Smartphones: past, present, and future!

[Caltsar]

So, I recently got an iPhone... I had an iPod touch so I knew what I was getting already and I've always followed the iPhone software and hardware closely.  On that subject, I've also always been a follower of smartphones and PDAs.  I make a point to try every major new phone and OS that comes out.  As a disclaimer, those of you who read my LJ may be familiar with what I'm going to start here and I am biased toward the iPhone as it is my personal favorite.

Now, before I start rambling on here... the general discussion I'm trying to start is "What are your views on the directions mobile computing is going?"

For the sake of brevity I'm also going to leave out a LOT of details I used in my recent LJ post, so if you want elaboration please ask and I will do so, but I do believe that we're at a sort of tipping point for mobile computing that is finally making it practical for every day use.

Now, I personally believe that Apple is leading the way to this in the same way they lead the design and widespread adoption of DAPs (Digital Audio Players).  Obviously the big reason for this is the massive mindshare that the iPhone has.  *Everybody* knows what an iPhone looks like and most people have used one by this point.  All of this has happened in the last couple years.  That's good by the standards of ANY company.  Windows Mobile has been around in excess of 10 years and while many people know what it is, your average consumer will think it's for "geeks" and it really is.  The adoption rate of Windows Mobile isn't very good either... As I went into detail about this in my LJ post I'm going to sum it up with a few comparisons and generalizations between these two main competitors (I know there are exceptions and I know I'm ignoring android and web os... I'll get to them later)

• WinMo phones are either slow, horribly built, and mildly expensive ($100 to $200) or HUGE, good, and better built... but expensive ($300 to $600) while the iPhone is fast, well built, and cheap ($100 to $200, only more if you need 16+GB)
• WinMo is complicated, clunky, and not approachable while the iPhone is something you can give to a toddler and s/he'll know how to use it almost immediately.
• WinMo is a scaled down desktop, the iPhone is a true handheld OS.

Now, to head off any potential flame wars, I'm talking from the view of an "average consumer" and whatever your views of them, they are VERY important in deciding the role of these devices in our future.  WinMo is not a good mobile operating system by design.  even with nice capacitive touch screens, it still requires a stylus to use effectively and the 6.5 facelift barely helps as it's mostly the home screen that got updated.  The fact that I don't have to keep track of a stylus was what moved me so quickly from my Palm to my iPod touch...

I've been ignoring Android and WebOS... and Symbian... I will continue to ignore Symbian.  If you don't know why then go pick up the most expensive S60 device you can find and watch it perform like that $100 WinMo smartphone from 2005.  Android and WebOS on the other hand are very promising.

First is Android.  It's still very new and needs a lot of work.  It does not feel like a finished product for me even with 2.0.  There are some interface standards that NEED to be implemented and that horrible "chin" on the keyboards of every Android device out there is probably the main reason I've found them all unusable (in my opinion).  That said, the OS itself shows promise and is something I see targeting the Windows Mobile poweruser crowd.  The multitasking is WONDERFULLY executed, but is not something I see being the "killer feature" since almost every "average consumer" doesn't give a rats ass about multitasking as long as their browser starts up in less than an hour. (I'm actually part of the crowd that actively hates using multitasking on mobile devices).  I do see the Linux-like community and attitude surrounding the (linux based) OS as something that will keep it out of the hands of most average consumer types though when you have something as simple as the iPhone on display nearby.  That said, it's defiantly hitting another market segment and it's moving in the direction to saturate that segment (and winning the % of devices war... but maybe not mindshare war.  Both are very powerful by themselves and can measure equal success)

Finally, I used to be a huge fan of palm, but they've been making poor decisions in their hardware and OS... I'm not going to go into detail here, but I see them crashing and burning in a short amount of time... or continuing to stagnate.

Anyway, I know I'm heavily iPhone biased, but I'd like to hear your opinions on the state of mobile computing (this means Smartphones, PDAs, tablets, netbooks, etc.  I would have gone on, but I want you to actually read the topic.)

On another note, attached is my first two screens on my iPhone... I find it kinda fun to compare the home screen/fav. app screens to see what people use their phones/pdas for.

[Draque]

I use an iPhone, and have pretty much nothing but praise for it from a consumer point of view...  The only real complaints I've had about it are the lack of copy/paste (fixed, but after WAY too long), the fact that their push technology didn't work and was disabled for quite some time (also fixed) and the shoddy navigation system (which is still an issue).  While the GPS is very useful and I love the fact that it plugs directly into google maps... they took very little effort taking a map system that was designed for someone in a static position and adapting it to a system for a person who is moving.  If I encounter something that forces me off of their route or make a mistake and a wrong turn, it does not recalculate my route.  If I'm in directions list mode, it doesn't keep track of where I am in the list of directions.  It doesn't have any kind of audio prompts or voice instructions to let me know that I should be ready make a turn or exit.

From a developer perspective... it's a little bit more frustrating.  I can understand their insistence that you can't run processes in the background; it conserves battery time and helps to prevent people from developing constant attack worms on the system.  What I can't understand is why on earth they chose to use a language like objective C.  I've done some development for windows mobile systems, and while WinMo is a pretty awful system for users... you can tell that MS doesn't actively hate developers.  I can't say the same for Apple.  Also, you can't develop at ALL for it unless you've got a Mac.  Also, you can't have the iPhone interface with any bluetooth device that isn't on a special approved list maintained by Apple.

Those are the worst of my complaints, though.  I think that the iPhone is the best cell out there currently, and wouldn't trade mine for anything else.  Like you mentioned, I think that it's a step toward convergence, and having one means that I get an MP3 player, phone, personal organizer and the intarwebs all in one device.

[Caltsar]

I wouldn't call objective-c a bad point.  While it is true that it's MUCH easier to develop an iPhone app on a mac, the iPhone itself is very heavily based on objective C and a variant of the normal cocoa APIs.  This entire system is based around the language and changing it and maintaining it to use another language is just impractical.  On top of that, many technologies used on the iPhone and OS X require special extensions to the C language (that's all Obj-C really is... C with a bunch of shit tacked on).  Most iPhone devs I've talked to have nothing but praise for developing for the iPhone, especially coming from Symbian and/or WinMo. This isn't counting app store gripes though.

If you noticed, my points were about the current state of things which kinda cuts out copy paste as a "way too late" item.  It would have been nice to have it sooner, and until I got it, I didn't realize how useful it was.  Coming from Palm and Windows Mobile, I NEVER used copy-paste because it was so clunky... when Apple comes along and makes it easy and elegant, I finally start using it all the time.  I'm sure that when Apple decides to add whatever form of multitasking they want (it will happen someday), I'll enjoy using that too, but for now my memories are of multitasking on Palm and WinMo and *constantly* working in the task manager to close processes I didn't want running.

It's very much a consumer device and not aimed at people who require those features that only the most tech savvy use.  It's definitely not perfect, but the whole platform has only been around for a couple years and is evolving constantly.  Just look at the state of (good quality) games in the app store when it started and now:

Racing:
Asphalt 4 - Hard to control, felt like a BREW game... yet it was AWESOME when it came out
Asphalt 5 - Smooth, looks good, feels PSP quality... and it gets "mixed-high" reviews due to occasional dropped frames on the 1G iphone and 1G touch.  Though the game still plays and looks better than the previous one.

FPS:
Cube - Hard to control, confusing interface, fairly simple graphics
Eliminate Pro - beautiful controls, pretty graphics, and AMAZING online play... even over 3G

I could go on with these genres, but if this is the kind of improvement you see by taking the "best" in each category from certain time frames and compare them to the recently released "best" it clearly shows just how much the platform is evolving.  Even networked apps like Beejive compared to earlier IM clients show massive improvements in sustaining connections over 3G and generally being faster and more reliable.  I never saw this kind of improvement in applications for other mobile devices, and I like to think this can be attributed to the massive following of the platform as a consumer oriented device.

In other news, I just heard the Droid only allows 256MB of application storage, and you can't install apps on removable storage.  I was excited about the phone, but every time I hear more about it, I feel that it's doomed to failure.  I have SINGLE apps that use more space than that.  What's the point in even having removable storage when all the important stuff is limited so much?  Knowing verizon and its history of crippling devices that are really good on other networks... I'm having reservations blaming this one on moto.

EDIT:  If you want a better navigation app, get MotionX Drive... $3/month (though they only take away the voice nav if you choose not to pay).  It's quite awesome even without it, and SO worth the $3/month to have the voice nav.  I like it better than the Tom Tom app that's $100 up front.

[Draque]

I wouldn't call objective-c a bad point.  While it is true that it's MUCH easier to develop an iPhone app on a mac, the iPhone itself is very heavily based on objective C and a variant of the normal cocoa APIs.  This entire system is based around the language and changing it and maintaining it to use another language is just impractical.  On top of that, many technologies used on the iPhone and OS X require special extensions to the C language (that's all Obj-C really is... C with a bunch of shit tacked on).  Most iPhone devs I've talked to have nothing but praise for developing for the iPhone, especially coming from Symbian and/or WinMo. This isn't counting app store gripes though.

At this point, they're committed to OC, so I'm not expecting that they suddenly try to change languages mid stream or anything, I've just been confused by their choice to use it in the first place.  Also, my frustration with having non mac computers is not that it's difficult to develop, but that I cannot.  I plan on eventually having a mac, but it's frustrating to be told that if I want to do development, I'll have to buy their hardware. 

In other news, I just heard the Droid only allows 256MB of application storage, and you can't install apps on removable storage.  I was excited about the phone, but every time I hear more about it, I feel that it's doomed to failure.  I have SINGLE apps that use more space than that.  What's the point in even having removable storage when all the important stuff is limited so much?  Knowing verizon and its history of crippling devices that are really good on other networks... I'm having reservations blaming this one on moto.

I think Android is a very interesting system that has a lot of potential, but it might have been a good idea to have let it cook for a bit longer before they released it.  It's still much nicer for users than WinMo, but I feel like it's going to fork a thousand times across multiple systems, and a lot of redundant effort is going to be wasted.  There's a google fanatic who I work with and who swears up and down by the system, and he's usually the one who keeps me updated on the new and cool features that are out for the system.

Also, I friended your LJ, which was linked from your site. ^^

[Caltsar]

Yay new friends

I do believe I know of some developers who develop for iPhone on windows. Give me a bit and I can find references

[Draque]

Ooh.  If you could find a way to develop in Windows, that would be fantastic.  One of the big hurdles to convincing my boss to have us spend company time on some experimental iPhone development is that we can't buy a single dev box and have us remote into it to work.  If it were possible to do development on a Windows box, that wouldn't be an issue.  (as a note, we've explored VNC, but it's simply too much of a pain to work with due to latency).

[Caltsar]

It looks like you need a jailbroken iPhone to do this development. Additionally the final product needs to be compiled on a mac to be submitted to the app store.  If you are just doing experimental development, then this may work until you can justify the cost of a mac to build the final release on.

[Draque]

Unfortunately, that's something that would have to be a project for my own free time, since as a business, we have to keep everything we do on company time from being legally questionable.  Even if we never ran into any trouble over it, were ever to decide to do business with Apple, it would probably affect how they dealt with us.  Ah well... when my current computer goes to PC hell, I'll be picking up a mac, then just using parallels or something to do all of my PC exclusive work. ^^

[Caltsar]

Ahh, that works.

On the point of a previous reply you made, I believe Apple chose to use Obj-C as the development language because NeXT used it, and OS X is based heavily on NeXTSTEP (hence all the classes being called NSString, NSRange, NSEtc)

Why NeXTSTEP used it?  I do not know.