From S60 to iPhone

Published by Steve Litchfield at 7:49 GMT, November 23rd 2007

Guest writer Matt Radford brings us his impressions of the Apple iPhone after a lifetime of S60 use, from Nokia 7650 to N70. Although the transition would have been even more apt if he'd gone from something more up to date like an N95, it's still a terrifically interesting comparison and a good read.

I’ve been a contented Symbian user since the Nokia 7650 was released. The continually expanding capabilities and easy sync with my Mac kept me loyal to the OS, but on November 9^th  this year I swallowed the £269 upfront fee and switched from my N70 to an iPhone. When I met Steve in the queue at my local Carphone Warehouse in Woodley, I happily agreed to write down my thoughts on how the experience ⁽¹⁾ of owning and using an iPhone differs from the Symbian devices I’ve owned.

I haven’t jailbroken or unlocked my iPhone, so my experience with the device is as Apple and O2 intended it to be, syncing with a Mac running OS X Leopard.

16 hours to buy a phone… ⁽²⁾

Apple has developed a polished retail division, where buying consumer electronics is akin to shopping in a high-end boutique; it was naive of me to expect any of that to have rubbed off onto Carphone Warehouse. I was served just after the doors opened at 6.02pm, but unfortunately at that moment all of CPW’s chip and pin servers went on the blink. The staff hit the panic button, and the fall-back system was implemented – which itself failed. Finally, they decided to accept real money in contravention of Apple’s orders (cue a mad run to the cash point), but insisted that I leave my credit card overnight and return in the morning with proof of address! Through gritted teeth I did so, and left the shop an hour after entering, only to have to return at 10am to finally complete the transaction. Not a good start.

Activation and Sync

Getting the phone onto the O2 network was simple – iTunes handled the activation, tariff choice and porting of my number from Vodafone. This took 10 minutes at most. I noted that the paltry 200 mins and 200 texts did not include any rollover minutes, but I think this is increasingly becoming industry-standard. Sync with the Mac was almost flawless – the exception being my inactive email accounts which were unnecessarily transferred and then had to be deleted on the iPhone. Other than that, the initial sync was done within about 40 minutes and I had transferred contacts, email, calendars, Safari bookmarks, photos, music and video. Good to go.

Any new or altered iPhone items – contact item changes, calendar entries, bookmarks, camera photos and music purchased through the iTunes Wifi store - all transfer back to the Mac seamlessly when cradled via USB. Contact fields also correctly map between the iPhone and the Mac (although not all contact fields transfer), whereas there were some errors when syncing with Symbian devices. This compares to a more disjointed sync effort with the N70, which involved using iSync (hacked to ensure All Day calendar items transferred correctly), Nokia Music Transfer and sending files via Bluetooth or USB to manage items individually. I definitely prefer the one-stop iPhone sync – it takes less time to manage, and lends itself to using my phone as more of an extension of my home computer ⁽³⁾.

Usage

The iPhone is slick. Transitions are smooth, and the interface feels polished. There are no momentary delays as with the N70. Handing off certain core functions to hardware buttons – volume level, silent on/off, sleep/wake – works very well. The keyboard’s fine once you start to just go with it, though one-handed operation is a strain. I have had a couple of GUI lockups to date, and the iPod function seems to crash sometimes when browsing the web. Overall, stability is on par with the N70 and the immaturity of mobile OS X only seems apparent in terms of missing features.

But it’s only as good as the battery life and that’s not great - a day and a half of moderate usage, compared to 3 days of similar on the N70. I’m not usually far from a power point (and it does charge via USB), but even so it’s disappointing seeing as the manufacturer’s estimate is 250 hours standby. I’m also on my second iPhone – the first had a faulty battery and managed barely a day on light usage. CPW did exchange it, but will only do so during the first 28 days.

Music

I lost my iPod earlier this year, so was using my N70 until the iPhone turned up. Although the N70 worked fine for playing the odd music track, it wasn’t great. The music interface was clunky, and although calls would pause the music, afterwards the track would often start again from the beginning – which is annoying when you’re listening to long mixes.

The iPhone is really streets ahead – music and video are at the heart of the device. Music fades in and out with ease when a call comes in. Plus, Coverflow is a very intuitive way of browsing albums. The large screen is excellent for watching movies, and there’s enough battery to watch a blockbuster.

Less a phone than an internet tablet?

I was using Opera Mini 3 on the N70, which was fine for quick checks, but not for really getting anything done. It just didn’t look or feel like the web as I knew it. Now, I find myself using the iPhone browser all the time. Safari presents most web pages exceptionally well, and having the web literally at your fingertips is liberating. Plus I haven’t found the lack of Flash to be an issue. Speed is the only downside. O2’s EDGE is largely AWOL, and GPRS reminds me of the dial-up days. Though even with this slowness when not on Wifi, the beauty of using the browser compensates in my opinion.

The web feels like the real web on the iPhone, and I can’t see myself going back to a device with a smaller screen.

Email and SMS - the messaging lucky dip

I was using Profimail on the N70, which is a great power user’s email client but which drained the battery by maintaining a 3G connection (even with that option turned off). Also, HTML emails did not render very well. The iPhone client is not as feature-rich, but HTML emails render well, it talks to my IMAP server with no problems, and does not seem to be a battery drain when on a similar polling interval. It’s a pleasing way to deal with email.

But as for SMS – gaaahhh! This is one area where the feature canyon is wide. The iPhone does not allow texts to multiple recipients, nor drafts, nor forwarding, and there isn’t even a character count as you’re writing a message! Also no MMS, even though it would not be hard to integrate. It’s like 1999 but we’re not partying. The IM style of threaded SMS (“conversations”) grates – I’m not convinced that this is a good way to handle what are usually fire-and-forget quick messages. Plus what’s the point of keeping those conversation histories if you can’t do anything with that data (there’s no cut and paste)?

SMS feels severely deprecated on the iPhone and is a major pain. Chalk up a large advantage up to the N70.

(As an aside, could someone please think about integrating messages – SMS, MMS, email, maybe even voicemail – into a universal inbox? They’re all just people trying to contact me, so why are they treated so differently?)

It also does calls

As a phone, it works very well. Making a call is easy: touch Phone | Contacts then Favorites ⁽⁴⁾, Contacts or Recents. Although there are more key presses than with the N70, the actual speed of dialling (because the UI is quicker) is just the same. Options such as switching calls, muting, looking up contacts, etc. are all easily accessible during a call. I’ve lost count of the times that I cut people off while trying to switch calls using the N70, and I don’t have particularly sausage-like fingers.

One gripe is that Contacts are a second-level menu item under Phone – but Contacts are used for more than just making calls. On the N70 they were the first item in my active standby screen and the first item I’d press with the D pad. They really should be a first-level menu item, as for me it’s the centre of the phone.

Once I’ve made my call, how do I check how many of my precious minutes (and texts) I have left? There is a Call Time under the Usage monitor, but it combines incoming and outgoing calls. That’s fine for the US where incoming and outgoing calls are charged together in a tariff, but not for the UK. As there’s no prospects of installing anything like Dashfly Minutes, the fall back is the carrier telling you your minutes remaining. On the US iPhone, there’s an AT&T Services option in Settings | Phone which takes you to a dedicated used minutes web page. On the UK iPhone, this option is just a link to the O2 iPhone start web site (http://www.o2.co.uk/iphonestart), and the minutes checker isn’t even on this site. You have to go on to the main O2 site, log in, and navigate through several options before you get to the answer. On my N70 using Vodafone it was simple: call 191, option 1, option 2 | receive text message. I even had a speed dial set with pauses, so it was a one-button operation. Finding out my minutes using the iPhone on O2 is completely user-unfriendly, and it will curtail my use of the device’s primary function as I’ll be worried about the expense.

Overall

This hasn’t been a comprehensive review, just a sample of my impressions since switching from Symbian. I find the iPhone to be a fantastic device that is beset with daily small frustrations – no Bluetooth file exchange, poor file handing, having to write things down instead of cut and paste.

Will I stick with the iPhone? Yes for now, because it does enough of what it does do really well. I noticed that CPW have a “no iPhone returns” policy so it’s just as well I’m happy with my decision for the next 18 months. There will be more iterations of the device, but at the same time Symbian and Nokia are not resting on their laurels and there’s the prospect of S60 touchscreen devices in the second half of 2008. From my perspective, it’s a great time to be using gadgets, whatever your preference.

But no, I didn’t write this on the iPhone.

Matt Radford

matt@mattrad.co.uk

1. As opposed to a straight feature comparison. It’s also not a comparison of cutting-edge devices, as I’m trying to get down how the iPhone feels as an upgrade from an older device, which will be the experience for most people.

2. This headline guaranteed by a Slashdot level of accuracy :)

3. Is sync this easy using iTunes on a PC? Comments please.

4. Note the spelling. Internationalisation only goes so far.

Categories: Comment, Hardware
Platforms: Series 60, General, S60 3rd Edition

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bassey It's now starting to look very much like what is actually letting it down in the marketplace is data entry in general and SMS in particular. I don't think this was an issue in the US where SMS isn't so massice as in the UK and cell phones are generally used for calls. The iPhone is fine for calls and adds a huge amount in terms of consuming content. It sounds like the synching also makes inputting unecessary for many things. However, the UK market is addicted to texting and relies a lot more on general text inputting, swapping pictures by bluetooth etc. These are the things either the iPhone doesn't do or doesn't do well and seem to be the reason (as well as cost) that they have sold so poorly. It seems to have little to do with editing word documents, customising the today screen, running ftp clients or any of the stuff WE think is important. There's an interesting piece on the Register on how the highstreet is full of iPhones but you can't get hold of a Wii or an Eee PC for love nor money. Now who would have predicted that two months ago?

I think that's a very astute observation. I think the problem comes down to fact the iPhone (whatever you might think of it) puts the music / video experience first in design terms (the device size / interaction). It doesn't really look like any other phone (nor does it behave like that) and people don't like that. We can debate whether its good or bad at particular tasks, but in one sense that's irrelevant.

I'd agree cost is also a factor.

I also wonder whether the good enough syndrome comes into play here. People buy a phone because they want to make calls / send SMS. The keypad with small to medium size screen is the best form factor for this (one handed usage, device size etc etc). Increasingly people are also thinking it would be nice if it also did something else (play games, play music, do email).... but crucially how good the experience is here is far less important than the phone experience provided it is good enough.

Yes touch and the iPod model does provide the best solution for media playback, but if a phone can provide a good enough alternative then that's all it needs to do. Music on a phones like the Nseries is actually quite good (i.e. most people can get a bit of music on them through one of the various methods. It might not be so elegant but it works. (The exception to this maybe where you're an existing heavy iTunes users, but then I suspect people already own an iPod and maybe more interested in the Touch. Equally this works the other way round - if you have your computer music collection in Windows Media Player you'll have an easy time using an Nseries phone)

Personally I think this is one reason for S60's relative success - it does the ordinary phone bit very well (or rather its very like the Series 40 experience people are use to).

On a separate issue: Things like codecs for video / audio apply less now. The recent S60 phones have the same stuff as the iPhone (indeed if anything they are more flexible). I also think sync works as reliably on S60 as anything else I've tried. Each has its annoyances. e.g. the iPhone uses play list based sync (making it less intuitive to drag and drop files on to it)

As others noted, it's a bit odd to compare a model from a couple of years ago with one that's just come out.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bassey There's an interesting piece on the Register on how the highstreet is full of iPhones but you can't get hold of a Wii or an Eee PC for love nor money. Now who would have predicted that two months ago?

Yes, I agree, I think we've reached a "good enough" plateau for many tasks in computing and electronics where we simply don't need or want more expensive hardware any more. If even low-end computers are good enough to do email, websites and multimedia then people are going to go for the cheapest computer possible, which is what things like the Eee offer.

One almost-totally-unnoticed development in Symbian a couple of years ago was their move to reduce the number of chips required by Symbian phones, which in turn greatly reduces the size and cost of the phones. The fruits of this are being seen now in things like the E51 and 6120, which are fully featured like their predecessors but absolutely tiny and have relatively low launch prices too. That reduction in size and price is IMHO by far the most important thing that a smartphone can do to make itself mainstream.

As long as a device has a certain minimum functionality, price outweighs all other factors. It's not a question of being the best, it's a question of being the cheapest while still being good enough.

In case anyone missed it, this was pretty much the gist of a feature article I did a while ago:

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/featu...Smartphone.php

I don't see Apple embracing this philosophy at all, they've always kept their products expensive year after year by upping the specs and not allowing anyone else to manufacture compatible devices. It's difficult to know what will happen in the short term, but that attitude just isn't going to work in the long term.

Quote:

But people who have been using the java based phones and the kinds will find the iphone a welcome surprise.

The sim-free iPhone costs €1000, which is thirty times more than a basic phone, twenty times more than a java-based phone, four times more than the 6120 (which has similar multimedia and web-browsing abilities as the iPhone, plus the ability to render flash websites, plus it runs S60 3rd Edition software), and the iPhone even costs more than the E90.

Looking at it from an average user's perspective, I can't think of anything that a phone could do which would justify it costing thirty times more than a basic model. It makes no difference how good it is, that kind of price difference is too much.

You can pay less up front if you buy the iPhone on contract, but you're still talking about hundreds of euros when most people get contract phones (including the 6120) free. You also end up paying a very hefty monthly fee for a couple of years, far more than you'd pay for a Java-based phone, and the total price of the contract will probably be something approaching a couple of thousand Euros.

Whichever way you buy it, the ultra-high price for the iPhone means that it's difficult to see the average user even considering buying one, especially as basic phones are going down in price all the time.

The only people putting their money down for the iPhone will be wealthy enthusiasts of one kind or another, ordinary users will be sticking to their €30 sim-free or free-on-contract basic models.

Quote:

Originally Posted by krisse [...]The only people putting their money down for the iPhone will be wealthy enthusiasts of one kind or another, [...]

Is this a euphemism for "dumbass Maczealot"?

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