit harsh but if you look closely it’s pretty much what Samsung did, they started with a pen pointer based UI, slapped a fancy front screen with large icons on it and passed it on as an “iphone killer”. This is just as true of Samsung as it is of all the other makers (still) trying to do the same 1 year after the original iPhone. The first screen looks fine and dandy and the hardware seems to actually have been designed this century (2Mpx camera, ohhh pulese) but underneath there’s the same old crusty windows mobile UI with 5x5 pixel ‘ok’ buttons and apps pretending to be a desktop. And a sad sad sad excuse for a web browser. Sad sad.

So people, this isn’t hard. Make a consistent effort at designing a confortable, consistent, quick UI. It’s not about the “touch” part, really. All my phones have been tactile so far. They have this things called buttons which I press with my fingers and they’re even haptic (which is a word I swear didn’t even exist last year). I press them to dial numbers and they go down and make a satisfying “click”. So people obviously aren’t all hyped about touching stuff.
The only ones apparently doing a reasonable effort at this are the good folks at Nokia. Instead of slaping a touch screen on their phones (why oh why SonyEricsson ??) and calling it an “iphone killer” they’re back to the drawing board working on a touch interface for Symbian S60, although I see quite a lot of penning on the early videos. Pen bbbaaadddd ok Nokia ?

So I’ll repeat, this isn’t too hard. It’s not about dialer apps with large buttons. I had that on my Treo180 in 2000. Yes, I could dial with my thumb on a touch screen on a smartphone in 2000. I could also take or reject calls too. It actually worked back then. I can remove my phone from my pocket, dial a number with my thumb and disconnect with my thumb, single handedly on any phone on the market today. It’s not about that m’kay.
Let me illustrate with something out of the laptop world. I used to only use the laptop built in pointing device only in the most dire circumstances. That was before I started using the MBP. The MBP touchpad is about twice the area of the touchpad on the pece I was using before so I can actually get a decent accuracy and on it. It’s also conductive instead of pressure based so it has a decent touch. And I can do a number of things like right click and zooming on it. So I have no reason to use an external mouse and in fact I spare myself the hassle of carrying one around. (after using the multitouch pads on recent MBPs I felt like sending mine on a long walk off a short pier. oh well, I digress)
This is the kind of detail that usually gets left out making human interfaces and it’s the kind of detail that makes all the diference.

As Nokia is taking extra sweet care fixing my N80 I defaulted back to my trusty SE T68i. It doesn’t have a camera, it doesn’t play music, it barely has a screen, but for connecting people and computers to a GPRS network (3G wasn’t there yet back then) it’s as good as it gets.

I wish SE still made good phones.

Cause Apple knows market theory and I don’t have money to waste on early adopter premiums.

Damn you Apple!!

iphone 8G vodafone pay-as-you-go = 499EUR
nokia N95 8G vodafone pay-as-you-go = 499EUR
nokia E71 + 8G SDHC, unlocked = 470EUR

not looking good for you iphone!

O2 will sell iphones 3G with prepaid plans (ie, no plan) for 299GBP which comes to around 374EUR. That probably means the EU price will be under 400EUR. It doesn’t say anywhere the iphones will be unlocked though.

Yes, this is all very confusing. Nokia, not in response to Android as some people advanced but, in response to Apple pulled a page out of Google’s world domination plan and announced it would free Symbian both to other manufacturers and the unwashed masses. Nokia went and said, “Look, Symbian is stabler than iPhone and is just as open as Android”

And really, when I got my N80 the second thing I did was try to figure out how to develop for it. And after a couple of hours poking around the nokia site and various foruns I said “oh screw it this isn’t worth the effort”.
And I guess that’s why it’s so hard to find quick ass apps for Symbian not made by nokia labs …

For the record, a Nokia N80 gets hell-u-va confused when you accidentally feed it a 8G microSDHC.

Don’t ask.