Anand Reviews the Apple iPhone 3G
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 16, 2008 8:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Clutter Awaits!
The iPhone doesn’t support third-party background tasks, and as I applauded in the original review, its whole goal is to kick applications and data out of memory as quickly as possible to maintain the fastest interface possible. This approach is partly necessary to ensure that the iPhone can appear to be faster than other smartphones built on similar hardware, but it also makes sure the phone can scale with the number of applications you have installed.
Theoretically, it shouldn’t matter if you have zero or forty applications installed, performance should remain identical since all they do is take up space on the iPhone’s writable flash yet don’t remain resident in memory. I didn’t notice any performance degradation as I kept adding applications to the iPhone 3G, but admittedly I could only find around 21 that I wanted to have installed.
You can now have multiple home screen pages, you swipe to view additional pages. My second homepage is just App Store applications.
But even with only 21 applications installed, the iPhone’s home interface quickly becomes cluttered. You quickly have to reorganize the iPhone’s home screen to optimize for frequently used first and third party applications.
The original iPhone’s interface worked because it was so simple, something many considered a detriment given that the iPhone lacked basic smartphone or cellphone features. My thinking was that Apple honed in on the top 10 features that it wanted to get right and focused on perfecting those, which it absolutely did with the original iPhone. The problem is that with the 2.0 firmware and the app store, the iPhone takes a dangerous step towards becoming more like Windows Mobile. The balance between program functionality and UI was tilted far in favor of UI with the first iPhone, but with multiple screens of applications and very little connecting them together, the tides are beginning to turn.
By no means am I taking issue with the app store, it’s clearly an important part of Apple’s strategy and as you’ll soon see, there are a number of applications that will actually help make this phone even better. The problem becomes what happens when you’ve got so many applications that you use on a regular basis that navigating between them all becomes an issue?
Apple helped addressed this on the desktop through the use of the Dashboard in OS X 10.4. The Dashboard provided one simple interface for things like notes, weather, stocks, the calculator and more, unfortunately porting that to the iPhone wouldn’t really work given that you’re constrained by screen size. The concept however, I believe, is similar to what Apple may need to do going forward.
When all of the applications you needed to run fit on a single home screen, things were fine. Once that number grows significantly, we start to straddle the line between feature-packed and cumbersome. Apple’s iPhone interface is far from the mess that is Windows Mobile, but it’s headed in that direction. I do hope, for Apple’s sake, that the next iPhone update actually encompasses more than some minor hardware/physical changes.
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cocoviper - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
Well I think it depends on how we define free. Since you're paying so much for the iPhone's plan one would think they could (or should) include it at some point.The Instinct does turn-by-turn voice GPS and it's included in the phone's plan.
jcal710 - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
Anand,You talked about the problems with contact syncing on Exchange. How configurable is it? Does it automatically default to your top level 'Contacts' folder in your Exchange mailbox, or can your point it somewhere else? Do you have the option of choosing whether or not to sync subfolders?
Griswold - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
I'm glad I didnt go for the first iphone, that way I can appreciate my 3G more(besides the fact that it wasnt sold until the 11th of july in this country and I would have been forced to import one and jailbreak it).Anand, your friend with the huge lips doesnt listen to the name of S.Tyler by chance? :P
ViRGE - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
Anand, do you know if Apple's A-GPS implementation requires cellular network access? Some do, others can revert to traditional GPS operation if there's no cellular network to offer location assistance. I'm curious which of this it isObrut - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
So how is it even remotely possible that there hasn’t been a real iPhone competitor in the year since the original’s release?Nokia N95 8GB is far superior to iPhone and it was released even before the first iPhone.
It's right to say there's no competition here. Apple need at least 3-4 more years to be truly competitive to Nokia. I think iPhone is better solution for americans. In Europe you need 3.5G or 4G phone to be truly connected.
michael2k - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
You're serious aren't you?Let us count the ways then:
iPhone screen resolution is 2x the Nokia screen resolution
iPhone is nearly half as thick as the Nokia
CPU of nearly twice the speed
The Nokia's one physical advantage is the 5MP cammera (which is only possible because the Nokia is twice as thick).
Obrut - Friday, July 18, 2008 - link
OK, let's count, Michael...1. Screen resolution is bigger and it should be simply because the display is much bigger. The display is much bigger because it's a touchscreen, though not big enough for my fingers.
2. iPhone is thin and that's because it has merely 4 buttons and a low profile, low-end camera. By the way how do you play games without buttons?
3. Speaking of games how do you play OpenGL games? I play Quake 2 with full lighting effects and FSAA at 40 FPS. What about the JAVA games?
4. N95 8GB is a dual CPU solution (2 x ARM 11 @ 332MHz) hence no lower performance here.
5. The 5MP camera of N95 8GB is more that just megapixels - it has Carl Zeiss optics, decent flashlight and can capture movies at 640x480@30FPS. In addition - correct me if I'm wrong but I don't see the front camera which every decent 3G phone has. How can I make a video call with iPhone? After all this is one of the best 3G features.
I can continue counting the battery, office productivity and so on, but this is not the place. I don't want to engage in a Nokia vs. Apple or N9x vs. iPhone battle here. I just don't like statements like "there's no competition", "best phone ever" etc. The most accurate thing to say is that iPhone is the best touchphone to date.
Griswold - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
Why talk if you dont know what you're talking about? 3.5G is called HSDPA (an extension to UMTS) in europe, which is supported by the iphone 3G. 4G isnt even available yet, think 2010 for commercial use, so why mention it?Why is there no competition? Because none of the competition has a smartphone that comes with this usability. All the other phones can do the same or more, yes. But all of them feel clumsy like a brick when using them. That is why there is no competition. And this comes from somebody who truly doesnt like apple and its godfather jobs...
cocoviper - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
Speaking of not knowing what you're talking about...HSDPA isn't 3.5G, it's definitely AT&T's 3G and that is what the iPhone 3G supports. That's the 3G that Anand complained is not really that much faster.
If there were a "3.5G" in AT&T's portfolio it would be HUPSA (the one that they just upped the offered speeds on.) However AT&T currently doesn't offer any phones that are HUPSA capable. They only have a couple of Aircards for laptops.
And yes, 4G is available in many parts of the world besides the US my friend. WiMax alone is deployed 119 countries currently. LTE is the only 4G that's "not even available yet," and that's because it's yet to be developed. (LTE isn't even into the whitepaper stage yet.)
So don't slam other people especially since there's always someone that will know more than you.
sources -> http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/93...">http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Te...A0BF6-62...
http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/wow/index.cfm/20...">http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/wow/index.cfm/20...
cocoviper - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
*HSUPA not HUPSA :-P