The Life and Times of Elliot Pike

I’m guessing I fit in with the “majority” out there when I say I’ve been sick of the iPhone obsession for a long time now. Frankly as a computer geek and a Mac fan, I was miffed when Steve Jobs spent the entire January Keynote talking about this phone and the only computer-related item was that the company was taking the word “Computer” out of its name. (Then I waited for the June WWDC Keynote, hoping he would make up for it with some cool Mac/OS X stuff and found myself again completely disappointed.)

Now the darned iPhone is out, and I grant you there is a lot about the device that looks cool. (Disclaimer: I still haven’t seen one in person, but I’ve read more than I care to about it.) Since I have a blog (and haven’t used it much) I figured I would write my initial reactions to what I believe the device is like.

First of all, I do think it is an engineering (hardware and software) marvel. The new User Interface, with it’s invention of “flicking” and “pinching/squeezing/stretching” is truly innovative. And that’s just like Apple. They also use the “Core Animation” technologies that are being introduced into OS X to the hilt, and this is really an act of invention–not simply repackaging. For that they deserve a lot of credit.

I also respect Steve’s ability to strong-arm AT&T into modifying their network infrastructure to permit the introduction of intelligent new functionality. (The one and only case right now: the menu-access voice mail where you don’t have to listen to every message sequentially.) I’ve forever hated our nation’s mobile carriers for ramming the crappiest feature-sets down the consumer’s throats.

That said, there are still some things that leave me scratching me head. Really, the biggest item is that Apple has decided to maintain a closed-architecture so nobody can develop a 3rd-party app. The line about “you can do a Web 2.0 app” is total B.S.

But maybe my impression and Steve’s impression of the iPhone are different. You hear his famous line of “It’s a phone, an iPod, and a Web Browser in one device!” Yeah, that is a neat 3-in-1, but what I really want is a phone, a friggen PDA, and a web browser in one device. These days I carry around a Palm Pilot and a cell phone around with me, and I hate the Palm Pilot (mostly because of Palm’s lame, retarded, I-wanna-kill-someone-for-this-crap reinvention of “Graffiti 2.0″ that dropped my handwriting accuracy from about 95% to about 40%) and would like the two to be merged into one.

The iPhone should be the nail-in-the-coffin for the Palm Pilot. After all the OS X / Cocoa development environment is famous for being incredibly easy to use, allowing amazing feats of developer productivity, whereas developing for the Palm is even nastier than developing for Windows. Okay, so Apple is still locking 3rd party developers out of that arena. Well, in that case you would assume their feature-set would at least replace 80% of my Palm Pilot, right?

Wrong. One feature that’s completely missing from the iPhone (even though Apple’s iCal has it) is the to-do/task list. Another (unconfirmed, I’m still reading reviews) that’s missing is an actual address book. Okay, yeah, you can look up your contacts when you’re about to dial their phone number or when you’re about to send them an e-mail, but someone wrote that there’s no way to look up their actual address.

I don’t know about you, but I periodically meet someone at a party or other “out and about function” and want to get their contact information. I’ve (slowly) tapped their info into my Palm Pilot. That I couldn’t do this on this new advanced iPhone just floors me. (Again, I could be wrong. I’m regurgitating other peoples’ reviews here.)

Another example of silly missing features is the lack of any Instant Messaging support. IM is such a silly, simply, primitive–albeit for many people useful–feature. It would be so each for Apple to have an iChat ported to their iPhone, but what do you want to bet it was dismissed so the mobile carrier (AT&T) can ream the customers for expensive and primitive SMS messaging?

In my eyes Apple has a small window of opportunity to correct these issues with software updates (something the iPhone should be able to do effortlessly since it’s OS X under the hood) before I start getting really miffed at them. Until now I’ve forgiven their monopolistic behaviors because at least their locked-in technologies were good and useful as opposed to the crap Microsoft was trying to cram down everyone’s throat. But when they start sacrificing the user’s experience for profits and market lock-in, Steve and Bill start looking like one and the same person.