Trevin Chow

I’m still in the process of authoring a blog post on what it was like to move to an iPhone 3G after nearly 6 years of using Windows Mobile devices.  My most recent phone was a Motorola Q9H which was running Windows Mobile 6.0.

However, in the meantime, I’m getting super frustrated over the crazy bugs and problems I’ve been having with the iPhone so I wanted to spend a bit of time venting.  While Windows Mobile is not perfect by any means, the iPhone is definitely getting a lot of undue accolades in my opinion.  There are features and scnearios that work fantastically such as GPS integration into Google Maps, Yelp, etc, and not to mention the obviously superior web browsing experience.  However, the things that don’t work well, are absolutely horrible.

This writeup is in no way trying to compare Windows Mobile to the iPhone.  Instead, this is isolated feedback on the iPhone 3G.

In no particular order, here are my gripes:

• The UI and Application performance is horrible. There is unacceptable lag in so many scenarios, but the most glaring one is with the Contacts application.  Even after updating to the new 2.0.1 firmware, it can take up to 4 seconds for the Contacts application to load.
• Why does it have to “backup” my iPhone everytime I dock and sync with iTunes?  Even better, why isn’t this configurable?  This is made worse because these “backups” can take as long as an hour for me.
• When the first generation iPhone launched last year, Steve Jobs stated:

“…iPhone’s battery life is longer than any other ‘Smartphone’ and even longer than most MP3 players… We’ve also upgraded iPhone’s entire top surface from plastic to optical-quality glass for superior scratch resistance and clarity. There has never been a phone like iPhone, and we can’t wait to get this truly magical product into the hands of customers starting just 11 days from today.”

When the iPhone 3G launched this year, he said:

“If we compare this to WiFi, we’ll see 3G approaches WiFi speeds. We’re also really proud that we’re doing this with great battery life — standby time is 300 hours.  2G talk time is up from 8 hours to 10 hours. 3G talk time… other phones have 3 – 3.5 hours, we’ve managed 5 hours of 3G talk time, which is an industry-leading amount of time.”

I have no idea how the Apple Engineers have their phones configured, but there is not way I’m getting this type of battery life.  With 3G, push email, bluetooth and Wifi turned on, I can barely get through half the work day with a single charge.  I’ve had to resort to either 15 min email sync’ing on the “fetch” setting, bluetooth off and wifi selectively turned on.  I can now last a full day now, but as a contingency plan, I bought an iPhone 3G dock for my office.  Goodbye $40.

• I get continued errors about applications not being able to install or update, and when that happens I get obscenely useless errors messages. Here’s the latest gem I get from iTunes:

• iTunes still has horrible performance after all these years.  It doesn’t like the fact my music was on a network share, so much so, that there would be a noticeable lag between keystrokes in the search box.  Did I mention I have a gigabit ethernet network at home?
• I get random crashing from applications.  At first I thought this was the fault of the 3rd party application developers, but the biggest offender is Safari.  If Apple can’t even get it right, then how can 3rd party developers?  Something is amiss either in Apple’s hiring competency for developers or the iPhone OS is pure crap.  Either way, the end-user loses.
• Apple gets continually praised for making things “easy to use”, but the iPhone is an counter-example, and a big one at that.  There are weird UI inconsistency exist all over the place, one example is between SMS and Email.  For SMS, why is there no way to delete a message when you’re viewing it like there is with email?  You can only “clear” the message thread, but this leaves an entry in the SMS inbox.  To delete it you have to do it from the inbox.

This is all I can think of off the top of my head.  Stay tuned for a later post on specifically commenting on an enterprise user like myself going from a Windows Mobile device to an iPhone.  That’s where it will get interesting.

Instead of giving Apple money for ringtones on your iPhone for music you already own, here’s a simple set of steps for getting free iPhone ringtones from your MP3s:

1. Select your favorite MP3 from your music collection.
2. Open it in Audacity and trim it down to at most 30 seconds.
3. Import the edited song into iTunes and choose to convert it to M4A format. The file will then be something like yourRingtone.M4A in file explorer.
4. Copy the file and rename the extension to M4R in file explorer (e.g. yourRingtone.M4R).
5. Drag and drop the newly renamed file back into iTunes.
6. Delete the old M4A song to avoid the duplicate.

It’s surely not as simple as a one-click purchase through iTunes, but hey, save yourself a few bucks

Outlook and Exchange are the center of my universe due to the integration with my cell phone thanks to push-email and over-the-air sync.  If you’ve never had this capability (includes all you iPhone users!), then you don’t know what you’re missing.  There’s never a situation where there is out of sync information between my phone and Outlook, and since the master copy of my address book is in Exchange, losing or changing cell phones is easy schmeasy.  You’ll never see me send an email that says “Hey friends, I’ve changed cell phones and need all your phone numbers again“.  Sound familiar? Probably one of your friends that switched from their Motorola Razr to an iPhone  

Due to my reliance on Exchange I’ve never jumped on the Google Calendar bandwagon despite using Gmail for my personal email.  Google Calendar is a great product, but the last thing I want to do is manage a manual sync between it and Exchange.  To say that would be a nightmare would be the understatement of the century.  The shunning of Google Calendar has proved problematic for my personal life since many of my friends use it to send me event invitations to my personal email address instead of my work email address.  To them that makes sense since it’s a personal event, but to me, I need everything to go through my Microsoft email address for Exchange.

Well now to solve my problem, it looks like Google has finally release two-way sync between Google Calendar and Outlook!  It’s a client side component so it has to be installed on my work machine to get sync’d to my Exchange server, but this is definitely the next best thing to have server-side support.  With this app, I won’t have to tell my friends anymore to re-send the invitations to my work email, manually enter the appointments in Outlook, or even set up email forwarding rules.

The initial reviews I’ve read of the app is great and seems to just work exactly as advertised.  I’m anxious to install this app when I get to work tomorrow!

2 days ago I raved about how much I liked the iPhone after Jobs’ Macworld 2007 announcement.  After thinking about it and reading more coverage, the so-called reality distortion field has passed and I’m not feelin’ the iPhone like I previously did.  Call me wishy-washy, but it’s true.  Omar and Torres have both discussed it at great length, and I agree with most of their points.  I’m not going as far as Torres and saying I won’t buy this phone, but there are enough things that concern me about it to at least delay my purchase for a significant amount of time.

After reading Mike’s post, here’s my response:

1. Access to my corporate data over the air – Agree that if this functionality doens’t exist, the device is also a non-starter for me.  However, we haven’t heard definitively that this won’t be possible so let’s keep our fingers crossed.
2. EDGE network speed — while Mike finds Edge “so slow it’s almost unusable for browsing”, I woudl have to disagree. After moving to the Samsung Blackjack recently which sports 3G HSDPA connection, I find myself in Edge-only mode to presrve battery life.  For what I normally browse (yahoo mail, rss feeds, engadget), Edge is clearly slower than 3G/EVDO, but not a deal breaker.
3. Too expensive? People are continually saying this device is too expensive, but I’m still on the fence.  $500-$600 for this device isn’t as outlandish as people claim it is given it’s a full blow iPod but also a phone.  Considering iPods are $200-$300 and phones alone can go upwards of $300, the iPhone price point is right there.  Admittedly, once you factor in the fact that Cingular should be subsizing the price since they are going to lock you into a 2 year contract, you gotta wonder whether Cingular is subsizing anything at all.
4. Touchscreen interface – I was really keen on this originally, but now, I’m going to have to agree with the skeptics.  It looks freakin’ cool, but after you factor in screen scratches and smudges along with the lack of any tactile response, this device could be an absolute nightmare.
5. Closed system – I was all hyped up about the iPhone running full blown OSX since it meant that app developers wouldn’t have to really do much to refactor their apps other than accomodating smaller screen size (unless the iPhone did some clever UI scaling).  But turns out that the iPhone will be a closed platform just like the iPod.   WTF Apple. Haven’t you learned anything at all from anyone else in the industry? Why do you keep doing this?

Other than a cool form factor, the only thing that the iPhone does for me, is allows me to ditch my standalone iPod altogether.  I would always have my ipod on me which would be ultra-convenient, but then again, this means I always have to carry my headphones.  I just know I’d end up in a situation where I have my iPhone with no headphones to listen to music. 

The teedot jury is still out on whether the iPhone will be a winner or not, but what’s certain is that I’m not going to rush out and buy this thing.

Macworld 2007 kicked off today with the Steve Jobs keynote.  Apple definitely delivered on the anticipated hype by delivering on the iPhone:

As always, if you want full covereage do a search or check out Engadget. Why the iPhone is freakin’ cool in tee dot’s book:

• All-in-one device – Cellphone and iPod combined into a single device. Finally I can get rid of burden of carrying my smartphone and iPod at the same time, which means I”ll always have my ipod with me.
• 11.6mm thick — thinner than the Motorola Q and even my new Samsung Blackjack.
• Runs full blown OSX – 3rd party app creation will be far simpler for developers.  No need to scale down apps? woah.
• Proximity sensor — turns off screen and touchscreen interface when it’s close to your face
• World phone enabled – Quad-band GSM
• Push-IMAP Yahoo email — This freakin’ rocks since I use Yahoo as my primary email provider.  I’ve been using them for nearly 5 years and the pain of changing my primary email address is big enough to stop me from doing it
• 4GB and 8GB storage – priced at $499 and $599.   Pricey for a cell phone alone, but considering this double as an iPod, it’s a little more justifiable. But still… $500?!  Will be interesting to see if (1) Cingular reduces the price based on contract, and/or (2) it’s unlocked.  I can’t imaine Cingular agreeing to carry an unlocked device despite the rumours. 
• Google maps integration – I wub Windows Live Maps more, but tight integration with Google Maps is never a bad thing.
• Available through Cingular – since this is my carrier, it’s obviously a good thing

Other minor features I love:

• Visual voicemail — I absolutely hate voicemail since triage is so difficult. This almost makes it palattable.
• SMS conversations – I’m an SMS junkie and showing my SMS exchange in a conversation form is an obvious enhancement. I love it.

I do love my Windows Mobile devices (and my new Samsung Blackjack), but am absolutely in love with the iPhone already.  Gotta love how Apple keeps pushing us.  Always an advantage when you build the hardware along with the Software, which is one of the reasons Microsoft has been so succesful with the Xbox 360  and will be succesful with the Zune.

I’m skiddish on the “multi-touch” UI, as I’m a big fan of the tactile response from a keypad.  I guess I’ll either have to wait for an in-depth review, or just take the plunge and score one when they are available from Cingular in June 2007.