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iPhones: iPhorm over iPhunction |
It is unfair to compare the iPhone, a device from end 2009, to the Palm Treo 650 that came out in 2004. The five year advantage that the Apple iPhone has over the Palm Treo 650 should not be neglected when you read this page.
The paragraphs in this first section change with time, as I add reflections.
For some reason it is impossible to upgrade to iOS4 unless the iPhone has a valid SIM card in it. Why? Can't I use it as a PDA? iTunes gives this message:
Is this not an attack on my personal liberties?
Usability: My personal digital assistant (PDA) has to be fast, efficient and easy to use. I want a workhorse, not a toy. Sorry to disappoint you, but I do not play games on my PDA all day long.
Security: I want my data to be safe, I need encryption and password protection at several levels.
Independence: I want to be stand-alone: no obligatory tethering to any network or any consumer service. A GPS navigation system that obliges me to be connected to Google Maps is no use to me.
Access: I have a right to the data that I created myself. I want to see the files I made as a file system and I want all of those files to be easily transferable to my computer. Anything I typed in or otherwise created should be available to me in such a way I can operate on it elsewhere, and the transfer should be entirely under my control. Don't tell me to use a commercial service in some country outside my legal space.
Synchronisation: I travel with a laptop, often for long stretches of time. At home I have a stationary machine. Obviously I need to synchronise at least my agenda and some data bases with both machines. Don't tell me to use a commercial service in some country outside my legal space.
Multi-tasking: any app should be able to run alongside any other one.
I worked first with a PSION (1992-1993) then a Palm (2002, 2004) and now an iPhone (2009).
My conclusion is quite simple: form is winning over function.
The objects have become more charming, more beautiful but less efficient. They are going in the direction of entertainment, away from productivity.
I thought that the iPhone would allow me to collapse several physical devices into a single one. Alas, after several weeks of trying hard, I have switched back to the Treo, at least for the agenda and the telephone.
Here are the details:
The iPone is the wheel reinvented, and it is a square wheel. Though in the two years since its launch, the corners of this curious square wheel have worn off a bit and the iPhone is now rounded enough that it may become usable. For some.
2009-08-14 I got it new.
2009-08-21 After one week my iPhone gave up on WiFi. I checked every setting I could think of, did a full restore (which includes the firmware) but it still did not work. A hardware defect? Probably. I had already spent 150€ on software by this time.
2009-10-06 I got it back repaired (replaced, actually). More than a month! But admittedly through a dealer.
2009-10-21 Switch back to the Treo, at least for the agenda & telephone. I'll see what a Palm Pre can do. I keep the iPhone for entertainment, access to WiFi hotspots, GPS navigation and reading e-books.
Do not think I don't have e-mail, web browsing and office applications on the Treo: I do, but I don't use those functions.
I use a PDA for these activities, listed in order of frequency:
| Activity | Doing it on a iPhone (2009) |
Doing it on a Palm Treo 650 (2004) |
| Use Agenda consult the calendar, make appointments, set alarms |
1 tap the calendar icon, 2 tap the "+" to add an appointment, 3 tap "Title & Location", 4 type the title, 5 tap "Done" 6 tap the start time field, 7 roll wheels to display the start time, 8 tap the "Done" button. |
1 click the calendar button 2 tap the hour of the new appointment, 3 type its title on the keyboard. |
| Use Data Base mainly lists: contacts, identities, media items, … |
1 tap FMTouch icon, 2 select data base, 3 look up data. |
1 click FileMaker icon, 2 select data base, 3 look up data. |
| Calculate use a calculator or a spreadsheet |
1 tap MathU icon, 2 calculate. |
1 click MathU icon, 2 calculate. |
| Read e-books mainly |
Third-party BookShelf is good. Varying the reading speed needs several taps. BookShelf also displays html and pdf. |
Palm Reader is supplied and scrolls at reader's desired pace. Th navigation button is used to speed up, slow down. |
| Navigate mainly the area around where I live |
TomTom fortunately produced a usable system a few days after I got the iPhone. | I have the Michelin street map of four years ago, covering France, the Benelux and Switzerland on an SD card in the Treo. The Treo USB however does not connect to the GPS antenna (which the Palm Tungsten did). |
| Photograph just to remember something because it is faster than making notes. |
1 tap camera icon 2 tap shutter. Always makes a noise. |
1 click camera icon 2 click shutter. |
| Draw a diagram helpful in explaining something |
SimpleDraw is good enough but my finger is too large to draw accurately. Autodesk Sketchbook is better. |
JazzyDraw does more than I need and fast, as it also uses the buttons. |
| Phone very occasionally |
A third-party program can get the call logs out. | Buttons can be programmed for shortcuts. A third-party program can get the call logs out. |
| Send SMS even rarer than a phone call |
A third-party program can get the sms texts out. | Typing with the buttons is less error-prone and leaves more screen visible. A third-party program can get the sms texts out. |
| Consult a document mainly a pdf of a diagram |
The pdf reader is good though slow. | There is a pdf reader but it is slow and limited. |
| Note write and consult notes |
Notes do not sync, a third-party app is needed. | Sync with Palm Memos. Typing with the buttons is less error-prone and leaves more screen visible. |
| Record Voice memo when there is no time to write |
1 tap voice memo icon 2 tap record button 3 speak 4 tap save button. |
Third-party app can be programmed to record with single button. |
| Video | video only introduced with 3GS | not high-quality, but also does video |
The speed and the accuracy with which I can get results is important.
Switching on the iPhone is already an exercise in dexterity: if you move the slider to the right too fast it bounces back and you have to try again. One learns, but it generates stress induced by the design of the device itself.
There are only two ways to switch the iPhone on: the main button and the on-off button. On the Treo a number of buttons can be programmed to switch it on and immediately go to a certain application. As I use the agenda most, I have assigned a button to it and can get to my appointments in one click.
Synchronisation: the Treo will synch with any number of computers without a problem. The iPhone syncs only with one machine. At the very least I should be able to sync my agenda with more than one machine, and in fact I should be able to determine which apps I want to sync with which machines. Don't tell me to sync through a server of a commercial service in some country outside my legal space.
An interesting aspect of the iPhone is that it uses a music playing program (iTunes) to synchronise my agenda. A bit like flushing the toilet to turn on the light. Humans get used to anything.
Agenda: the most important application of a PDA. The PSION had the best one, with day, week, month and year views. An anniversary could be shown as a date or a number of elapsed years (useful for birthdays!) or both. Repeating appointments had a lot of options. Appointments could be copied and pasted. The Treo's agenda does not allow copying of entries. They can however be beamed by infrared to another Palm device.
iCal is simply underdeveloped. It has its concepts of repeating entries wrong. Its month view does not allow me to scroll by week (but the week view allows me to scroll by day). Version 3 makes it more difficult to edit events than the previous version. The editing panel is animated, which wastes my time, it needs more clicks and drags than before, etc.
Entering a new appointment in the Treo requires one tap on the screen. There is also a dedicated button to get directly to the agenda. On the iPhone I can't tap the hour slot where I want to put the appointment, I have to go sideways into many levels of menus and move "wheels" around. Pretty, very pretty, and very slow.
Neither the Treo nor the iPhone allow multiple agenda files, though they allow multiple agendae inside the same file (but that is not the same thing!).
Phoning someone: the iPhone is not even a good telephone! On the Treo I have assigned frequently used phone numbers to specific buttons. For example, holding down "Q" calls my wife on her mobile phone. No other actions necessary. No looking in lists, not even "favourites" lists! Impossible on the iPhone because there are no buttons.
Screen area: the iPhone has 320x480 pixels, the Treo has 320x320. But for typing in anything on the iPhone you must use a pop-up keyboard. This is so large that it leaves little of the data visible: only 320x265 of which only 320x165 is the note's text (7 lines). The Treo shows me 11 lines (320x230).
Typing an accented character on the Treo is simple: click the option key and a menu of accented forms of the character you just typed appears. On the iPhone you have to hold down the character and then after some time a menu appears. Slow again. And all in upper case!
International formats: the iPhone chose to bundle them all into a "region format". But I am not in any region. I want English, metric, euros, ISO dates, 24h clock, and numbers in the format 1'234.56 . This is a combination that cannot be had. Good applications like the RPN calculator from Creative Creek dutifully get the number format from the system settings. And so I am stuck with 1,234.56 which I hate.
Copy-paste was in the Treo from the start, it just arrived on the iPhone, and it is extremely clumsy, error prone, difficult. Just because there are no buttons on the thing! The Treo has a navigation button, the equivalent of the four arrow keys on a keyboard. It is incomparably easier to edit text with the Treo than with the iPhone.
Buttons: when the number of functions grows beyond a (small) size, a screen + keyboard + menu system is the best solution we know. VCR recorders were just on the limit: too many options but no screen+keyboard, hence the need for multiple modes and sequences. The VCR became the standard example of a device too complex for most people to handle. The iPhone has even more functions and even fewer buttons.
Precision: a stylus is better than a finger, full stop. But there are no precision styluses for the iPhone. A wet bit of sponge, connected to your skin, will do the trick though. Choose a very fine-grain spongy matter that is also as hard as possible (if a sponge can ever be hard) so you can make a point as thin as possible. Wrap it round a metal rod, such as a good old Palm stylus, but the end of a barbequeue skewer will do. Fix it with adhesive tape. I cut a bit off a blue spongy kitchen wipe and fixed it to a Palm stylus (that also has a ball-point pen in it by the way):
Accuracy of typing improves dramatically. The drawback is that the tip has to be wet. I have not yet tried a felt pen tip. Essential is that the tip makes galvanic contact with your skin, felt pens are usually of non-conducting plastic so it would need some tinkering. It may also work with a bit of conductive rubber, but that is more difficult to find.
Drawing: in a conversation a sketch is often much more effective than a lengthy explanation, and having an app that allows you to make a crude diagram is very useful. But try to draw with your finger instead of a sharp stylus.
Data Bases: Bento is for dummies. It syncs and is beautiful but unproductive. FileMaker is much better and FMTouch is good. FMTouch allows data bases on the iPhone to be encrypted and password protected. This is vital.
Protection: neither the Treo nor the iPhone have protection for individual files. This is a serious drawback. Certain applications do allow some protection (e.g. FMTouch).
GPS navigation: on the Palm Tungsten I could connect a GPS locator, this device is not accessible through Palm's own USB driver for the Treo! GPS is built into the iPhone, but I did not want to use also the 3G connection to get the map. TomTom has an app that has the map of Western Europe (about 1.5GB) and therefore renders one independent. However, form over function again: there are 75 different voices included, but the software cannot read the street names (voice synthesis lacking), which is a useful function and which my TomTom of 2005 does have. (note: Europe having many languages, it would be useful to have the street names pronounced in the local language instead of having them massacred in the language of the chosen voice. This would be a useful setting: I would hear the local names in French, while still getting the driving instructions in English. But that would be function over form I guess.)
Voice notes: these can be very important. There are quite a few situations in which it is impossible to write. The PSION 5 had a single button on the side to make a voice note. You did not have to switch it on or open it up. Just take it out of your jacket pocket, press and hold the button while speaking, release the button to stop. Easy, efficient, useful. The Treo is better than the iPhone, because it has programmable buttons, but needs third party software.
Reading: on the Treo I read a lot of classic books using the Palm Reader. This is a built-in simple text reader, but it can do continuous smooth scrolling. I don't have to flip pages. There are many e-readers for the iPhone, but so far I have found only one that allows scrolling: BookShelf. Fortunately BookShelf is very good, it even allows you to lock the orientation. Without that it would be impossible to read lying down on your side. However, because the iPhone has no buttons, changing the scrolling speed is much more difficult than on the Treo.
Operating system: no multi-tasking on the Treo, but it exists on the Pre. And not on the iPhone. Not for third party apps anyway. But this may come.
Should I write: "I've had an iPhone for a month now" or should I write "I've had iPhone for a month now". Because from Apple's pages it is not clear if the iPhone is an object or a person. There are so many sentences where the word iPhone has no article. Like:
"… is visible on iPhone by tapping…"
Funnily, when we talk about a program, we don't use an article either: we say "Linux started up" and not "the Linux started up". But we always use the article when mentioning objects: "the printer is jammed", even when we use a brand name as in "the iMac went to sleep".
So why does Apple sometimes use an article for the iPhone and sometimes not? The same is true for their use of the word iMac and iTunes.
Well, now, why can't I start the iPhone without a SIM card? I should be able to get it going, synchronise, restore, back up and so on without the SIM card. The telephone is only one of its many functions.
Hah! The reason is a simple matter of cartel forming: there are deals between smartphone makers and mobile phone network providers. Apple just wants to know that you have acquired your phone through one of these deals. After having started once with a SIM card the iPhone can then be used without one. Fortunately.
There are indeed thousands of applications one can download. But only a few are actually useful. Yes, iPhone apps are "beautiful", "funny", "must have" and what not, but most of them are useless.
It reminds me of the old situation between Macs and PCs: there were few applications for the Mac but they were generally very good; there were tens of thousands for Windows, but most of them were useless.
Apparently, because most of what I have seen so far is not fit for productivity. iPhone apps are slow, unimaginative and mostly useless.
They also bind you into an on-line service, you have to sell your soul to someone you don't know.
Apple, you had five years to outwit the Palm, to produce a device that would also be a decent successor to the Newton. You produced a beautiful object that sells like hotcake to ignoramuses who use it mostly for entertainment. It makes money for you, certainly, but you will have to do better to convince the professional users.
But I can see the strategy: with OSX inside, you can step by step unlock existing but locked features, such as multitasking, as the clamouring from the public grows or the competition makes a move.
Who knows, we may even get a keyboard and a stylus! And no doubt it will be hailed as innovative progress.
