The iPhone came out yesterday. I didn’t feel it warranted waiting for hours in line, and I wasn’t sure I wanted one yet. But I called the Apple Store (Barton Creek) today and was told that iPhones were still in stock (ha ha to all you suckers that waited in line for hours yesterday!) and I just couldn’t resist. So now I’ve played with it for about three hours. Here are my thoughts.
Ways the iPhone beats the Treo 650:
- The user interface is beautiful. The screen’s resolution is apparently slightly lower than my Treo 650’s (165 dpi vs. 178 dpi), but Apple’s interface looks so much better. It always annoyed me that the Treo doesn’t use anti-aliased text. The iPhone does. This makes a huge difference.
- It appears to sync perfectly with my Mac OS X Address Book and iCal. My Treo (with Missing Sync) did an acceptable job of this, but not perfect, since its Contacts and Calendar schemata are a little different from those of Address Book and iCal. The iPhone was presumably designed to work perfectly with these apps.
- Safari works great. It’s no faster at loading pages over the cellular network than the Treo 650, but the browser does a much better job rendering pages than Blazer (the Treo browser).
- My iPhone plan is cheaper than my Treo plan. I paid Verizon $105/month for the Treo (including unlimited data and no SMS messages). I’m only paying $60/month with the iPhone, including 200 SMS messages. (If I could get a plan with fewer airtime minutes for less money, I would. I only use about 50-100 minutes per month. This was a problem with the Treo too. Nobody sells a plan with as few minutes as I need, apparently.)
Ways the Treo 650 beats the iPhone:
- I can’t search the iPhone’s address book by typing. On the Treo, I just start typing a first name, or last name, or first initial plus last name, and it filters the contact list. It usually takes no more than 2 or 3 keystrokes to isolate the person I want to find. On the iPhone, I have to scroll and look. Scrolling is smooth and fast, but not as fast as the Treo’s keyboard search. As a bonus, the Treo magically figures out when I’m typing a phone number instead of searching by name. On the iPhone I have to press the keyboard button to dial a number. You might think this is nit-picking, and I should just use the iPhone’s “Favorites” list to store my commonly-dialed numbers. But the Treo keyboard search was so efficient that I never needed a separate mechanism for accessing my oft-dialed numbers.
- I can’t install my own ring tones on the iPhone.
- The Treo can sync over Bluetooth. The iPhone can’t. (Nor can it sync over WiFi.)
Ways that the iPhone and the Treo 650 both suck:
- Neither works with the Mac OS X Address Book. The Address Book has a Bluetooth button,
, right in the toolbar. Supposedly, if you pair your Mac with a cell phone, you can dial numbers on the cell phone just by clicking Address Book entries. It doesn’t work with either the Treo or the iPhone. In the case of the Treo, it’s annoying but understandable. In the case of the iPhone, it’s just stupid. - Neither has a 3G radio. (Newer Treos do.)
Ways in which the iPhone sucks that have nothing comparable on the Treo:
- The iPhone can’t access the iTunes store.
- It seems to have trouble remembering my home WiFi password, so when I leave the WiFi network and come back later, I have to re-enter it. This doesn’t happen every time.
- A few days ago, Google enhanced Google Maps. Now you can change its driving directions just by dragging the route with your mouse. It’s terrific – totally intuitive, and lightning-fast. Want to do that on your iPhone? You can’t. The built-in Maps application doesn’t support it. And if you go to maps.google.com in the iPhone web browser, you still can’t. As soon as you click the “Search Maps” button in the web page, the iPhone takes you to the built-in Maps application. I feel like Apple might as well have just displayed “fuck you” in inch-tall letters.
- So far, it’s been much easier for me to type with two thumbs in the sideways orientation, but only Safari offers it. Phone, Calendar, Maps, Notes, etc., only offer the cramped, clumsy portrait-mode keyboard. Also, once you bring up the keyboard in Safari, you can’t then rotate the iPhone and have the keyboard change its orientation. You have to back out of the keyboard screen and re-enter it to make it rotate.
[...] iPhone vs. Treo 650 The iPhone came out yesterday. I didn’t feel it warranted waiting for hours in line, and I wasn’t sure I […] [...]
Pingback by Top Posts « WordPress.com — 2007/07/01 @ 11:59 pm |
Call me crazy, but I’d so much rather just have a separate Palm device and cell phone.
I’ve got a Palm T|X right now, and a bluetooth capable cellphone. I can dial the phone from the palm via BT, no problem. I can also use the phone as a modem, via BT, no problem.
As far as Blazer goes, yeah, it’s got a couple issues – it doesn’t always reliably show pages correctly, but most of the time it works. (One gripe I’ve got is that I can’t sign in to wordpress, for some reason!) Blazer looks pretty damn good, though, especially when you set it to ‘Wide Page Mode.’ (Oh yeah – I use my Palm rotated to the wide orientation.)
But what it really breaks down to is, very simply, that I’d rather have two separate devices. How often, wen you’re on the phone, do you need to look up a phone number, or check an appointment, or write down a number or directions? It just makes sense for me to carry around the two separate devices.
Comment by jessecuster — 2007/07/02 @ 1:03 am |
I think the answer for a lot of smartphone power-users is to use a headset, which makes it easy to use the other device features while on a call. I never bothered before, but I’m considering getting a bluetooth headset now.
Comment by mayoff — 2007/07/02 @ 1:12 am |
Very good review.
Comment by sisirkoppaka — 2007/07/02 @ 6:27 am |
Interesting.
I’ve got the Treo 755P, now, so I tend to compare the iPhone on that level. Of course, I don’t own an iPhone, so I can only go by what I’ve heard about it. Some of what you mention was news to me and a bit surprising considering how often I’ve heard “intuitive” used to describe Apple’s phone. Oh well. I guess nothing’s perfect – even Treo’s.
Thanks for the comparison info.
Also, I get that jesse’s preference is to have multiple devices, but I don’t get the question about needing to look up a number or make note of something, while on the phone. Mayoff’s response seems to reflect my experience – use a headset (Bluetooth or otherwise) or the speakerphone and the Treo’s contacts and memo applications, among others, remain accessible.
Comment by West — 2007/07/02 @ 10:59 am |
Jesse, I’ve thought about trading my Treo in for a smaller phone and a PDA but I’ve heard that the web access through bluetooth is pretty slow compared to an integrated device. What’s your experience been like?
- Rich
Comment by Rich S. — 2007/07/02 @ 1:32 pm |
Rich – Bluetooth is a -little- slow, yeah, but it’s not really -that- bad. Most of the heavy browser work I’m going to do on my laptop anyway. The handheld is really just a ‘ok, I need to know now, don’t have time or space to set up my laptop’ kind of thing.
West – I don’t keep a headset in my ear 24/7. It’s a bitch to switch to the headset once you’ve already dialed or answered a call without it.
Comment by Jesse Custer — 2007/07/02 @ 2:28 pm |
[...] I couldn’t tell if he was just fiddling or actually having to do that, but now that I read this it appears the landscape mode isn’t totally seamless – sure it looks groovy when the image [...]
Pingback by Doesn’t look like I’ll be buying an iPhone « The view from my window — 2007/07/02 @ 11:12 pm |
I owned a iPhone for five days. I didn’t hate it but I was thankful for the treo 700p. Here are several reasons that anyone who has a treo shouldn’t run out and buy an iPhone.
-The treo allows for sending text messages to multiple recipients at a time. The iPhone is one person per message.
-iPhone isn’t capable of carrying any word or excel programs which are built into the treo.
-iPhone has no third party software capabilities at all
-iPhone accepts no memory cards or expansion
-entering datebook info in iPhone is extremely tedious
-iPhone is unable to use ringtones outside of preinstalled tones
-iPhone keyboard is one of the worst on the market of smartphones. Also predictive text causes more mistakes than corrections
-iPhone has no second battery backup options
-no iPhone applications allow for copy and paste functions
The iPhone has beautiful user interface. It appears to be very stable (unlike treos). Has nice display. The virtual voicemail is awesome. If you think of the iPhone as the best ipod yet, then it’s almost worth the money. Non treo users will not be disappointed.
Comment by jesse — 2007/07/04 @ 3:35 am |
Rob, you won’t want to sync over Bluetooth as your normal synchronization channel. It is far slower than a USB connection; I only sync over Bluetooth when I forget the USB cable for my Palm when I’m out of town. I don’t know how much Bluetooth chipsets’ power profiles have improved since Palm put together the T|X, but if they haven’t improved much then synchronizing/backing up the iPhone over Bluetooth is likely to be a significant power drain. On my T|X a sync will put a visible dent into the battery meter; only about a few pixel’s worth, no more than 2% I’d say, but still a lot more than a USB-based sync (which of course draws power from the USB plug and yields a net increase in battery life).
The Bluetooth connection icon in OS X’s Address Book is indeed spiffy. When connected to my cell phone, it will indeed let Address Book dial it, and furthermore, when calls come in on the cell phone, Address Book will pop up a small window with the caller’s information if it finds a match.
Wanting Spotlight-like (or Quicksilver-like) behavior is entirely reasonable, and I would go further to say that not implementing it is throwing out the valuable lessons Google taught everyone about the relative value of manually constructing indexes versus letting the machine search through content for you. I think here they let their iPod experience override usability analysis; usage patterns for music are not the same as for address book information.
The lack of a memory card is not a big deal as long as backing up and re-imaging an iPhone to/from a Mac/PC via iTunes is single-button simple. Being able to add more flash RAM is nice, but at 8 GB, I think I can stand the limitation. If there was some way to wirelessly tether an iPod to an iPhone, and seamlessly access all the contents of your iPod from your iPhone as streams however…
I’m sure third parties will step up and fill the gap for a second battery. Make a battery that will plug into the iPhone to keep it going, and accept the iPhone’s charger. Now if the iPhone stops working as soon as you plug it into the charger, then that would be a big design flaw.
I used to be like jessecuster, and wanted to keep my PDA and cell phone as separate devices, primarily because I didn’t want a more functional PDA to come along, and still be stuck with a smartphone whose PDA half I want to ditch but was perfectly happy with the cell phone half. The iPhone comes pretty close to addressing that concern though, with it raw specs.
Applications that I’m waiting to see on the iPhone for before re-evaluating purchase of one would be: password manager, alarm clock, ICQ client, SSH client, VNC client, VOIP client, lists manager, and Google Gears. Issues like improvements in Google Maps not fanning out seamlessly to the iPhone also need to be ironed out. If Apple doesn’t trust their own message that web applications should be good enough and instead of eating their own dog food, uses a hard-coded application to talk to a web service instead of passing Google Maps straight through to the Maps service, then they shouldn’t be surprised when developers demur and punt to see what happens with third-party development in certain sectors (primarily business-oriented; I expect consumer-oriented development will be robust).
Comment by Tony — 2007/07/08 @ 10:14 pm |
I had in iPhone, had a AT&T Tilt, and I am going back to my Treo 650. It works. Nuff said.
Movies? On my laptop.
GPS? In my car, and I know how to use a map :) I guess many people don’t.
I’m simply hoping someone takes the simplicity of use of the Treo 650 and makes a wonderful device with a 4″ screen. That I would buy.
Comment by Counsel — 2008/01/23 @ 10:03 pm |