5 ms·

The First Phone I've Been Excited About In A Long Time

35 points by twampss 18y ago

dcurtis 18y ago
Nice article, but I have one thing to say: your list of priorities for features is probably what you think you want. Before I got the iPhone, I never browsed the internet on my Treo because the experience was just absolutely terrible (the experience on blackberry is also terrible). Now I browse the web on my iPhone more than I use it as a phone. While investigating how to make the best UI, I've found that people's priorities come from their habits and not necessarily from their needs. At first this seemed kind of illogical to me. But if you think about it, before the iPhone, no normal people really could imagine a mobile browser as good as mobile Safari, so no one really put "a desktop experience web browser" at the top of their requirements lists for phones (obviously tech people did, but average people did not). I wonder what would happen if you bought an iPhone.
- axod 18y ago
  Agreed. I had my iPhone for about a week before I actually used it for a voice call. It's a portable macbook really. As you say, the browser is ridiculously good. Reading about the Palm, it looks like it's insanely based around the web, which is awesome.
- mikeyur 18y ago
  I love my iPhone to death - and despite a few features I would love in the phone (such as copy/paste and possibly a physical keyboard) the phone does exactly what I need it to. I spend a lot less time talking on the iPhone because I have the ability to use txting/email/twitter/facebook much more easily (I know other phones offer these features, but the interface is nowhere near as intuitive). I barely surfed on my old phone and I feel I would die without a 3G network and Mobile Safari now. I live in Canada so I am with Rogers/Fido - and to be honest, even though we get screwed on pricing most of the time, I haven't had any problems with network coverage. I get awesome 3G speeds at home and all over the city (I live in Vancouver). I really like what the Pre has to offer, but I can't see myself moving away from this iPhone. If Palm brings me an unlocked quad-band GSM Pre I would likely drop the cash, but that's extremely unlikely so I'll just stick with my iPhone.
- davi 18y ago
  I think you underestimate the importance of his items 1 and 2 (call quality and email/SMS) to the business population. A dropped call at the wrong moment can cost a sales guy a lot of money; and a hard-core Blackberry user is not going to give up that keypad for a nice browser. For them, the importance of reliable, rapid communication with business contacts outweighs the pleasure of a good browsing experience. With the Palm, you theoretically will get to have a keypad, a choice of carriers, and a nice browser (assuming the fact that it uses the same HTML rendering engine as the iPhone means the browsing experience will be equally good). Hence his assertion that "Apple’s strategy has worked well, but it has major holes, and this Palm unit looks like it exploits them".
  - axod 18y ago
    Surely then if you're looking at the corporate user, the Palm is a "Blackberry killer" rather than an "iPhone killer"?
    - mattmaroon 18y ago
      Yes. iPhone isn't a serious contender in business. It may be a threat to the iPhone in the pro-sumer market (yeah, I hate that term too) also though, since it too has a full-screen WebKit based browser, a UI people are raving about, $200 price point, and potentially (jury's still out) awesome platform. And, most crucially, it will be on many networks. I like it's chances.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    So, (1) a dropped call at the wrong moment is not going to cost a sales guy a lot of money unless that sales guy works in Scranton and is trying out for the CIA, and (2) am I the only one here who uses an iPhone as their primary phone and has never had a dropped call?
    - mattmaroon 18y ago
      There was a tremendous amount of negative publicity around dropped calls specifically when the 3g launched. I'm sure you're not the only one, but it's clearly a common problem, just as some people still have an Xbox 360 from launch day that works, while I'm on my third. Call quality goes beyond just that too. There's the abysmal maximum volume. General sound. Etc.
- volida 18y ago
  you mention some really good points
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  There's some truth to that I'm sure, but it couldn't get to #2.
dmix 18y ago
Ahh, early adopters, you can always rely on them.
jemmons 18y ago
Essentially he's saying he likes the Pre because its imagined features are better than the iPhone ones that he hasn't tried. The article is about pitting an ideal vs. a bias. Who will win?
- swombat 18y ago
  That's the feeling I got too. Criticising something as different as the iPhone keyboard (which I'm using to type this) when you haven't tried it is very unconvincing and possibly slightly dishonest both with yourself a d with your readers.
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    Who said I haven't tried it? Interesting that multiple people here made that assumption.
    - swombat 18y ago
      Tried it you may have, but for how long? This sort of information should be included in your article, too. It's an obvious hole in your article and you should probably have thought of it when you were writing it.
      - mattmaroon 18y ago
        Long enough to discover that I have sausage fingers. Long enough to realize that they did a great job with the automatic corrections, but that when that fails, the process of correcting a word is brutal, and that it happens enough to make the whole experience grating when you're used to a keypad. Long enough to discover that there's no way I could shoot off a text one-handed without looking like I can on a device with a dedicated keypad. Long enough to know Blackberry-esque models are for me. I don't know how many minutes if that's what you're asking. I don't think it's a hole in what is clearly an opinion piece that I didn't describe the exact length of time I spent typing on one.
    - gcv 18y ago
axod 18y ago
>> "The iPhone’s call quality is notoriously abysmal" I've heard other people complain about call quality with the iPhone, but only people in the US. Is this a US only phenomenon? Surely this is down to the network, and not the handset. I know that doesn't help much if you don't have a choice of network, but I haven't heard of any UK users complain about call quality. All in all my experience of call quality in the US on any phone has been abysmal, including land lines... Also I think you place way too much importance on the app store. I doubt that many people buy a phone based on the apps they can install on it, obviously to hackers it's important, but for most people I'd say the app store is a sort of bonus they didn't know about. I tried out a G1 yesterday, and although it looked quite nice, the keyboard is so small it's impossible to use :( Still thinking of getting one sometime, wondering how it stacks up against the iPhone. Great to see some more competition though :)
- mikeyur 18y ago
  I find the call quality great over 3G, or good enough for my standards at least. I have yet to experience a dropped call or bad connection, but that's more about the network than the phone. Looks like the main problem is AT&T
  - dhimes 18y ago
    No, I use AT&T just fine. But my son has an iphone and it doesn't have nearly as good reception as my old Razr. I can make and receive calls standing next to him when he can't. An since I need my phone to be a phone first, I'm waiting.
- enomar 18y ago
  > I tried out a G1 yesterday, and although it looked quite nice, the keyboard is so small it's impossible to use :( I have to completely disagree with you here. The keyboard is one of the G1's redeeming features. I type much faster and make much fewer mistakes on it than when typing on my iPhone. It's especially better than all those phones with physical keyboards with weird non-standard layouts. YMMV...Just thought I'd offer a counter example to yours :)
bprater 18y ago
Matt, white on black is really tough on the eyes.
- palish 18y ago
  Not for me. (If we're dishing out opinions, I thought I'd throw mine in.)
pauljonas 18y ago
Palm’s embrace of “developer friendly” open platform philosophy for its new handset in development, in constrast to the decidedly unfriendly sandbox approach Apple has taken, certainly must be applauded. And a flock of delighted developers are cheering them on, as indicated by the cited article discussion, as well as tech sites across the net. However, I see no reference to a factor that looms larger than software platform — quality of the hardware. Palm devices (PDA and their foray into mobile phone market space) are notorious for their unreliability and low quality. Historically, they are poorly made and break rather easily. Back when I toted a Palm PDA in my work travels, it frequently had to be replaced. And I remember giant pallets of refurbished PDAs in Fry’s Electronics, where devices would be recycled for second and subsequent deaths. Experience with Blackberry devices, I do not have, but my iPhone performance and reliability (other than on OS upgrade days) has been stellar. In fact, the iPhone is more solid that it was nearly 15 months ago. I have not even witnessed battery degradation yet on my first generation model. Yes, I realize there are iPhone lemons, but I’d assess the iPhone defect rate at a fraction of all those Palm products.
jhancock 18y ago
Matt's article links to the Pre intro page at palm.com http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre/index.html http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre/index.html It has a "notify me" button to register when there is more info. Since noone outside Palm has touched a Pre yet but we _all_ know about it, I think somehow I'll be kept informed either way ;)
marcell 18y ago
>> "But the iPhone platform is also, in many ways, problematic. Programming native apps in Objective C is really hard work (or so the friends who’ve done it tell me). Palm greatly reduces the barriers to entry by making app development html/css/javascript-based, meaning any web developer (maybe even me) could get started." A warning to bloggers: when you don't know what you're talking about but talk anyways, it's very obvious. And it hurts your credibility. I wouldn't complain about problems with the World Series of Poker in a blog post, and if you've never used Objective-C/Cocoa, it's best if you don't complain about it.
- jmtulloss 18y ago
  Maybe so, but it's hard to make the case that web development tools aren't faster than compiled ones for many things.
pistoriusp 18y ago
I find the call quality to be really good, much better than my Nokia could ever achieve.
randallsquared 18y ago
"If your phone is on multiple carriers that collectively serve four times as many customers, it only needs to be some amount greater than 25% as appealing to get the same market share." If you measure "appeal" by market share, then this is a tautology. If you measure appeal by some other method, it's almost certainly false.
- mattmcknight 18y ago
  That math is wacky. The >25% number is assuming that people won't switch carriers for a really cool phone like the iPhone. So it's obviously wrong. The point he is trying make is that if it's the best Sprint phone, the best Verizon phone, and the best T-Mobile phone, it's going to get a lot of sales, even if it isn't the best AT&T phone.
ssharp 18y ago
Not sure I understand the point about development at all. You can program apps for the iPhone using HTML/Javascript/CSS as well. In fact, when it was first announced, many people criticized Apple for not having a native SDK. People felt that it was too limiting and you couldn't really tap into the power of the phone. We've seen some great applications since the SDK has come out that shows that these folks were justified in their initial critiques. As it is now, you can still program apps for the App Store using web technologies through the WebView object.
anthonyrubin 18y ago
Why is it that everyone bitched when the iPhone offered a Javascript widget API and now Palm is being praised for it?
- blasdel 18y ago
  Because this adds a fuckton of standard libraries to JavaScript -- a full set of syscalls for manipulating files, contacts, etc -- it's not just a standard browser, and your shit is stored on the device.
Silentio 18y ago
I think the Pre looks interesting, but the biggest draw for me when it comes to the iPhone is the tight integration to my mac. If a smart phone isn't going to synch easily and seamlessly with my PC I'm not interested.

35 points by twampss 18y ago

Nice article, but I have one thing to say: your list of priorities for features is probably what you think you want. Before I got the iPhone, I never browsed the internet on my Treo because the experience was just absolutely terrible (the experience on blackberry is also terrible). Now I browse the web on my iPhone more than I use it as a phone. While investigating how to make the best UI, I've found that people's priorities come from their habits and not necessarily from their needs. At first this seemed kind of illogical to me. But if you think about it, before the iPhone, no normal people really could imagine a mobile browser as good as mobile Safari, so no one really put "a desktop experience web browser" at the top of their requirements lists for phones (obviously tech people did, but average people did not). I wonder what would happen if you bought an iPhone.

axod 18y ago
Agreed. I had my iPhone for about a week before I actually used it for a voice call. It's a portable macbook really. As you say, the browser is ridiculously good. Reading about the Palm, it looks like it's insanely based around the web, which is awesome.
mikeyur 18y ago
I love my iPhone to death - and despite a few features I would love in the phone (such as copy/paste and possibly a physical keyboard) the phone does exactly what I need it to. I spend a lot less time talking on the iPhone because I have the ability to use txting/email/twitter/facebook much more easily (I know other phones offer these features, but the interface is nowhere near as intuitive). I barely surfed on my old phone and I feel I would die without a 3G network and Mobile Safari now. I live in Canada so I am with Rogers/Fido - and to be honest, even though we get screwed on pricing most of the time, I haven't had any problems with network coverage. I get awesome 3G speeds at home and all over the city (I live in Vancouver). I really like what the Pre has to offer, but I can't see myself moving away from this iPhone. If Palm brings me an unlocked quad-band GSM Pre I would likely drop the cash, but that's extremely unlikely so I'll just stick with my iPhone.
davi 18y ago
I think you underestimate the importance of his items 1 and 2 (call quality and email/SMS) to the business population. A dropped call at the wrong moment can cost a sales guy a lot of money; and a hard-core Blackberry user is not going to give up that keypad for a nice browser. For them, the importance of reliable, rapid communication with business contacts outweighs the pleasure of a good browsing experience. With the Palm, you theoretically will get to have a keypad, a choice of carriers, and a nice browser (assuming the fact that it uses the same HTML rendering engine as the iPhone means the browsing experience will be equally good). Hence his assertion that "Apple’s strategy has worked well, but it has major holes, and this Palm unit looks like it exploits them".
- axod 18y ago
  Surely then if you're looking at the corporate user, the Palm is a "Blackberry killer" rather than an "iPhone killer"?
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    Yes. iPhone isn't a serious contender in business. It may be a threat to the iPhone in the pro-sumer market (yeah, I hate that term too) also though, since it too has a full-screen WebKit based browser, a UI people are raving about, $200 price point, and potentially (jury's still out) awesome platform. And, most crucially, it will be on many networks. I like it's chances.
- tptacek 18y ago
  So, (1) a dropped call at the wrong moment is not going to cost a sales guy a lot of money unless that sales guy works in Scranton and is trying out for the CIA, and (2) am I the only one here who uses an iPhone as their primary phone and has never had a dropped call?
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    There was a tremendous amount of negative publicity around dropped calls specifically when the 3g launched. I'm sure you're not the only one, but it's clearly a common problem, just as some people still have an Xbox 360 from launch day that works, while I'm on my third. Call quality goes beyond just that too. There's the abysmal maximum volume. General sound. Etc.
volida 18y ago
you mention some really good points
mattmaroon 18y ago
There's some truth to that I'm sure, but it couldn't get to #2.

dmix 18y ago

Ahh, early adopters, you can always rely on them.

jemmons 18y ago

Essentially he's saying he likes the Pre because its imagined features are better than the iPhone ones that he hasn't tried. The article is about pitting an ideal vs. a bias. Who will win?

swombat 18y ago
That's the feeling I got too. Criticising something as different as the iPhone keyboard (which I'm using to type this) when you haven't tried it is very unconvincing and possibly slightly dishonest both with yourself a d with your readers.
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  Who said I haven't tried it? Interesting that multiple people here made that assumption.
  - swombat 18y ago
    Tried it you may have, but for how long? This sort of information should be included in your article, too. It's an obvious hole in your article and you should probably have thought of it when you were writing it.
    - mattmaroon 18y ago
      Long enough to discover that I have sausage fingers. Long enough to realize that they did a great job with the automatic corrections, but that when that fails, the process of correcting a word is brutal, and that it happens enough to make the whole experience grating when you're used to a keypad. Long enough to discover that there's no way I could shoot off a text one-handed without looking like I can on a device with a dedicated keypad. Long enough to know Blackberry-esque models are for me. I don't know how many minutes if that's what you're asking. I don't think it's a hole in what is clearly an opinion piece that I didn't describe the exact length of time I spent typing on one.
  - gcv 18y ago

axod 18y ago

>> "The iPhone’s call quality is notoriously abysmal" I've heard other people complain about call quality with the iPhone, but only people in the US. Is this a US only phenomenon? Surely this is down to the network, and not the handset. I know that doesn't help much if you don't have a choice of network, but I haven't heard of any UK users complain about call quality. All in all my experience of call quality in the US on any phone has been abysmal, including land lines... Also I think you place way too much importance on the app store. I doubt that many people buy a phone based on the apps they can install on it, obviously to hackers it's important, but for most people I'd say the app store is a sort of bonus they didn't know about. I tried out a G1 yesterday, and although it looked quite nice, the keyboard is so small it's impossible to use :( Still thinking of getting one sometime, wondering how it stacks up against the iPhone. Great to see some more competition though :)

mikeyur 18y ago
I find the call quality great over 3G, or good enough for my standards at least. I have yet to experience a dropped call or bad connection, but that's more about the network than the phone. Looks like the main problem is AT&T
- dhimes 18y ago
  No, I use AT&T just fine. But my son has an iphone and it doesn't have nearly as good reception as my old Razr. I can make and receive calls standing next to him when he can't. An since I need my phone to be a phone first, I'm waiting.
enomar 18y ago
> I tried out a G1 yesterday, and although it looked quite nice, the keyboard is so small it's impossible to use :( I have to completely disagree with you here. The keyboard is one of the G1's redeeming features. I type much faster and make much fewer mistakes on it than when typing on my iPhone. It's especially better than all those phones with physical keyboards with weird non-standard layouts. YMMV...Just thought I'd offer a counter example to yours :)

bprater 18y ago

Matt, white on black is really tough on the eyes.

palish 18y ago
Not for me. (If we're dishing out opinions, I thought I'd throw mine in.)

pauljonas 18y ago

Palm’s embrace of “developer friendly” open platform philosophy for its new handset in development, in constrast to the decidedly unfriendly sandbox approach Apple has taken, certainly must be applauded. And a flock of delighted developers are cheering them on, as indicated by the cited article discussion, as well as tech sites across the net. However, I see no reference to a factor that looms larger than software platform — quality of the hardware. Palm devices (PDA and their foray into mobile phone market space) are notorious for their unreliability and low quality. Historically, they are poorly made and break rather easily. Back when I toted a Palm PDA in my work travels, it frequently had to be replaced. And I remember giant pallets of refurbished PDAs in Fry’s Electronics, where devices would be recycled for second and subsequent deaths. Experience with Blackberry devices, I do not have, but my iPhone performance and reliability (other than on OS upgrade days) has been stellar. In fact, the iPhone is more solid that it was nearly 15 months ago. I have not even witnessed battery degradation yet on my first generation model. Yes, I realize there are iPhone lemons, but I’d assess the iPhone defect rate at a fraction of all those Palm products.

jhancock 18y ago

Matt's article links to the Pre intro page at palm.com http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre/index.html http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre/index.html It has a "notify me" button to register when there is more info. Since noone outside Palm has touched a Pre yet but we _all_ know about it, I think somehow I'll be kept informed either way ;)

marcell 18y ago

>> "But the iPhone platform is also, in many ways, problematic. Programming native apps in Objective C is really hard work (or so the friends who’ve done it tell me). Palm greatly reduces the barriers to entry by making app development html/css/javascript-based, meaning any web developer (maybe even me) could get started." A warning to bloggers: when you don't know what you're talking about but talk anyways, it's very obvious. And it hurts your credibility. I wouldn't complain about problems with the World Series of Poker in a blog post, and if you've never used Objective-C/Cocoa, it's best if you don't complain about it.

jmtulloss 18y ago
Maybe so, but it's hard to make the case that web development tools aren't faster than compiled ones for many things.

pistoriusp 18y ago

I find the call quality to be really good, much better than my Nokia could ever achieve.

randallsquared 18y ago

"If your phone is on multiple carriers that collectively serve four times as many customers, it only needs to be some amount greater than 25% as appealing to get the same market share." If you measure "appeal" by market share, then this is a tautology. If you measure appeal by some other method, it's almost certainly false.

mattmcknight 18y ago
That math is wacky. The >25% number is assuming that people won't switch carriers for a really cool phone like the iPhone. So it's obviously wrong. The point he is trying make is that if it's the best Sprint phone, the best Verizon phone, and the best T-Mobile phone, it's going to get a lot of sales, even if it isn't the best AT&T phone.

ssharp 18y ago

Not sure I understand the point about development at all. You can program apps for the iPhone using HTML/Javascript/CSS as well. In fact, when it was first announced, many people criticized Apple for not having a native SDK. People felt that it was too limiting and you couldn't really tap into the power of the phone. We've seen some great applications since the SDK has come out that shows that these folks were justified in their initial critiques. As it is now, you can still program apps for the App Store using web technologies through the WebView object.

anthonyrubin 18y ago

Why is it that everyone bitched when the iPhone offered a Javascript widget API and now Palm is being praised for it?

blasdel 18y ago
Because this adds a fuckton of standard libraries to JavaScript -- a full set of syscalls for manipulating files, contacts, etc -- it's not just a standard browser, and your shit is stored on the device.

Silentio 18y ago

I think the Pre looks interesting, but the biggest draw for me when it comes to the iPhone is the tight integration to my mac. If a smart phone isn't going to synch easily and seamlessly with my PC I'm not interested.