Programming

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.