iPhone

It’s not often that I disagree with Ryan Block or John Gruber — these guys are always on top of their game — but I have to disagree when it comes to the recent SIM-Unlock question.

Don’t know it? It was when, during the Q&A portion of the recent Apple announcement regarding the iPhone SDK and the roadmap for the deployment of third-party apps, that Ryan Block asked Steve Jobs:

Will SIM unlock software be considered software not allowed in the app store?

As the live blogging reported, the answer was “(pause)…Yes. (Laughter)”.

Block blogged this later:

But even knowing the answer would be a resounding no, asking whether SIM unlock software would be allowed can be construed as a statement — as well as and an opportunity for Apple to address the millions of potential customers who’d like to be able to use an iPhone on a non-prescribed carrier. (source)

Gruber said this in support:

Just because the answer is obvious doesn’t mean it wasn’t a fair question. I don’t have a problem with Apple serving as a gatekeeper with approval over all apps, but if that’s the role they want, their policies should be explicit. (source)

Here’s the problem, guys: These weren’t the questions asked. What got asked was “will you circulate SIM unlock apps?” and the answer was an obvious “No.” The failure here is that Question 1 was somehow meant to imply Question 2 but only Question 1 can be answered, ergo, it was a waste of time.

Or as Kramer might say, why don’t you just tell me the question you want answered?

Here’s two alternatives:

• “Who is defining which apps are allowable and which are not for the app store?”
• “What is Apple’s policy on third-party applications that compete with AT&T services?”

In film school, one of the first rules of interviewing I ever got was to remove questions that can be answered with a simple Yes or No. Jobs was lobbed an easy “No” — which is exactly how he fielded it — that really no one would argue with, and the purpose of the question was so opaque that we now have two blog entries clarifying it. “Because” is not an acceptable answer, so if the answer must be a reason or an explanation, then you’ve got a winner.

Instead, we got the equivalent of “will you allow software that voids the user’s warranty?” Excellent work there, Professor Layton.

Well, the January Software Update is out, and I feel like I have to address my old post about keeping my then-returnable N800 in light of the iPod touch’s debut.

After all, the post centered around events we didn’t know would happen, such as the announcement of an official SDK and the release of iPhone apps which were missing from the original firmware of the device.

So what’s left from my original bullet-point list of things missing from the iPod touch, in light of the iPhone and the Nokia Internet Tablets (NITs)?

• Camera
• Microphone
• Bluetooth
• Speakers

So am I as firm on the NIT as I was then? Eh… not so much.

Let’s break this down.

Camera

The inclusion of a camera on the N800 was an attractive piece of its arsenal. However, it has become the single-most unfulfilled feature for the platform. What can you use the 640x480 front-mounted camera for? Video chat from NIT to NIT only. While the N800 was released in January 2007, it took 10 months before the Gizmo Project released an N800 version of their app that could do NIT-to-PC video chat. For someone wanting to set up a video chat solution for one or two users, this is great, but the camera still does not live up to its marketing as a web camera: it does not work with Flash’s web camera API, despite the NIT now touting having a “full version” of Flash 9. That means no webcam recording for YouTube, etc.. To this day, Gizmo is the only third party to utilize the camera for a mature product.

Summary: the camera fails to be useful for anyone who doesn’t use or need application-based chat, as it is the only usable experience of the camera.

Grade: B-, if you video chat (and use Gizmo); F, if you don’t

The VS factor: Yeah, the iPod touch doesn’t have a camera, but that doesn’t make it a plus for the NIT, because odds are you’ll never use it anyway.

Microphone

The microphone goes hand-in-hand with the camera of the N800. However, with Skype being easily available to the device since the latest firmwares, audio chat is a much more attractive prospect than video chat, and with headset support (see Bluetooth) this makes audio chat a really powerful feature of the device. Sadly, very little extra has been enabled for the microphone. A community-developed audio recorder does exist, but it is not promoted in the device (the repository is disabled by default).

Grade: A+, if you chat; C, if you don’t

The VS factor: I don’t use Skype, and I have a cellphone. Losing the mic is not a deal-breaker for me, or for most people really, unless Skype is your bread and butter.

Bluetooth

The inclusion of Bluetooth on the N800 ensures that if you can’t get a Wi-Fi connection when you’re trying to get onto the internet, you can always use the dialup-networking profile of your phone to hook into your cellular data plan. Even though I have the T-Mobile Total Internet plan which includes their hotspots, I can’t stress how important this is. Cell signals are nearly ubiquitous in big cities, whereas a trip to a compatible hotspot is a good 10 minute walk. Even so, the Bluetooth support is pretty standard, and doesn’t include A2DP for stereo bluetooth headphones, which combined with the many shortcomings of the Media Player keep the device’s ability at a novelty level. It’s simply not optimized for audio/video.

As far as pictures go, with the right cameraphone, or Bluetooth capable full camera, viewing your snaps on the NIT’s screen is as easy as opening the device over the BT connection, or copying a batch of files over first before viewing. Very nice.

Summary: not just headset support for Skype and other chat apps, but backup networking with the right phone when you’re in the middle of nowhere.

Grade: A-

The VS factor: Pretty huge. During our recent Macworld Keynote Lunch Out, one of our party had a Wi-Fi only device, but neither the restaurant nor any nearby tenants or stores had an open access point. The device, for our purposes right then, was useless. I was able to tether to my cell phone for data, and was able to monitor MacRumors in style. Bluetooth will save you when you need it. It will also give you instant compatibility with other devices you own that you’d need to buy a proprietary cable or accessory for the iPod, if one exists, that is.

Speakers

While you don’t always need them, the convenience of built-in speakers is pretty damn nice, and on many occasions I have listened to a podcast on the way home, only to unplug the headphones to listen to the show out loud once I have gotten back into my apartment. Sure, you could have an iPod Hi-Fi at home, or some extra portable speakers to dock into, but that’s another accessory to buy, carry and juggle when you want to use them, and they are never as portable as just the device itself. For light use they’re perfect, and it’s only minus for plugging into your stereo system is that you can’t set it to output a line level signal.

Summary: Always underrated, built-in speakers are perfect for sharing, on the desk, and around the house. You may not need them, but once you have them their convenience will never go unused. The only strike against the NITs speakers are their relatively low volume levels. They’re not quiet by any means, but often they just don’t get loud enough. For many of my podcasts, a running sink can drown it out at it’s top levels, forcing me to use a radio or something else with more power.

Grade: B+

The VS factor: You don’t always want to deal with a headphone splitter and extra headphones if you want to share a song or watch a movie, and speakers make that happen. And when they’re built-in you never have to worry about leaving them at home. You’ll never “need” them, but you’ll miss them when they’re gone.

So.

What have been my biggest complaints with the NITs, now that I’ve had it for this long?

• The immaturity of video support: Sure, Mplayer is there and functions well, but about the same as Excel on Windows. Most players do not integrate well to the tablet’s OS, or support basic ID3 tags, or make playlists easier to manage, or run reliably. 320x240 H.264 files are supposedly supported in the latest tablet OS, but as fully as they were on the PSP, meaning the window of acceptable encoding settings is so small that most files you’ll find online and in podcasts won’t work, even though they are 320x240 H.264 files. And yes, some of these even choke Mplayer. For someone like me who adores video podcasts, and has a 50GB music library with perfect ID3 tags and album covers, this has been a migraine headache for me.

• The incompleteness of media players and other applications: Aside for a few stars in the Maemo world, such as Vagalume (a last.fm radio client) and FBReader (an ebook reader), the hobbyist audience of the NITs becomes very apparent very quickly. New media players (that use the same media libraries, therefore not adding new media support) crop up on what seems like a weekly basis, all repeating the same shortcomings and errors in usability and user interface. Setting up the SDK for the device is apparently only for the hardest of hardcore, meaning only the hardcore Linux programmers seem to be developing for it. Simply put, I expect a higher quality of 3rd party applications on the Apple device despite the newness of the SDK simply because I expect the development environment to be an extension of the easy-as-pie Xcode environment, meaning designers and artists can get into it with the programmers, too.

So where am I now? Still stuck in the middle, on the precipice of buying an iPod touch, only because of the failings of the NITs. Because as necessary I’ve found Bluetooth to be, and how useful the speakers and the microphone can be, the overall experience has been only adequate, and now that the main internet-application failings of the iPod touch have been solved — core apps like Mail available, and an SDK coming in a month — there’s no reason for someone who wants a internet & media player to consider the NITs anymore. Unless they are Skype addicts.

It won’t feel like a full computer in the palm of my hand, but it will feel like it works like the way it was meant to work.

[Update 2008-01-22]

Those who read the blog regularly or follow me on Twitter know that I also have an N95. I thought of mentioning it originally, but when comparing the two, I felt it was only relevant to tethering the NIT to a data connection.

However, I think that the phone influences me in a few ways as many of its features are redundant in light of the NITs. Since they are sold side-by-side as Nseries devices, you can either see this as ironic (two devices designed to work together doing double-duty) or making perfect sense (you really are expected to pick one or the other).

I won’t go into great detail here about the N95, but I will say that the deficiencies of the iPod touch are picked up extremely well by the N95, even if the phone is not the optimal experience for them. Because of that, my needs from the tablet revolved things that a tablet-sized device should have a better experience for than a handset — videos, reading, web browsing, general internet connectivity and performance.

Case in point: I always read RSS feeds on the N800 because it has a bigger screen, caches images well, can be used in an “offline” manner and has good display options. But there is a dedicated feed reader in the S60 browser, too. Hell, both devices even have a video podcatcher app named “Video Center.”

It doesn’t really change or affect the details in the post, but it does shed some light on the level of frustration I had, and the lower value I placed on the geekier features of the device, since Nokia makes both and the newness of the NIT OS is made even more obvious in light of the S60’s maturity. Many NIT issues have been long solved in the phone products. The knowledge is around there, somewhere, but it’s just not making it to the tablet teams yet.

Gearlog posts a story that shows Apple’s stance on the modding their hardware:

I asked [Apple’s Greg Joswiak] about independent, native software development for the iPhone. He said Apple doesn’t oppose native application development, which was new to me. Rather, Apple takes a neutral stance - they’re not going to stop anyone from writing apps, and they’re not going to maliciously design software updates to break the native apps, but they’re not going to care if their software updates accidentally break the native apps either. He very carefully left the door open to a further change in this policy, too, saying that Apple is always re-examining its perspective on these sorts of things.

This is pretty consistent with previous devices (Apple TV hacks, the existing Linux-on-iPod project). By being neutral to software development they allow the minority who “need” custom features to still get them in some fashion without being beholden to support them officially. For example, Apple never had to add OGG support because those few who needed that audio format on an iPod were likely satisficed by the Linux project. Apple is focused on the mainstream, and being developer-neutral allows them to trend-watch their devices from a extremely safe distance. If a feature is a) important enough to risk breaking the thing and b) is popular enough to be rapidly adopted by users and developers of the hacked devices, they know it is a feature that might be worth developing internally or with a partner that will help the bottom-line. It can also help fine-tune and set priorities for existing projects already in the pipeline (just think of every late-to-the-party feature of .Mac service, and the quick upgrade to the 160 GB Apple TV after hackers learned how to upgrade the HD).

I take their statement to mean what I’ve been assuming all along — if we are to ever see an official iPhone SDK released, its countdown is in years, not months.

Especially after this update in the same article:

Apple says “software updates will most likely break” native apps as they go forwards.

Ever since the announcement of the iPod touch I’ve been having people regularly spin by my office asking me when mine arrives. Oh yeah, it’s because they want to know if it’ll replace the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet I’m test driving. Yeah, forgot to mention that.

I’ve been pretty vocal about my crankiness over how Nokia handled the transition between their first and second Internet Tablets, but to make a long story short (by skipping all of Nokia’s growing-pains and early mistakes with the platform, I did only pay one-third of the price of the N800 when buying the 770 so it isn’t surprising that I ended up with a third of today’s experience. In the end, what I was doing with the discounted tablet was so satisfying when it worked that I just wanted it to work all the time, and I felt I had to give the N800 the old 30-day-retail-test-drive and try it with all those bugs finally fixed.

But back to the iPod touch. Right after the announcement of the iPod touch I felt extremely underwhelmed. It was a iPhone without the phone, as I’d hoped for, but it also was without a lot of other things:

• Camera
• Mail client
• Google Maps
• Widgets
• Bluetooth
• Microphone
• Speakers

And these have left holes in functionality. Sure, the iPod touch still has a Contacts application, but without a Mail client, how useful would this really be? Lots of people knocked the Nokia Internet Tablets for not being able to sync contacts into the device, yet here was the exact flip-side of that situation…an application to view contacts that were synchronized to your iPod, but no way to edit them or integrate them in the web-based client you’re now forced to use.

It really feels like Safari is there only for the reason Steve Jobs said it was there: because you need a web browser to log into most Wi-Fi hotspot services. Contacts — and Calendars and Photos — on the iPod touch are essentially the same as they were on previous iPod models. They are read-only, now-crippled versions of their iPhone counterparts that do not get any advantage to being on a networkable device. Hell, they don’t even get a mention on the website or the guided tour video for the product. And YouTube? Well, you’re offering Safari but you don’t have a Flash plugin, so you have to make up for it somehow. And I’ve had the Tablets for a while now — Wi-Fi access points are just not that plentiful. You need access to cellular data as well, and with no Bluetooth to link your cell phone with to make that data connection (which I do with the Tablets regularly) you’ll be out of luck. Make no mistakes about it, the Wi-Fi is primarily for the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store and the Starbucks partnership. Its browsing capabilities are secondary.

So is the iPod touch an N800 killer? No way, not unless you thought the N800 was just a media device, where the price difference alone would decide a winner. And even though it’s not a phone, it’s still best compared to the iPhone because of those missing applications. Still, the iPhone is not the best choice of the two if you care about adding functionality like making Skype calls, GPS navigation, or even just listening to Shoutcast radio, reading RSS offline or viewing 800-pixel wide sites with Flash in Mozilla without zooming. The question is, do you care?

This is all update-able technology after all, so could there be a Mail client on the iPod touch in the future? Probably. Might we see VoIP on the iPhone? Unlikely, but it could happen. But the N800 can be updated, too, and, that’s why I’m not returning it. Relying solely on third-party apps through a modding community is risky and can still be a frustrating experience — just ask the Sony PSP users about their homebrew efforts. Not to forget, the moment the modders cross a line that impacts Apple’s bottom-line (re: Jhymn and iTunes), a new software update will appear to lock them out, and that update will be enforced by an iTunes/device feature update. As long as no official path into the device exists, this is always a possibility.

In the end, I want to vote with my dollar. And maybe if we all didn’t buy the product when it has obvious flaws we’d all prefer weren’t there, those flaws would get fixed sooner rather than later.

P.S. In fact, there’s only one thing that could have turned me around to the iPod touch and made me return my N800 for it — an 80 GB HD edition. As I recently commented on Newsvine, I’m all about the library-in-your-pocket factor:

“Those focused enough on media to warrant the 80GB/160GB anytime-anywhere model will be focused almost solely on that, and consequently need only the Click Wheel UI, instead of the omnifunctional multitouch interface.”

I would have to strongly disagree.

If you have 160GB of media, you’ll want…no, NEED…a few things: Easy search (i.e. a way to actually type-in queries), Quick indexing (i.e. a way to immediately jump from A to X in a list), and Visual browsing (i.e. a quick & precise way to scan contents visually as opposed to textually).

All of these things are limited when channeled through the click wheel. Text input is extremely awkward, you still have to scroll up into letter-mode and even then it’s jumpy and takes time, and using a wheel for Cover Flow is not nearly as fast as using the flick (plus the emulated inertia) or a precise to stop as the tap-to-freeze. Reports have already come in that the wheel just doesn’t feel as precise as it should.

If anything, a scroll wheel is better suited for smaller libraries where there is less material to traverse. Really, this announcement was a HUGE miss for me, and I’m still waiting for a touch HD.

P.P.S. I haven’t gotten an iPhone because I want Apple’s version of a smartphone, not Apple’s version of the Sidekick. I’ve been there before, so I know how amazing the experience of having precisely orchestrated & unified components can be, but a) it gets boring and familiar quickly, and b) even the Sidekick let you install third-party applications on it. Besides, my contract doesn’t expire until July, and as you know, a lot can happen in ten months. A lot can happen in two months as well, right, early adopters?

[Correction 2007-09-16] The Contacts app on the iPod touch does indeed let you add new contacts right on the device. All other apps still remain push-from-desktop-only, however.

Being pro- or anti- iPhone all depends on what your vision of the future is: doing new things vs. doing things differently.

Recently, Nokia’s Linux-based 770 Internet Tablet was heavily discounted (well, liquidated, basically) and began showing up on Woot.com and Buy.com (as a no-return item) for surprisingly little. I’d been eying the N800 for a while for some crazy reason I still haven’t figured out so I decided to spring for the 770.

The 770, with the latest system, isn’t dramatically different from the faster N800 — but honestly, the N800 needs a bit more zap for it to be truly cutting-edge. Better touchscreen/digitizer, WiMax, LED screens, etc. are in this series’ future, and the sum of the N800 today just doesn’t wow like it should. The 770 would be a fun device to knock around and see if I should start saving a space for the next model to come.

The experience was a bit shocking. To add a new application — since it was touted to be so open-source friendly — required adding a new distribution directory every time. For some reason, developers weren’t all sharing their apps into a single one. This is fine on the rare occasion, but one of the apps required adding three directories because of all of the shared libraries involved. All-in-one directories, like Fink for OS X, make sense — let there be stable ground for the regular user, and all these other locations be for the experiments and unstable releases. I suspect there aren’t many “regular” users using this thing yet.

But the kicker was that in the first 24 hours an RSS feed nearly killed my device. Looking on the forums, it turns out this isn’t that uncommon — if the RSS is invalid enough, it can crash the reader application. But at times it crashes enough to make the device reboot. Add an auto-refresh of feeds on bootup, and no “hard reset” of preferences in the hardware, and you’ve got a formula for essentially bricking your device by just adding a news feed. My problem feed (from TUAW.com) couldn’t even be deleted — accessing it at all crashed the RSS reader, and I had to install XTerm (see previous comments about installations), and delete setting files in the shell because there was no built-in way to get into those directories.

In a way, I feel like it validated what Steve Jobs said about the iPhone and applications. OK, not exactly, since the RSS app is built-in and clearly buggy as hell, but it was a third-party source that triggered it. It was external data now on a local file that would survive a reboot and could trigger another reboot. It killed the experience of the device for me within one day of ownership.

I’ve heard Linux be called “the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot” and I think this applies here. In my hands was a completely open and programmable Linux-based platform, capable of doing whatever I could program it to do. This freedom appeals only to computer engineers and hobbyists — I could get it to do new things in new places! Mplayer, in my pocket, dang it!

Compare this to the “revolutionary” internet device that Jobs says the iPhone is. As an data device it does basic web browsing and basic email — but the ways in which the user gets to do those basic features — both in the application and in the user interface — is new and reduces the friction involved in doing those activities, making them easier and gosh darn it, fun. Does this excite the programmers and hobbyists? Of course not, because it’s all basic, and there’s a lot missing.

In the end, I wrote this post on my Nokia E70 because it had a full keyboard. Doing this on a stock 770 would have been crazy. And I certainly wouldn’t have done this on an iPhone either. Are they both compromises? Of course, we don’t get to build our dream device in step 1. But are they both the future? Do they both drive to the same destination? Absolutely.

It just depends on which angle you look at it.