A letter from the iPhone world

[slitchfield]

Part rant, part apologetic, part FAQ, in this article I reply directly to a long and interesting email fired in by a Mac-owning, iPhone fan at my championing of the Nokia N95 (8GB) in Smartphones Show 62. Not your typical troll, Nikolay makes some good points in his missive but hopefully I make some equally good ones in return!

Read on in the full article.

Was that a sad piece to read. The Iphone crowd can coo all it wants, and frankly I can't be bothered. I will stick with S60 for now. One handed devices trumps all in usability, even if the UI is a bit cluttered.

[chortik]

that's a fair response, aside from your comment on osx being an os for beginners. it is unparalleled as a development platform. unix underpinnings come in useful on a daily basis. the filesystem is far more powerful than fat32/ntfs. let's not forget that windows until recently could not handle files larger than 4gb.

I have the feeling that the statement about entering Chinese and Japanese on a N95 is just a red herring in an attempt to make a touch screen seem superior w/o giving any details. On a PC with Windows XP Home or Professional (non-Chinese version is good enough) a latin keyboard is enough to enter Chinese. You don't need a touch screen like the one used on a tablet PC for that.

So why should this be that different on a phone? If it is really so much different, why didn't Nokolay explain the differences in a few words or a video? Did he just write it to make the touch screen seem more capable? One advantage of a touch screen, though, is the ability (at least at the hardware level) to just draw the characters on the screen. The question here is how convenient that is for real world use with fingers on something like the iPhone.

BTW: Does a software exist to compose and read Chinese SMS on a European S60 phone? Would be a good addition for my phone.

And regarding HSDPA speed and support for different frequencies: At least the networks in my home country charge alot of money when travelling outside Europe. And this cost will make me use data less then and for that EDGE and even GPRS will be good enough. Keeps my bank account in the propper territory so could even be counted as positive for private use. Even if I am inside my home country, I am content with 3.6 MBit/second as that is already faster than my Internet connection at home. Having HSUPA would be far more useful to me as that would speed up uploads.

[bartmanekul]

Im suprised that Steve did this at all. It was blatently a fanboy rant, just a little more polite than usual.

"It's the same with many Windows users who do not understand why Macs are so much better untill for some reason they end with with one for a week or two and can never get back to the PC."

And thats the proof. The Windows V Mac/OSX argument has been going on for years, and the obvious answer is that it depends on the user. Every single non fanboy has known that for ages.

And yet the classic 'Macs are so much better' line comes from Nikolay.

omg..i love ur comments steve!
it's like..u fought back real good there..
i'm so agree with u!
heavy users will have to stay with Windows or Symbian! there are far more various things u can do with it than Mac OS!

[jpwbamber]

Simplified Chinese characters as used in PRC are quite easy to input using a mobile keyboard such as that on the N95.

In PRC children learn Pinyin and Chinese characters in parallel from nursery school onwards. Pinyin is the way to enter Chinese characters using phonetic roman characters.

In China you see the same number of teenagers sending Chinese character text messages from usual looking phones. They enter the message in Pinyin and it appears and is sent as Chinese characters.

[Dr Tran]

"magapixel myth" Can't this guy use spell check?

Unnecessary to reply to brainwashed Mactards/iTards, it's like arguing with Jehovah's Witnesses. Apple always does everything right, just the required functions, never less, never more, it's just perfect. If something's not there, you don't need it.

[buster]

I think the real comparison is going to be when the Appstore launches, and the iPhone and iPod Touch finally get some real applications.

As it stands, there is so much that the iPhone CAN'T do, that what it can do pales into insignificance (certainly for power users, which is maybe not the iPhone's target market). However the iPhone does what it does extremely well...

I'm a software developer, and something I find fascinating about the iPhone isn't necessarily the phone at all, but rather the iPhone SDK and the App Store distribution model.

I've recently downloaded the SDK and have started to create my first iPhone applications. I'm annoyed that the development environment only works under OS X Leopard, but delighted with the IDE and instrumentation tools. Cocoa is a pretty easy framework to pickup if you have had OOD experience. I was productive within a couple days of downloading the SDK. One thing that i'm really happy about is the lack of variety among the handsets what support Cocoa Touch (just the original iPhone and iPhone 3G), that is a really big win for developers.

I think it is really quite revolutionary that Apple is opening up the App Store to anyone that wants to pay $99/year for a developer subscription. Immediately you have a venue with which to sell your software, and the commission that apple takes (30% or free if you give your apps away for free) seems reasonable given all the infrastructure that they have built (iTunes). With apple projecting to sell 10 million units by the end of the year, that is a pretty large audience for the software that i'm developing.

It would be cool if nokia could come up with a similar model for symbian applications (perhaps open up Download! app to symbian developers)

[puterman]

Saying that MacOS is just better for beginners is really stretching it. Of course it's easier to do real work on the platform you're used to. To me, a Linux user since more than ten years, Windows is very difficult to work with. I've been using Windows at work for years, and it just doesn't get much easier. It all depends on what you're used to and what sorts of things you do.

i am a mac user (fan). I have tried iphone twice. And yet last week i traded my second iphone for e71 which together with BluePhoneElite2 is better integrated with mac - ironically. And it syncs wirelessly via iSync. Iphone is inconvenient for a business user - try typing in a car (while being passenger) and you will understand. It will eventually be great but not yet ! I have done a review in latvian here : http://boo.tunt.lv/?zoomzina=901

[Solnyshok]

I am also surprised that you took to answer this rant, Steve. Seems typical iphonniac attack to me.

Nokia is a moving target, and Apple is slower than I thought previously. First iPhone was years behind Nokia when it appeared on the market. Now, yet-to-be sold iP3G is about just 20 months behind Nokia. With such speed, we will see a truly revolutionary iPhone in 3 years only. (if, and only if, Nokia screws up big time). By that time there will be 5 or 6 generations of iPhones to support in SDK, all with different specs, speeds, and limitations. Goodluck apple.

[Sick Spider]

How come every time iPhone users go back to the UI?, we get it!, its pretty, yes, apple got THAT right.
I think thats about it, no usability.

I really don't get it, they ad this as a full mp3 player with NO bluetooth stereo support, you got to be kidding.... (only one example).

Steve,
Great reply BTW.