iPhone: why I don’t care
Sunday, July 13th, 2008So, this has been the iPhone week. It started right on monday, with Vodafone and Optimus, the two portuguese carriers that sell the iPhone, announcing their pretty ridiculous price plans. Then, the iPhone was launched, together with the App Store and a barely functional activation site. And I couldn’t care less. Why? Many reasons, some of them are Apple’s fault, some of them are consequences of the wildly spread stupidity that exist in my country. If you are one the 4 regular readers of my blog, you know that most of my articles are techie-focused, and not opinion-based. This one is an exception.
The iPhone itself
So, what’s wrong with the iPhone? What should have been made much better in the most popular gadget of the week? A lot.
First, the phone itself. I never had a smartphone. I don’t know how does the phone part operate in a smartphone. But I know how it works on a regular phone, say, a Nokia phone. And, pick up any Nokia and it will tear the iPhone apart in what relates to be a phone, you know, something to make calls with. My first complain is something really obvious: it’s hard or impossible to use the iPhone with just one hand. Of course it depends on how large your hand is, and how much are you willing to risk dropping the iPhone on a hard ground in the middle of a street (that glass keeps shouting “break me!”). But personally, I find it a challenge, specially if I’m walking in a hurry in the middle of the street carrying stuff in one hand, which seems to be the preferred time for people to call me. I never tried to operate one while driving but it should be a real pain (I know it’s illegal to make calls while driving without a loudspeaker, I just receive or start the call and turn on my Nokia’s built-in loudspeaker, so it’s not that bad). On top of this, you have to do all that scrolling-trough-the-alfabet, and then scrolling-trough-the-names-on-the-selected-letter, and finally call the person. That sucks, because not only it’s slow, but it also requires you to actually look to what you are doing and wait for the visual feedback. On a normal phone, with a numeric keypad, if I want to call John, I press the 5 key (jkl) once and I’m already on the J. If I want to call Fred, I press the 3 key (def) three times. No feedback needed, I know where I’ll end up. I just then need to scroll (with a key, thank god!) and push the green button. You are free to disagree, but I think Nokia is so much better.
Second, the keyboard. Yuck. It’s true that I never set it to portuguese, but even when I try to write in english, it SUCKS. Man, it sucks big time. I rarely can get the word I actually want. The phone suggest wrong things. It’s hard to understand how to NOT accept the suggestion. I actually think that removing all the “intelligent” guess-what-the-user-is-trying-to-write stuff would actually improve the usage a lot, because most of the times I screwed up writing on an iPhone keyboard was actually not because I placed my finger on the wrong “key”, but because iPhone decided that I pressed a key that I actually didn’t. And of course, not having the physical feedback of a real keyboard is also bad, but I can understand that as a compromise between size and functionality.
Third, Safari. I do believe iPhone’s Safari is the best web browsing experience in the mobile market, I really do. But it sucks. It’s painfully slow. And I don’t mean the network. I mean the CPU of that thing. Even with a high-speed WiFi network, it’s slow. Rendering is slow. Panning is slow (hate that checkerboard pattern). Zooming is slow. Argh. I don’t know exactly how to make this better, but having a faster CPU would be a nice start. Yes yes, I know that faster CPU = less battery time, but as a client, I can demand! 
Fourth, the GPS. Are you kidding?! What’s the use of a GPS if it doesn’t support turn-by-turn mode? I usually know where I am, thank you. My problem is knowing how to get to where I want while driving. If the iPhone GPS can’t do it, it’s useless. It’s worth zero for me. Now is the part you say, hey, but iPhone is an open platform, so someone will develop a better GPS software, right? Who cares. First, it won’t be free. I don’t understand why I’m buying a device with a GPS receiver and then I have to pay more for something that will actually make it work as expected. And second, and worse, it probably will not happen. Why? Because on the iPhone development SDK agreement, there’s a clause that explicitly forbiddens you from doing it: “Applications may not be designed or marketed for real time route guidance”. Period. (Waiting to be processed by Apple for copying that sentence from the SDK)
Fifth, it doesn’t work as a modem/router for a laptop. I need mobile internet access in my laptop. That comes with a monthly payment. But hey, if I have an iPhone, that means TWO monthly payments for the same service. Now wait a minute. I said “same service”! So why can’t I share it? Well… because the iPhone won’t do it. Any other phone can be used as a modem, via bluetooth, so that you can access the Internet from your laptop using the phone connection. Nokia. Sony. You name it. But hey, not Apple. So, as I don’t like to give away my money to the phone carriers for a stupid reason, iPhone is a no-go.
Sixth, the bluetooth implementation is totally crippled. It will only power your headset, and nothing else. No vCard sharing via bluetooth with nearby phones. And worse, no synching with your mac via any wireless means. Yes, that’s right. Remember using iSync with your Nokia or Sony or whatever phone? Forget it with the iphone. You have to carry the USB cable with you all the time. Which is actually a good thing, because battery life time seems to be not that great, so you’ll often need to pump in some juice to keep it going.
So, the iPhone, as a device, sucks. But it’s a good mobile platform, and platform means really great third party software to use. Or doesn’t it?
The app store
It’s 1984. Apple will introduce Macintosh. And what better way to do it than with the famous 1984 commercial, where IBM is pictured as the evil Big Brother and Apple as the liberating force that will provide everyone with their deserved freedom from the evil empire?
It’s 2008. Reality check. Apple is the Big Brother.
The app store seems to be a great ideia. An organized, controlled, easy to use place for users to go and buy the apps they want to use. But what does it mean for the developers?
Big Brother is what it means. Apple reserves the right to accept, or not, your application to be on selling on the App Store. Also, it imposes some very strict guidelines on what you can actually do, like the GPS example I stated above, and also VoIP and other stuff. Even worse, the App Store is the only way to publicly distribute applications for the iPhone, assuming you didn’t jailbreak it, and most people didn’t. So, Apple has the power to decide that you are out of business if they decide so. The only way to reach your customers is trough Apple.
In my opinion, this is not only ridiculous, but also a very dangerous precedent. If I buy an iPhone, it’s mine. I should be able to do whatever I want with it. And if I’m a developer, I should be able to reach my clients directly. It’s very dangerous to have someone saying what is OK to run on your phone and what’s not. Some claim it’s a security issue. After all, you don’t want your software to call people on foreign countries without your knowledge, because those calls will be billed on you. Bah. What about computers? Don’t we have really important information on them? Information that can compromise much more than just your phone bill? Why don’t we create a desktop App Store, to control everything you have on your Mac? It’s simply ridiculous. And what pisses me off about this is watching developers and users accepting this without a single complaint. What’s next? All the books you buy must be approved? All the movies you see must be “decent”? All the music you hear must be controlled? It’s ridiculous. And dangerous. It’s Apple totally forgetting about 1984, totally forgetting about it’s roots, and going totally Big Brother, totally enterprise-who-wants-to-make-money-no-matter-what. As someone who entered the Apple world in 1987, with the Mac PLUS, it’s really, really sad to see this.
The plans and the hype
This next subject depends, of course, where you are. I live in Portugal, and as I said, we have ridiculous data plans for the iPhone. Vodafone’s plans were all limited to 250 MB per month, and of course, they will charge the hell out of you for every extra bit. After some complaints, they bumped the limit on the most (and ridiculously) expensive plan to… 500 MB. Optimus’ plans are not better. It’s sad to compare this to other countries like Netherlands, where all the plans include unlimited data, and, depending on the plans, you can get your phone for 1 euro. The problem is that the carriers didn’t really understand what this product is about (or they pretend to not understand while they happily rip you off). The iPhone is a mobile platform. It depends on the Internet for most of it’s features. The fact that the iPhone is a phone, and allows you to make calls, is a minor detail. The iPhone depends on the Internet, so it’s ridiculous to sell data plans as if it would be just another phone with internet access. It’s a completely different product, and should be looked to by the carriers as what it is. Unfortunately, portuguese carriers didn’t go along with this vision, and are happily raping their clients.
To conclude, something that makes me really pissed off and sad is all the hype, and the way the iPhone was promoted here. In San Francisco, lines were formed near the stores, and you could see geeks, with their eyes shinning about the new stuff they would be able to do with this new platform. Here, lines and launch parties were constituted mostly by VIPs. Most didn’t even know what the iPhone was, they just wanted one because they have money and it’s cool to have the latest Apple gadget. Carriers wanted those people to be there because they are famous. Because, even being incredibly stupid and ignorant, they have big (sometimes artificial) half-naked boobs they show to the TV cameras resulting in more attention in the news reports. Because they think they are funny comedians, making jokes about knowing nothing about technology, being proud of their ignorance. It’s sad to see a new piece of technology being used as a glamour toy, a coolness factor, and not as a new device that will allow new and incredible stuff to be made. Oh well. It’s Portugal.
), large windows and sunlight on the halls. Food (well… not that good, but after all, it’s USA!) and caffeine provided frequently. Very very nice. Suggestion for the next year: a bigger (and brighter) screen, and eventually plasma screens among the room to make it easy for people in the back to read the code.
I started googling for the problem and I got it: apache is compiled for all the four architectures I referred above, and it always runs with the most appropriate one for the machine. In the Xserve case, it uses the PowerPC 64 binaries. The problem is that PHP had been compiled for 32 bits only. Ok, no problem. Go to PHP dir, make clean, poke around with the environment variables, recompile the thing for 64 bits. Bum. More explosions. Guess what, MySQL was NOT compiled for 64 bits! Ok ok, one more level deep in the stack, go to MySQL directory, blablabla, recompile and… BUM! Yet another explosion. Now this one was more complicated. Apparently some of the libraries on the MySQL source code package were not being compiled for 64 bits. So, no 64 bits MySQL means no 64 bits PHP that means no runnable PHP with 64 bits apache that means falling back to Apple’s branded PHP that means… no PostgreSQL.