confessions of a serial hobbyist

So apparently I was tagged in this a couple of weeks ago by Jonathan Greene at atmaspheric | endeavors. But things having been crazy with work and all I missed it, but to follow on I’ll see about what I have…

I’m currently switching between two devices, the Apple iPhone and the Nokia N95. I have a few others phones (N80, N75, about 30 others…) but I don’t use them much so they don’t count.

Let’s start with the iPhone because it’s the least interesting in terms of what’s on there. I use the iPhone primarily as my iPod, a web tablet (it is in my opinion superior to say the Nokia 770/N800, despite lacking flash support), for email, and sometimes I even use it as a phone. I do have a little bit of extra software installed:

1. Mobile Terminal - The quite nice (though a pain to install) terminal emulator for the iPhone. I actually end up using it more than one might expect… Unfortunately it doesn’t fully support ANSI escape sequences and what-not so it’s not 100% usable as a unix terminal yet.
2. SSH - what I use the Mobile Terminal for. I frequently SSH into my machines at home etc. to check on things (and once popped on IRC just because I could, though it didn’t work so well…see above comment about ANSI escape sequences).

That’s it - afterall what else is there for the iPhone? Even these required me to spend most of a morning running shady applications to break into my own device. However, having a usable terminal on my phone is such a godsend that it has me thinking of picking up a Nokia E61i - the qwerty on the iPhone is probably the biggest reason I like using it for email etc. over my N95.

Then there’s my N95… I use it often as my phone, and for a slightly larger number of apps - some officially released and some not.

1. Snakes - Yeah I know, it comes on the phone, but for some reason I still have a blast playing it (and replaying it, as I start from scratch every time there’s a firmware update).
2. Podcasting - The s60 podcasting app. Sure I have my iPhone to listen to my podcasts, watch my vidcasts, and generally handle all my media, but I feel it’s my right, nay my DUTY to download as many of those podcasts onto my n95 as I can (especially over EDGE…I’m paying for unlimited data, I should use it). The n95 has the one big win over the iPhone for podcasting - I can actually check for and download new episodes as I’m on the road, and can frequently start downloading an episode as I walk to lunch, and have it downloaded for listening as I eat.
3. Nokia Sports Tracker - I’m an engineer, which almost automatically means I’m out of shape. And so I’ve been using this (along with the GPS built in to the N95) to keep an idea of how much I’m walking…trying to keep up around 2 miles a day atleast.
4. Widsets - I primarily use this for the Jaiku widset. Unfortunately I’m not special enough to get in on the Jaiku mobile beta, and as such have been stuck with the older Jaiku mobile client. It works ok for making a post, and the automatic location updating (based on cell tower information apparently) is great - but being unable to read comments or read more than the last post of other people makes it useless…
5. Mobile Search - as I often do most of my emailing on the device it’s important to be able to search through things. Sure I use my iPhone more than the n95 for emailing (even soft-qwerty beats out t9 when it comes to typing) but since I use IMAP for email, I keep it synced both places. Hint to Nokia by the way - support saving sent emails to a IMAP Sent folder! Currently I have to CC myself, and then have my computer run a rule on incoming email that if it’s from me, move it to the IMAP Sent folder (so it’s saved on the iPhone and my laptop as well).
6. Nokia Maps - I haven’t used it too much, but when I have, it’s come in EXTREMELY handy. This is especially true with the latest firmware where it gets GPS locks a lot faster. And as I’ll be doing a bit more traveling in the coming months, I’m sure I’ll be using it even more.
7. K-Rally - A fun little racing game that took me a while to get into, but then quickly had me hooked. One of the highest quality mobile games I’ve played…and having worked in mobile games for years that MAYBE says something?
8. loopt - Loopt is a mobile-phone based social networking community app. I’ll note RIGHT NOW that this isn’t actually available for S60, or for most phones really - it’s a new service that’s being rolled out a carrier at a time, and the only reason I have it is that loopt happens to be one of my company’s clients. I figured if I’m working on their product, I should be using it - and if I’m going to use it I had to make it work on the phone I use.

So there we have it, most of the apps I use on my Nokia with any kind of regularness (I’m fully aware, thanks to the spell checking built into Safari, that that’s not a word). One thing I noticed as I typed this out - most of those are Nokia apps! I’m not sure if this is a good sign or not… I had previously used QuickOffice for writing up notes, but typing anything serious with t9 was just too painful so I stopped - this may be something I start using again if/when I break down and get an e61i (or e90). I should also note that there are some other things installed on my n95 (generally my company’s own products) but as they’re unannounced, they’ll remain so here - plus I’ll probably have to push them in a new blog post at some point in the future.

I was recently given an invite to try out joost - an internet streamed TV service that actually manages to get real TV content on there. Personally as soon as I heard they had episodes of I Hate My 30’s from VH1 I knew I had to try it out. Watch the show - it’s fantastic (any TV show that name-drops Mr. Belvedere is alright with me).

So, I grabbed the client, logged in, and fired it up. At any point clicking on the screen will bring up the overhead menu, from which you can pick the Channel Catalog to pick what you want to watch. The channels are a combination of old TV shows, made-for-joost content, and TV shows offered up from current TV networks.

On top of the TV at any point you can turn on a number of Widgets (solely for the sake of being buzzword compliant I’m sure) that basically just block portions of the video you’re supposedly trying to watch - I don’t see the point and turned all of them off pretty much immediately.

All of this isn’t bad, and the interface is something anyone with about 10 minutes of playing with could get to the point where they can pick what they want to watch and watch it. This is good. What’s bad is the streaming. I’m on a 3 mbit DSL line at home, and wasn’t able to make it through a single episode of I Hate My 30’s without a number of pauses and delays for buffering. And there’s the killer. That right there keeps it from being usable as a main entertainment source. Buffering before a show starts is acceptible - buffering while the ads play (hint for joost, if you pre-download the ads the client, you can then use commercial breaks to get a jump-start on buffering the remaining portion of a show) is even better, but having my watching experience constantly pausing for buffering made for a frustration time. I couldn’t sit down on the couch with the wife and watch a show on joost because of this. I tried at three different times of day - early morning (7am), midday (1pm), and later in the night (11pm) and all three times had the same problems with pauses.

I like the idea, I like some of the content, I just wish I could sit down and watch a show and forget that I’m using a computer program (this will be KEY in the future of moving video through a computer to the TV).

This is something that I noticed but wasn’t sure if I wanted to bother writing anything about, but I figure why not…

If you get a chance to see the movie, take a note of something:
Almost every single cell phone you’ll see is a Nokia. In fact, they make a point to SHOW the Nokia emblem in a number of shots. The bad guys? Nokia N90s (or were they N93s?). The “good guy” (Justin Long)? A Nokia E62. Then running down the street they “borrowed” a phone from a guy on the street to make a call…a Nokia 9300 (maybe 9300i, I don’t know the communicators well enough). Even McClane’s daughter was shown using an S60 phone (saw the screen - looked like the S60 standby screen atleast…maybe just an S40?).

Then there’s the other lacking tech devices - I didn’t notice a lot of obviously placed Apple products. Apple is notorious for having their computers/laptops in just about every movie in Hollywood. And yet in this movie I saw little to no Apple, and a whole lot of Nokias.

Is this the beginning of Nokia actually trying to get marketting in the US, or is this just a case of the movie makers wanting phones that look “geeky” or “techy” or something…not too sure.

Regardless, see the movie, it was fantastic.

–

Also of note - a Nokia N93 (I believe) made an appearance in Transformers as well…

So as I use the iPhone more and more I’m running in to things it can’t do, that frankly I never thought about - things that should just be there that you shouldn’t need a bullet-point in a feature list to have…

1. The ability to save and download files. I mean come on, really Apple? This “breakthrough internet device” can’t save an attachment from an email or download a file from the web? I almost want to hope that I’m just being stupid and missing this…but I’m not seeing it anywhere. Even if they didn’t want to give access to any kind of filesystem on the iPhone (which they apparently don’t) a “Save to iDisk” feature would be cool (you hear that Apple? it’s the sound of cross-promoting your own services).
2. The ability to upload files via the web. Similar to above, Apple seems bent on having your email be the only file storage available to the iPhone. The only ways to get files on and off your iPhone are via attachments.
3. The ability to send files to my laptop from my phone via bluetooth. Often I’ll be out and about with no net access on my laptop. Since I get my email delivered to my phone, I could just grab the attachment and send it on to my laptop via bluetooth and go about whatever I need to do.
4. Music player controls without having to take the phone out of my pocket. Sure there are SOME controls you can access - a single click on the mic will pause/resume play, and a double click on the mic will skip to the next track, but what if I want to replay the song I was just listening to? And volume controls are manageable keeping the phone in my pocket, but still requires me to reach down into my pocket and find the volume rocker to press. A few more controls on the headphones/mic would have been great here especially since there’s no controls on the iPhone itself - a purely touchscreen device doesn’t lend itself well to touch-only use…

Lastly, I wish I could say that web browser stability is something I took for granted, but that’s something that seems to be buggy and crash-ridden on every mobile platform I’ve tried. Seriously why is it so hard to make a web browser that just doesn’t crash? And I mean on some of Apple’s own pages. I log in to .mac and after logging in there’s a decent chance the browser crashes / restarts (and takes down the iPod app with it if I’m listening to music). And don’t give me the excuse of web browsers being horridly complex pieces of software - I write software for mobile platforms for a living. I know what’s involved and regardless of complexity, stability should be the top priority.

I’m sure there will be more little things that pop up, but I just wanted to note these as I thought them up. Let’s face it - the iPhone is a fantastic little device, but it’s SO very far from perfect. Hopefully software updates will help.

So I’ve had my grubby little mitts on this thing for a little over a day now and figured it’s about time to do the obvious comparison post…

In the name of being a good little Apple whore I’ll start off with what I love:

First, the hardware is nothing short of fantastic to hold and look at. Lets face it, Apple shines here. Second, the web browser is the best I’ve ever used in a mobile device and I’m going to include both Nokia’s S60 browser and the n800 in that statement. Both are slightly more advanced in that they atleast offer some semblence of flash support but the iPhone’s browser is just so slick and easy to navigate around/scale to fit to a usable size for what you’re trying to read. Rendering speed is key and that’s the biggest problem the S60 browser faces - too many instances of me left staring at a blank screen waiting for one last file to download. Third would have to be the email client. Finally we have a mobile email client that is able to easily handle multiple accounts and properly render html email. Fourth is the music player. It’s clean and elegant, can play all the tracks I’ve purchsed from the iTunes store over the years, and it’s smart enough to save my place when I’m in the middle of a podcast or something. Which brings me to the next thing I absolutely love: it has sufficient ram. Anyone with an n95 has run into apps being closed because the phone ran out of free ram. This just isn’t an issue with the iPhone. And on the topic of hardware there’s the battery life which is good enough that I don’t have to think about it or turn wifi off in normal use. And the last thing for the love it list will be the keyboard. I jumped right in with two thumb typing and am able to manage a good pace. And yes if you’re wondering this entire posting has been written on an iPhone.

Unfortunately the iPhone isn’t a perfect device. Possibly the biggest complaint is with that same keyboard I love. The text prediction code seems to randomly turn off which then requires me to pay a lot more attention to individual letters instead of just focusing on the words. While on the topic of typing, the loupe that shows up to let you precisely move through text has a nasty habit of being mostly off screen at times and therefore useless at times. Next complaint is the web browser apparently not supporting file uploads which means uploading a file to Flickr for example requires you to email. In fact the only way to really move data around on the iPhone is to email. Copy and paste, along with a text-selection mode would have gone a long way. Web browser stability is another issue I’ve run into, having it crash a few times. The only saving grace is that upon reopening the browser the pages you were last reading are reloaded for you. The camera is another letdown. I’ve just gotten used to using my phone in place of my digital camera, a task the iPhone isn’t so well suited to. And the ease of taking a photo and sending it to Flickr was easy enough that I’d actually do it. The lack of an IM client is annoying as a lot of people I talk to are the types to not carry theor phones close by, making sending an sms pointless. That pretty much wraps up the negatives for me. Then there are other lacking features but they’re things I’m not yet sure I’ll miss, such as gps and mms. They’re features I used so rarely I’m just not sure if I care.

Overall the iPhone is a sexy little device with a few issues. The good news is that atleast for the issues I care about, fixes could be a software update away.