The new iPhone - good, not great
I'll be buying an iPhone on July 11th. With 3G, GPS and lower pricing this is now a very attractive product. Apple's ability to make browsing and maps work smoothly on a mobile device is unrivalled now, and I expect I'll still own a leading product at the end of the 18-month contract.
However, there are two significant annoyances that temper my enthusiasm for the iPhone.
Mobile Me, a new data silo
Push updates to mail, calender and address book are helpful, but the world has moved on from desktop apps. It is not very helpful to sync with the data that sits on my computer, because that is going to be more out of date than the stuff on my iPhone. And no, a new set of web apps from Apple does not help, however nice they are. Like many people, I've already chosen apps on the web that look after my data. I use Gmail/Google calendar, Remember the Milk and occasionally Flickr. So do lots of other people, and I share stuff with them. When the iPhone was originally announced, Google and Yahoo were a big part of the party, but there has been no mention of integrating their products with Mobile Me.
I live in hope that Apple will offer great integration with a wide range of web applications. That way they could extend the Mobile Me market to people like me, and probably even bring onboard some new iPhone users.
No background tasks = much worse device for media
3G is of limited use for watching video. A decent iPhone video is at 512kbits - a rate not reliably available over 3G. The EDGE terms and conditions (at least in the U.K.) explicitly forbid audio and video use, so I would not be surprised if some kind of contractual limit was applied to audio or video unlimited 3G bundles too. Therefore, the iPhone should be downloading media in the background via WiFi (and 3g if possible) whenever it has coverage. This would allow me to leave home with a device synced from home WiFi with the audio and video content I might want to consume today. If I pass WiFi at lunchtime I can top up, maybe just with a few news clips that are integrated into the news application, or maybe with a show that has just been released.
I am enthusiastic about the new notification services that Apple announced. They are a hepful extra feature for many applications, but are not enough for audi and video. Notifications allow a developer to push a message to an iPhone, essentially "new stuff available" in various forms, but the user will have to open the application and wait while the 'stuff' downloads. That is fine for an instant messenger client that is downloading text, but useless for audio and video. Webware also pointed out that Apple could do worrying things with the notification data that flows through them.
The announcement was pretty misleading on this point. They explained the perils of allowing applications to run in the background - essentially that they can eat resource that could be needed to complete the current task. That is an important consideration if the current task is an incoming call. During the announcement, the assembled Mac developers had a good laugh at the Windows Mobile solution. It seems that Microsoft allows the mobile user to control resource usage via a series of geeky charts and tables. Of course this won't be included on the iPhone any time soon, but it's not the only way to run background tasks either. For example, Google Android allows background tasks, and has a sophisticated system to ensure that the phone call app can always take the lead when required. It is complex for the developer, but simple for the user. I have heard it works well.
The logic for including proper background process handling seems strong. I hope Apple are working on it.
Posted at 10:42 BST, 10th June 2008.
Last changed at 12:27 BST, 10th June 2008.
8 Comments
Add a new comment.
I'd be surprised if Apple doesn't allow Google and Yahoo! to put their own sync applications on the iPhone apps store; and given Google's support for the BlackBerry (with decent clients for Talk and Maps and a semi-working Calendar sync app), I can't imagine it will take long to happen. A subscription service like MobileMe is only ever going to be a minor income stream for Apple compared with device sales. MobileMe is probably aimed at consumers who want the easiest way possible to sync and are willing to pay for it, but I doubt it will be the only way allowed. Why would Apple risk annoying Google? Apple makes most of its money from hardware, Google is in advertising sales. It's in Apple's interest to make the iPhone as useful as possible to existing Google users like you, and it's in Google's interest to get people using its services on their phone, whether it's iPhone or Android.
I wouldn't say that the Android approach is complex for the developer. A smart developer will embrace the whole activity lifecycle and use the hooks Google provide to do useful things for the user. It's all pretty optional, though, and you can write something that roughly works pretty quickly.
The added complexity of Android's background apps is on their end, and they clearly have spent a lot of effort ensuring that background apps can't screw up the user's experience.
Apple have saved themselves that effort, but at the expense of making third-party developers second-class citizens on the platform.
You are dead right that background apps are crucial for a compelling audio/video experience, but isn't this just Apple's way of ensuring they are the only people who can offer that compelling experience to iPhone users. Do they really want iPhone users filling up on lots of free content from lots of diverse sources (including their own recordings) when they ought to be shopping at the iTMS instead.
I'll be quite tempted by one of these devices come July too, depending on how the pricing/contract works out in the UK. But as someone who is capable of writing compelling apps on this class of device, I'll also be very tempted to wait to see what the Android handsets bring, too.
I've been quite confused about whether 3rd party developers have access to all the same stuff as Apple apps.
Apple are keen to emphasise that they use the same API as everyone else to create applications, and this post does a nice job of explaining that no apps (Apple or 3rd party) run in the background on the main CPU.
Clearly building a good sync app would require hooks into the core Apple apps rather than the OS, and I guess the 'same API' thing is talking about OS hooks only? Also, notifications are only available in September, so Mobile Me will get the first use of that API.
Ben: my experience of Google integration on the Blackberry is not so positive. Gmail only works well thru a separate app, so I don't use the core mail app, losing many nice features inc. push. The gcalsync app is written by an independent developer. It does load stuff into the core Blackberry diary app, but has lots of weird edges. Good sync with 3rd part web apps will require effort from Apple, and I find it unlikely that they will bother in parallel with launching their own web app suite. Here's hoping, though.
Ashok: My point (not made so clearly) was that the background API would have to be more complex than most iPhone APIs. Maybe it would not be complex by the normal standards of mobile OS APIs?
Oh, also, U.K. pricing for the iPhone is at: http://www.o2.co.uk/iphone/paymonthly
Chris, there is an official Google Sync app for BlackBerry now. Admittedly it still suffers from the flakiness of the third party apps. I don't know where the blame lies for that but Google have certainly put a lot of effort into supporting other Blackberry apps. The Maps and Talk clients are very good in my experience.
Gmail through POP on the BlackBerry consumer push email service is OKish, but both iPhone and Gmail offer IMAP now, don't they? I wonder how well that will work.
I just saw a Twitter go by about the Google Sync app too. Will give it a try.
I gave up with the Blackberry pop to push gateway, because I could not manage mail in folders. I don't think they have an IMAP one? Even if they did, I doubt I'd have the energy to use the blackberry website any more. Yuck!
IMAP gmail on my iPod touch works very nicely, and I'll probably stick with that on an iPhone. Push email doesn't do it for me, but I know there is demand from others. To satisfy my personal needs I mainly need decent Google calendar sync on the iPhone.
I still think Apple should make this easy, though.
Sync
IMAP gmail works well for me across an N95/laptop/webmail/desktop. I'm pretty sure the MobileMe 'push' mail is just frequently polled IMAP anyway.
I'm defeated in my attempts to find anything that will do the same for contacts and calendar. MobileMe is pricey just to get those.
I've got something of a sync set-up now between Google Apps, Mac desktop apps and iPhone. It works about as well I expected a cross-vendor 3-way sync to work – worth having, not 100% reliable. I remember messing about like this 10 years ago with an HP OmniGo. It's depressing how slowly things have improved.
My setup:
Mail: Good - IMAP polling to the gmail servers. Honestly, how many people are important enough to need push email? In 4 years with a Blackberry I found it a massive distraction from real work.
Contacts: Bad - via a running desktop Address Book instance , which at least has in-built Google support. Mobile Me up to the iPhone. Agreed with Simon - it's too expensive for just sync, but my free trial seemed to get extended. Hopefully something better comes along in the next 3 months.
Appointments: Ugly - needed Spanning Sync to link Google to desktop iCal, then Mobile Me to tie in the iPhone to iCal. I had such high hopes for using Google CalDav support, but iCal won't sync CalDav subscriptions with Mobile Me - however much you pay them.
Add a new comment.