Soft Arts

I picked up a new iPhone with my friend Dave yesterday and have spent most of last night and this morning playing with it. There are a lot of people talking about the iPhone, and with good reason, it is a fantastic device.

As a handheld developer I have worked with several different smart phones over the last few years, including a Treo 650, a Sony Ericsson P900, 8700g, 8700c, 8800, and 8100 (Pearl) BlackBerrys and two completely heinous Windows Mobile “Smart Phones”. Each device usually had one or two desirable features, but none of them were good enough to end my quest for the perfect smart phone. I think that the iPhone has brought that search to an end.

The purpose of this article is not to discuss the ease of use of the iPhone, but to compare its basic feature set directly to these competing products. Even though some of the phones are getting pretty out of date, their interfaces are still very similar to their modern day predecessors. Although it would probably be a good idea to compare the iPhone with the latest Treos, I think that this comparison is valid because a large number of people have developed established histories with these devices.

P900, Pearl, iPhone, 8700G, Treo 650 side by side comparison
(8800 out of the office at the time of photoshoot)

Specifications

Due to the completely heinous user experience I’ve had with various Windows Mobile smart phones I will not be including them in this discussion. I am only covering device families that I consider to be usable. About the only thing I can really say in favor of the 3 different Windows Mobile Smart phones that I have owned or worked with is that they came with built in wifi support.

I’ve compiled a side-by-side list of the salient features of these phones and the upcoming BlackBerry Curve below.

	iPhone	Pearl	8700	8800	Curve	Treo 650	P900
MSRP	$599	$349	$399	$549	$399	$699	$850
Display	3.5″	2.5″	2.4″	2.4″	2.4″	2.5″	3″
Resolution	480×320	260×240	320×240	320×240	320×240	320×320	208×320
Height	4.5	4.2	4.3	4.5	4.2	4.4	4.5
Width	2.4	2.0	2.7	2.6	2.4	2.3	2.2
Thickness	0.46	0.6	0.77	0.6	0.6	0.9	0.9
Storage	8 GB	2 GB*	2 GB*	2 GB*	2 GB*	2 GB*	64 MB
Camera	2 mp	1.3 mp	N/A	N/A	2 mp	0.3 mp	0.3 mp
Wifi	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No
Voice Dialing	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
3rd-Party Apps	Web	Strong	Strong	Strong	Strong	Yes	Strong
BT DUN	No	Yes	Yes**	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Talk Time	8 hours	3.5 hours	4 hours	5 hours	4 hours	6 hours	13 hours
Standby Time	10 days	15 days	16 days	22 days	17 days	12 days	16 days

*with add-on SD card
**with Pulse

Pricing

People have squawked about the iPhones price, but in my business, I have almost never been able to score a carrier discount as I have bought 2 to 4 new phones a year. The iPhone’s price of $599 seems completely reasonable when compared to the unsubsidized price of the other models, particularly considering the Sony Ericsson P900, which sold for $850.

Size

The iPhone’s footprint isn’t quite a small as the Pearl, but it is smaller than just about everything else. It is also about 2/3 the thickness of the BlackBerry models. The feel is great, and most of the real estate is used for the display.

Display

The iPhone totally dominates this category, offering 16% more screen real estate than the P900 and 40% more than the Pearl (which has the largest diagonal screen size of the BlackBerrys). It also has twice as many pixels overall than its closest competitors, the 8800 or the Curve.

Storage

The storage capacity of the iPhone is fairly small compared to some of the larger iPods, but it practically dwarfs the capabilities of its competitors, which can only accommodate about 2 gigabytes of storage through an add on SD card.

Camera

At 2 megapixels, the iPhone’s camera is better than any I have seen on a handheld device (I haven’t seen pictures from the Curve yet). There is still room for improvement, but the quality compared to the Pearl is superb.

Image taken with BlackBerry Pearl on the left, image with iPhone taken on the right

3rd Party Application Support

The iPhone falls short here, in my opinion, and only offers support for browser-based web applications. RIM and Sony Ericsson offer what I consider to be “strong” application support, in that they provide APIs that allow developers to integrate their applications with calendars, address books, email, system events, etc.

Wifi

The iPhone, along with every Windows Mobile phone I have used, comes with support for wifi networks. This is fine and good, but EDGE speeds, despite a bizarre wave of FUD to the contrary, provide decent performance away from hotspots.

In our Pulse benchmarks we found that Cingular’s (now AT&T’s) EDGE network was capable of sustained transfers at over 220 kps. This is definitely slower, but not disasterously slower, than 3G, which maxes out at around 400 kps.

Voice Dialing

Voice dialing is supported on most of the BlackBerrys released in the last year, and is not available on the iPhone. Although I have played with voice dialing on my various BlackBerrys I have never personally made use of this feature in regular practice.

Bluetooth Dial Up Networking

Bluetooth dialup networking is available on all of the models considered except for the iPhone.

Battery Life

The talk time for the iPhone exceeds all models except for the Sony Ericsson P900. The iPhone’s standby time is worse, coming in a just under a week and a half.

My ratings, based on personal experience

In this section I reflected on my overall user experience for each device I’ve actually used over several different categories. I have assigned these scores from 0 to 10 to indicate my overall satisfaction with the device in that particular category.

A ‘0′ indicates that the device did not actually come with the feature in question. A score of 1 to 3 indicates that the feature could technically be described as present but was basically crude and clumsy to the point of being unusable. A ‘10′ indicates that the feature has exceeded or met my most reasonable expectations.

	iPhone	Pearl	8700	8800	Treo 650	P900
Phone Experience	10/10	6/10	6/10	6/10	7/10	8/10
Display	10/10	5/10	7/10	7/10	6/10	5/10
Keyboard	6/10	4/10	10/10	8/10	9/10	N/A
Camera	8/10	6/10	0/10	0/10	5/10	3/10
Browser	10/10	4/10	4/10	4/10	2/10	2/10
Applications	7/10	10/10	10/10	10/10	5/10	10/10
Email	10/10	10/10	10/10	10/10	4/10	4/10
PIM	9/10	10/10	10/10	10/10	8/10	8/10
Music Playback	10/10	2/10	2/10	2/10	2/10	2/10
Battery Life	10/10	10/10	10/10	10/10	10/10	10/10
Total (out of 100)	90 (A-)	67 (D+)	69 (D+)	67 (D+)	58 (F)	52 (F-)

Comments
The scale-of-1-to-10 ratings are by me and are almost completely subjective. I hadn’t actually intended to include a total score for each device, but once I’d rated the various feature offering it seemed like a natural move to total things up and see what the bottom lines was. I find it interesting that the device I once described as ‘the best smart phone ever‘ now gets an F- compared to the iPhone. That’s because, as people are saying, the iPhone is changing all of the rules.

The iPhone is absolutely the best smart phone that I have ever used. I am not going to bother to going into describing how this devices works as you can get a more detailed description from John Gruber at Daring Fireball or from the Mac World Keynote and from the Apple site itself. At this point, the only thing I could possibly imagine replacing it with is a 3rd generation iPhone, perhaps with a better keyboard and support for 3rd party applications.

Phone Experience

This is the best phone I’ve ever used. The earbud headset can be used to answer or hang up phone calls while you are on the road. I’ve been driving around with my phone in my pocket , quietly listening to music. When someone calls, the music fades and plays a ring tone. Squeeze the small strip by your right jaw and it answers the phone. Once you’re done with the call, the music resumes where you left off.

Phone quality is great and the built in speaker phone is excellent. Also, the iPhone has a proximity sensor that detects when the phone is close to your face and automatically disables the touch screen. This was a major problem I experienced using Windows Mobile-based phones - your face would interact with the UI like crazy when you took a call. It was very awkward to try and gingerly position the phone so that your cheekbones didn’t trigger popup menus galore during the call.

Display

I really do not know how Apple could make the display better without increasing the size of the device itself. This is, to my mind perfect.

Keyboard

The keyboard ratings are normalized to the best smart phone keyboard I have ever used (the BlackBerry 8700g, a definite ‘10′). The iPhone has one of the worst keyboards in the set, but it’s still better than the Pearl’s doubled up keys and ‘Sure Type’ system.

The large typo frequency associated with the iPhone keyboard is definitely made up for by the increase in screen real estate. My hope is that future releases will offer a somewhat more stable touch screen keyboard. Despite the ‘6′ I’ve given this for usability, I recognize it as a remarkable technical achievement and hope that Apple develops this technology further.

Camera

The iPhone camera is the best hand held camera I’ve seen yet. Some people regard smart phone cameras disparagingly but I think that their a great complement for a high density dedicated digital camera. At 2 megapixels the iPhones quality looks very good. If I ever see a phone that can take 4 megapixel images and offer 16 gigs of storage I think I’ll be happy for quite some time.

Browser

The iPhone browser is amazing. It’s even better than everyone has said it is, and nothing else besides a desktop computer can even touch it.

Applications

As a handheld software developer, I have to say that I’m a bit put out about the lack of an iPhone software development kit. Apple may well come out with a 3rd party SDK, but honestly, after using the iPhone for awhile I’ve come to doubt it. I suspect that, like the iPod itself, the iPhone will remain a closed platform. After using the iPhone for a day I can say that it doesn’t look like something meant to accommodate an arbitrary collection of new applications.

I have been contemplating this, however, and realized that the only applications I’ve typically installed on my BlackBerrys, Treo, P900, or Windows “smart” phone have been an RSS reader, an occasional casual game and a count down timer of some sort of keeping track of my kung fu practices. One notable exception to this was Pulse, which installed to provide dialup networking for my BlackBerry 8700g.

Email

Brain Murmurs uses the Postfix mail server, and RIM’s BlackBerry Internet Service provided the best mobile email experience I had ever had. I simply configured a new IMAP account on the BlackBerry site with my account information, and my mail was pushed out to whichever BlackBerry device I was using as part of the regular BlackBerry Push Email experience. This experience has been far superior to my experiences on the P900, the Treo, or my various Windows Mobile devices.

iPhone addresses email handily and simply by providing built-in IMAP support with regular updates (I have my mail checked every 15 minutes, which is more than adequate for my purposes). My mail is always in sync on both my desktop computer and my phone. Furthermore I like the iPhone mail client a lot more - deleting messages takes a fraction of the time it does on a BlackBerry and the application is considerably more responsive.

Visto has announced a secure Exchange mail service for iPhone, which should provide good integration for companies dependent on Microsoft server technologies as well. To my knowledge, companies using Exchange can also just connect via IMAP, anyway.

PIM

The iPhone currently offers the standard sync-with-your-desktop calendar and contacts support most PDAs have provided since the days of the Palm Pilot in the mid 90s.

I suspect/hope that this will change in October when Apple releases Leopard Server, which will include iCal Server. The iPhone is going to need some sort of built-in Open Directory/LDAP support for corporate address books and shared calendars if it is to compete with product combinations like BES, Exchange, and the BlackBerry in the corporate setting.

Music Playback

Music playback is fantastic.

This part is pretty straightforward as the iPhone was made by the guys that made the iPod. Jobs was not kidding when he said that iPhone was the best iPod ever during his keynote address. Honestly, I think that he really understated it.

The integration with the other features of the phone is flawless, as far as I can tell. If you are using the headphones, you can use the control on them to start and stop music and advance to the next song. The iPhone will automatically pause the music when you get a phone call and resume it once the call is over. Fabulous!

Furthermore, this is the first iPod that with external audio output, so you don’t have to have the headphones plugged in to listen to it. I also failed to realize just how MUCH music you could fit into 8 gigs of hard drive space. I’ve got a great selection of random tunes here.

Crazy big win here over the other devices.

Battery Life

Frankly, I rarely talk for more than 4 minutes a day on my cell phone. 8 hours of continuous talk time and 10 days of stand by time is total overkill for me. I habitually keep my phone in the charger throughout the day, and may on occasion go for a weekend without hitting a charger. If I go ten days without charging my phone, it means that I’m being held hostage by Al Quaeda or shipwrecked and have bigger problems to deal with than my cell phone.

I’m actually a lot more interested in knowing how long my iPhone will last playing music or surfing, both on EDGE and over wifi.

Bluetooth Dial Up Networking

As noted, the iPhone does not currently provide dial up networking. BT DUN allows you to surf wirelessly where ever you are, read and reply to import emails, or just chat with your friends.

In the past, this would have been a total show stopper to me. With the iPhone this need is significantly ameliorated, if not obviated entirely.

To date, BT DUN is usually used to provide internet access to a richer platform (i.e., your laptop) when you are on the road and need to do some serious work. Most phones have offered such crappy internet experiences that it made more sense to just pipe the internet connection to the laptop and let it do the heavy lifting.

The iPhone actually offers such a rich internet experience that I don’t really feel particularly put upon just using the phone instead. The need to access the internet with my laptop has become substantially reduced. Also, you can be a bit more spontaneous about surfing and looking things up with the iPhone - you just take out your phone and start surfing. With the laptop you actually need to find a place to setup camp and start working.

Overall verdict

I unhesitatingly give the iPhone a a resounding thumbs up. It is a vast leap forward compared to its competition and is just going to get better. Any one that is thinking about buying an iPhone should do so, immediately.

The lack of Bluetooth dialup networking is a bit of a nuisance, but honestly, the phone is good enough that my own actual need for DUN service is pretty low. A browser based ssh client like Webshell might be enough to make up for this lack.

That being said, a firmware update offering BT DUN and select, copy and paste functionality would be desirable.

I anticipate that the combination of Leopard Server and the iPhone will make a compelling alternative to BlackBerry/Exchange/BES.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2007 at 11:26 am and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.