iPhone Hill

6 platforms — Google Android, RIM BlackBerry, Nokia S60 and Maemo, Palm webOS, Microsoft Windows Phone — 10 devices, and almost as many weeks later and the final week of the 3rd Annual Smartphone Round Robin brings yours truly back to iPhone!

And I won’t lie — I’m loving it. It’s great to be back. All the other platforms have their strengths and highlight a few of Apple’s remaining weaknesses, and this is the first year I can honestly say that if there was no iPhone I could find a device on each and every one of them to live and work with. The iPhone, however, remains for me the most fully realized, most user friendly, most consistent, most convergent device on the market.

What has my time away taught me? What have I learned to appreciate more about the iPhone, and what have I come away wishing Apple would straight out steal from the other platforms?

I’ve already reviewed the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3.x OS before, but now I’m going to take a broader, wiser, look at it again — and I’m going to do it after the break.

5 Years Ahead — What the iPhone still does best

When he introduced the original iPhone 2G, Steve Jobs (in)famously said the technology was 5 years ahead of the competition. Back then that competition was the Treo 650, BlackBerry Curve, and Windows Mobile… something? And in many ways, he was right. The industry was complacent and unimaginative at the time. No one was driving them to innovate. Then the iPhone brought multitouch capacitive screens to the mainstream and revolutionized smartphone user interfaces and user experience. Sure, the original iPhone was missing a lot of basic “smartphone” functionality — the list is now etched in our cultural consciousness — no apps, not copy and paste, no MMS. But you know what else it was missing? Crashy, buggy, management-intensive software that was, frankly, hostile. Most of those missing basics have since been filled in (3rd party multitasking remains the most visible exception), but over the last 3 years something else interesting has happened — the competition woke up, Google jumped in, and the game got serious.

Has the iPhone stayed 5 years ahead? No. But herein lies the crux of this section:

That the iPhone 3GS, released in June 2009, can stand toe-to-toe with devices from Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, Palm, and Windows Phone that were released months later — an eternity in gadget innovation time — was one of the big surprises of this year’s Round Robin. That the iPhone 3GS could still hands down spank the best and the brightest and the latest the competition had to offer in certain areas was astonishing.

I mean, all we’ve heard for years was “iPhone killer”, right? Nokia’s had one brewing since the iPhone 2G launched. BlackBerry called the original Storm the “Apple killer”. Palm’s Pre was going to knock the iPhone off the top of smartphone mountain. And don’t even get me started on the hyperbole some media outlets spout every time a new Android device lands.

Again, each of those devices has something I’d like to see in the iPhone and we’ll get to that in a moment. First, however, I want to remark on just how remarkable the iPhone remains now 3 years later. Some may call it dated and in a purely fashion sense maybe it is, but when we get down to the bare metal and compiled code, what Apple introduced in 2007 and sped up to the nth in 2009 is still unmatched.

Multitouch

No multitouch experience is yet as good. Maybe it’s precision, consistency, responsiveness, or just the use of plastic instead of glass, but while the competition is gaining they still haven’t caught up. Of course, Apple was working on it secretly for years before they released the original iPhone, and it was the cornerstone of that release. Everyone else started at zero and had to play catchup — in public. But at the end of the day, it’s a huge part of Apple’s edge in user experience. On the iPhone 3GS interaction is almost transparent.

Virtual Keyboard

The iPhone’s virtual keyboard still sets the bar. It sets it so high, I think sometimes iPhone users take for granted just how completely Apple nailed it. It’s been 3 years. Three. Years. And despite some amazing work by brilliant companies like Google and HTC, and again factoring in the sheer quality of the iPhone’s multitouch experience, no other virtual keyboard has caught up. And on a full-screen device (or a device with a mediocre hardware keyboard, ahem) the keyboard is key.

Mobile Safari Browser

The sheer number of times we hear a rival browser is “almost as good as iPhone Safari” shows the work Apple put in, and continues to put into, Mobile Safari. To draw the starkest contrast, the browser I was using before the iPhone 2G was Blazer on the Treo 680. Yeah. Google and Palm are hot on Mobile Safari’s heels and may soon make it a real back-and-forth, but for right now Apple is packing in HTML5, CSS3, and Nitro-powered JavaScript speed to an amazing degree. Meanwhile, Firefox Mobile (Fennec) is still a work in progress and IE6 Mobile is… making progress but still based on IE6 (?!). Now, admittedly the Nokia N900 runs full on Mozilla and technically I suppose there were UMPC’s running desktop browsers going back a few years, but it’s tough to argue ease of use and overall experience isn’t still topped by Mobile Safari.

Media

The iPhone is the best iPod Apple’s ever made, and that should tell you how good the media experience is. Other platforms support broader formats (containers and codecs) for video and audio, but in terms of buying, managing, syncing, and enjoying media on the go, the iPod + iTunes ecosystem is the 900lbs gorilla in the market and for good reason. It just works, and so well this might be one of the hardest elements for the competition to ever catch up with.

Apps

The App Store is the elephant in the Smartphone Round Robin room — it really is that huge. Approaching 150,000 apps and well over 3 billion downloads, it’s often made fun of but it remains unequalled even by platforms that have been in the game far longer. Sure, no one is ever going to need 150,000 apps, but having that many, on a device with a user base as big as the iPhones, means there’s a better chance of finding those few apps you do want, and having a robust set of alternatives to choose from. The top 5 iPhone Twitter clients are often held up as examples and with good reason — not only can you find the type of app you want, you can often find one that really suits your tastes and needs. (Unless the type of app you want is Google Voice, then you’re out of luck!)

That last little shot there at the end? Yeah, that’s the transition…

A Year Behind — Where the iPhone needs to catch up

There are few important caveats that need to preface this section. First, what power-user/geek-blogger thinks is a missing feature may not be what Mr. and mom average even realizes or cares is “missing” and guess where Apple’s attention is focused? Second, even in cases where missing features are irksome across the board, Apple has shown time and time again they feel no need to rush out a short-term fix — they’d rather take their time (their frustrating, tear-your-hair-out-time sometimes) and present a polished solution. Third, even a company as big as Apple has limited time and resources. If they’d taken the time and effort to fill in a missing feature last year, this year it would just mean a different feature would be missing. Sure, Nokia had copy and paste and MMS back in 2007, but the iPhone has it now and Nokia doesn’t have the user interface or interactions Apple introduced back then. Pick your example. Apple chose some priorities over others. Say what you will about them, but from Steve Jobs down they have a laser-like focus and are absolutely ruthless about leaving out what they don’t consider to be vital — even if just “for now”.

All that being said, here’s what I came to love about the other platforms, and what I hope Apple shamelessly steals for the 4th generation iPhone and the iPhone 4.0 OS.

Android

If you’re thinking I’m going to say multitasking and notifications, you’re going to need to skip down a ways to the entry on Palm. What I’d love from Android are exactly what Google does best — services.

MobileMe is… okay… ish. Google is taking services to a new level, starting with Google Voice and Google Maps Navigation on the Droid and kicking it up a notch with the just-a-tad-too-late-to-be-officially-included Nexus One and it’s pervasive voice control.

Maybe Google will just bring their services to the iPhone — and maybe Apple will let them into the store or we’ll get them as WebApps — but it’s something that we need filled out.

As for the Hero, be it on Android or Windows Phone, Sense UI brings the widgets. The iPhone Lock Screen is screaming out for an Apple-esque version, a Dashboard.

BlackBerry

Big Mike, RIM Co-CEO, center stage at WWDC, announcing BlackBerry connect for the iPhone. No? Not going to happen? Okay, so I agree with Dieter that proprietary communication protocols are non-ideal for everyone except RIM, and sure there are iPhone IM clients that try to give the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) experience, but what really makes BBM is that everyone has it built in. It’s a ready-set-go community,

We’ve spoken about the near criminal lack of an official Apple Mobile iChat client on the iPhone before, and while it wouldn’t be BBM, it would be a start. Make a MobileMe IM account free for every iPhone user, and use open IM protocols just like iChat does already. Instant instant community.

Oh, and if I could get that 9700 battery life…

Nokia

Nokia is strong in the customization. Very strong. The ability to put what you want where you want in the way you want is incredibly well supported. I don’t see Apple doing anything like that, but starting with the Home Screen wallpaper in iPad, we are seeing a slight move in that direction.

Palm

Apple implemented Mobile Safari Pages in version 1.0. Palm did something similar with Card but made it a system-wide multitasking metaphor. And it works really well (especially on the Palm Pre Plus with its extra beefy RAM). Does the iPhone need that kind of multitasking? Power-user geeks certainly think so, and Apple could certainly adopt something similar.

For mainstream users, however, is the functionality worth the complexity? The typical complaint is “I want to listen to streaming internet while browsing the web”. Sometimes the aforementioned geeks will add in “I want to tweet/IM/SMS while surfing the web without existing and coming back”. But so far Apple’s approach has been to expose web views, email sending, and iPod controls as APIs for developers. They want to let you do basic stuff inside an app rather than multitask a… a bunch of unitaskers.

Could the reverse work? Could iPod offer a hook to your internet streaming radio and then run it in the background just like any other iPod music? And even if they did, it wouldn’t answer the Twitter/IM/SMS problem. So we’re back with the Palm-like solution.

And while we’re at it, we need something like their alert handling as well. There’s just too many push notifications coming in for a single, modal alert box to handle. Even a simple Push Notification app that showed a cue of Recent Alerts — like the Phone app’s Recent Calls — would be a start. A robust, system-wide service that, again, used typical Apple elegance to handle new alerts as they come in without obliterating older alerts, would be a better start.

Palm’s doing it, so is Android. Here’s hoping iPhone 4.0 does it to.

Windows Phone

I mentioned HTC’s Sense UI widgets under Android already, but I’ll pay lip service to an iPhone Dashboard here as well.

Mostly — and I’ll be delicate here for Phil’s sake — it’s the HD2’s hardware I covert. I asked for an iPhone HD last year, I want one this year. Spec for spec it’s a monster, and it’s 480p (480×800) display with a 5 megapixel camera — and throw in some 720p video recording.

And the Winners of the 6 Smartphones are…!

And now for the part you’ve all really been waiting for… the winners! Just for posting on the Round Robin forum threads across the Smartphone Experts Network of sites, we gave members the chance to win a new smartphone! Each of the participating sites is giving away a phone to a member who got their lucky post picked from among the thousands posted…. and at TiPb the lucky winner is

TiPb: DRTigerlilly!

And here are our other winners:

CrackBerry.com: iLovemy_bb

Android Central: droid00

Nokia Experts: David

PreCentral.net: skabeer

WMExperts: dougsyo

Congrats to the winners! Note to the winners on getting their prize: It’s Mobile World Congress craziness right now… so you’ll have to wait until it’s all over at the end of next week. You’ll receive an email from Dieter Bohn folllowing up with you to pick your prize and work out the shipping logistics. Thx for the patience and congrats again!

Smartphone Round Robin Wrap Up: Contest Winners Announced and Some Closing Thoughts! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb – The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Over the last 5 weeks of the 3rd Annual Smartphone Round Robin, the editors of our sibling sites, Casey from AndroidCentral.com, Kevin from CrackBerry.com, Matt from NokiaExperts.com, Dieter from PreCentral.net, and Phil from WMExperts.com have all had their chance to review TiPb’s flagship iPhone 3GS. And we’ve just had to sit here and take it, the good and the bad, the raves and the rants. Well, it’s week 6 now, baby, and TiPb gets to retort!

PreCentral.net’s Dieter Bohn

Week 1 saw our Editor-in-Chief, Dieter Bohn, this time representing PreCentral.net, return to the iPhone he’s reviewed about 5 or 6 times already, and… he was remarkably fair and I’m kind of sad there’s nothing much to pick him apart over. Thanks for nothing! One of his negatives is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, though:

I will admit to being a little tired of the iPhone’s design. It’s iconic and singular, but honestly it doesn’t feel as ‘high end’ as it once did. Not that the Palm Pre or Pixi is the picture of luxury, but sometime soon Apple will need to remember that phones are fashion and fashion changes.

iPhone 3G was indeed a departure from the original iPhone 2G; it lost the aluminum and gained a new, curved-for-thinness form. And people got really upset their cases didn’t fit any more, their docks didn’t fit anymore, and accused Apple of changing just to force people to re-buy all their accessories. Then the iPhone 3GS came out, new model same as the one before, and people got really upset that it wasn’t refreshed. Fashionistas complained one could tell they had the new model. Both the iPhone casing and the iPhone home screen wouldn’t be hurt for an update, but Apple won’t win either way.

As for Dieter’s conclusion:

We try not to pick winners in the Smartphone Round Robin, but rather talk about user needs and preferences. If you need apps and music, right now your choice is iPhone. If that’s not big and you care about openness and multitasking, webOS has a serious leg up. What’s sort of amazing is that most users don’t need to dismiss either out of hand.

I’d add the mobile web to that. iPhone Safari still hasn’t been exceeded and there’s a reason iPhone-optimized sites are still what other mobile WebKit clients want to pull. The point itself is spot on though — iPhone is owning the app and media space while BlackBerry owns messaging, and Android, Palm, Nokia, and WinMo battle it out over “openness” and “in-between”. Multitasking we might get in a future update (iPhone 4.0?) but it’s tough to see Apple loosening their ties on the App Store until and unless competition forces them to. Geeks and philosophers notwithstanding, some users and some developers prefer the level of trust a “gate-keeper”-style store provide (though Apple could certainly do better on the consistency side).

WMExperts’ Phil Nickinson

Week 2 brought us Phil Nickinson, editor of WMExperts.com, and again he was frustratingly fair. He also raised some good food for thought:

Some of the best conversations surrounding smartphones these days have to do with Apple’s singular vision. It designs the phones. It keeps a tight fist on the manufacturing process. It largely controls the marketing of the devices. Even the act of selling an iPhone is controlled by Apple. Want to use the iPhone? You have to connect to iTunes at least once. Apps? Only (official) way to get them is through Apple’s App Store. Everything, at least at some point, must pass through Apple. Do not pass Go, head directly to Cupertino.

I’ve been toying with the over-simplification that iPhone involves surrendering control to Apple in exchange for user-experience, Android involves surrendering privacy to Google in exchange for free services, and BlackBerry involves surrendering serenity to RIM in exchange for constant connectivity. There’s no perfect device or perfect model; everything is a compromise, and for a large swath of users, that’s a good deal. They don’t want to control (or have to worry about managing) their device — they just want to easily use it.

Phil’s conclusion:

We don’t believe in iPhone killers. That’s a phrase that was coined by writers who couldn’t think of any other arguments to make. No, we’re not looking for Windows Mobile 7, if and when it’s announced and later released, to “kill” anything, save for maybe the bad taste that Windows Mobile 6.5 left in a lot of mouths. But even that isn’t entirely fair. Microsoft announced Windows Mobile 6.5 and for the most part delivered exactly what it promised. No more, no less. A stopgap to hold things over until WM7.

Actor and gadget aficionado Stephen Fry uproariously so elegantly phrased:

Does anybody seriously believe that Android, Nokia, Samsung, Palm, BlackBerry and a dozen others would since have produced the product line they have without the 100,000 volt taser shot up the jacksie that the iPhone delivered to the entire market?

That the iPhone jumpstarted a complacent smartphone industry in 2007 is undeniable, as is the impact its made since. In that context, the media contrivance of “iPhone killer” makes sense. Until something makes that same original-iPhone-in-2007 level leap, it’s likely the media will keep comparing everything to the iPhone. Steve Jobs was recently rumored to have said Google’s Android wants to “kill” the iPhone, and likely the Windows Mobile team does as well. They have to if they want any hope to be competitive. No doubt the iPhone G4/4.0 team at Apple wants to kill the iPhone 3GS/3.0 as well. That is one of the keys to Apple’s success.

AndroidCentral’s Casey Chan

Week 3 had Casey Chan, editor of AndroidCentral.com share his thoughts on the iPhone 3GS, and forget the conclusion, he starts with the bang:

Ah, the iPhone. For better or worse, the iPhone has become the starting point for many consumers looking to buy a smartphone. In a sense, it’s become the standard for everyone to measure themselves against. Because of its position at the forefront of consumer’s minds and the fact that it’s in everyone’s pocket, that’s completely fair. But because of Apple’s sometimes senseless decisions in dealing with all things iPhone, it leaves the rest of us a little uneasy.

Our own Chad Garrett likes to say the iPhone is the first smartphone for everyone upgrading from the RAZR and there’s some truth to that. With the iPhone, Apple mainstreamed the smartphone — they took it from a power device for power users with a powerful requirement for tweaking, managing, and messing around with, and carefully packaged a subset of important features for the masses. That means that, for any particular user — and especially for a power user — there’s a high chance that subset doesn’t include an important feature.

That’s Apple’s modus operandi, however. They’d rather start limited and add slowly. They’d rather leave something out completely than add in something they don’t think just works well enough. They’re masters of always leaving something else on the table for the next update. And they’re laser-focused on those features they consider essential for the user they’re targeting.

And yes, it drives us all nuts, even as they’ve sold 70,000 devices on the iPhone OS platform and used it to familiarize everyone with the next-step in multitouch iPhone OS UI — the iPad.

CrackBerry.com’s Kevin Michaluk

Week 4 was our best frenemy forever, CrackBerry.com’s own Kevin Michaluk and he embraces the same yin/yang theory about iPhone/BlackBerry as TiPb:

I’ve said it many times over the past two years, be it in blog posts, on our CrackBerry podcast, or to individuals asking advice on what device to buy, that if you want the absolute no-compromise best smartphone solution that you keep a BlackBerry in one pocket and an iPhone (or iPod Touch) in the other. Though both Apple, RIM and every other manufacturer and platform in the smartphone space for that matter have the aim of developing the one device you need (in other words they’re trying to be both Yin and Yang), I still think as of now it takes two devices to have Best of Class everything. A device like the BlackBerry Bold 9700 is the ultimate communication and productivity tool, which excels in areas that matter both in enterprise (security, deployment, IT management) and to people who run their business and their lives depending on the phone, maximizing every minute of their day (one-handed speed of use, battery life, push everything, etc.). Apple hit the market with a compelling touchscreen experience that’s both intuitive and enjoyable to use that fits into the Apple ecosystem of products and services (ie. iTunes) and took it to the next level by causing a revolution in the mobile app space. So while the BlackBerry is still the ultimate communication / utilty tool, the iPhone arguably remains the ultimate convergence device.

Kevin being Kevin, however, he can’t resist tweaking us either. The Man who, in the first year called the iPhone 2G the iSmudge (before BlackBerry copied its black and silver design) and in the second year called it the Ah Frak Phone (on the eve of the BlackBerry Storm launch no less), decided this year he’d call the iPhone 3GS the douchebag phone (he owns one — as do almost all the Smartphone Experts editors).

NokiaExperts’ Matt Miller

Week 5 closed things out with NokiaExperts.com’s Matt Miller, who like Dieter is a multi-handset mobile gadgeteer with a lot of experience and a global point of view. His take:

As a guy who has used every smartphone operating system I am also quite frustrated with the iPhone OS because I know Apple can do better as they have shown glimpses of in the past. One of the main things people mention with the iPhone OS compared to other smartphone operating systems is the lack of multi-tasking with 3rd party applications. [...] Personally, the major thing I want to see in the next version of the iPhone OS is support for some kind of Today or status screen where I can put widgets or parts of applications on a single screen so my key information is glanceable without having to dive into applications. [...] Another area I would like to see addressed is notifications. Palm’s webOS and Google Android have the best implementation of notifications while the iPhone’s is pretty poor.

Setting aside that these are some of the most popular reasons people still Jailbreak their iPhones, Matt (and the other editors who took similar issue with iPhone functionality) will likely find many TiPb readers agreeing with him, yours truly included. Only built-in Apple apps can multitask, only your latest push message is shown on the Lock Screen (if you haven’t already dismissed it), and that same one message/dismissal is the crux of the notification problem.

This brings everything sharply into focus. Apple prides itself on making software “5-years ahead of the competition” (see iPhone virtual keyboard). They would rather not provide a solution than provide one that they don’t think answers the problem simply and elegantly (see cut, copy, and paste appearing only in iPhone 3.). They would rather provide a highly focused subset of functionality for the mainstream than to check off every power-user want (see everything all of us, er… want). Every version of the iPhone adds features that were considered “missing” to the previous version, either as technology and development resources allow, or Apple deems us sufficiently learned on what came before, and sufficiently motivated to buy what’s next.

So, if RAM and CPU are at the level where multitasking will almost never crash the Phone app and Apple decides they have the UI for it they want, if Dashboard goes mobile but can remain uncluttered and Apple-esque in execution and DashCode joins the iPhone SDK, if… well, given the rapid rise of push notifications, there’s no if — we need better alert handling — we just might get some or all of these things in iPhone 4.0.

Conclusion… Coming Soon

Week 6 is my turn. The iPhone 3GS comes home to TiPb and given everything every other editor has written about it, and everything I’ve written about the Nokia, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone, and Palm webOS, I have to re-examine and re-review the iPhone 3GS.

While that may not be conclusive, it will be TiPb’s conclusion for this year.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb Responds to iPhone Reviews — Smartphone Round Robin

We’re in the final “away” week of the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, and since I began the event looking at Nokia, what better way to cap it off than with NokiaExperts‘ Matt Miller looking at our iPhone 3GS.

Matt’s got his thread going at TiPb’s iPhone Forums, trying to figure out if even a applezillion apps can make up for the loss of full-on N900 Mozilla, so hit reply and help him out. Every day you help him on that thread, you’re entered for a chance to WIN AN iPHONE 3GS! (smartphoneroundrobin.com has all your details!)

As for me, I’m over at the PreCentral.net Forums learning me some webOS via the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi. Give me a hand over there, and you could win one of them as well!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Hands-on from a Nokia Expert’s Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin