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I love playing JewelQuest, especially on the train either to or from work on my iPhone. But I also like listening to music and you make it impossible for me to do both. Thus, I’d like to wish you well and tell you I’m moving to the Bejeweled camp. Thanks for the fun and good bye.

(PS, Apple: take a page out of the Xbox360 development guidelines and require App Store devs to allow the user to pick their own music.)

T-Mobile is my “choice” of carrier here in the US, inasmuch as one can have a choice in a closed and stagnating mobile telephony market like the US. Google is my choice of cloud computing platform – from email and IM to news and weather, I use Google. I have also been an ardent supporter of open-source solutions wherever possible. Thus the T-Mobile G1 phone, powered by Google’s Android, an open-source, Linux-based mobile platform sounded like a marriage of all my favourite things: Google, open-source, and T-Mobile. Toss in some Lego, and I think we’d be all set.

Coming from a background of Nokia S60 and, lately, the Apple iPhone, I am a power-user in many ways; except an instance of theft, and an instance of a lost SIM card, I have not been without a mobile phone since I first got one, the better part of a decade ago. What drew me first to the Nokia S60 platform was the applications – and the browser. My experience with the N80 were dismal; an awful in-warranty experience at Nokia’s NYC flagship convinced me of the folly of supporting a company that had no interest in supporting its users. While Apple has much of the same “thanks for the money, goodbye” mentality to its customers, both the community of Apple fans (rabid and otherwise) and the iPhone itself has over the months left me happy with the iPhone experience. That said, I am aware that few companies have the UI and hardware expertise of Apple and was willing to forgo some creature comforts in order to put my money where my mouth is: in open-source products. This is a review of the T-Mobile G1. It’s also a comparison, because I believe that Google has started a quiet revolution, that needs support, encouragement and criticism to make it truly the best product money can buy. (If you’re only interested in the bottom line, though, skip down to the antepenultimate paragraph – begins with “In its current form…”)

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Speaking of Windows crashes, let me also observe that iPhone OS 2.x is significantly less stable than its predecessor. While I had the occasional crash with 1.x, mainly with the jailbroken apps, I can’t go more than a few minutes of browsing without Safari crashing. This, of course, is insult upon injury, given how just about no app in the store was tested before it was released and is hence crash-prone.

Despite having spent some money for apps, I’m seriously entertaining the idea of going back to 1.1.4, just for the stability and reliability improvements. Anyone else considering the same?

I was in an Apple store having someone look at my charger yesterday. While I was waiting for someone to get to me, I decided to look around the new iPods. While I love the new iPhone OS, I found the prices on the iPod Touch high and the space lacking. I think my “perfect” iPod would be an iPod Touch with a hard drive instead of flash storage. Slap a Toshiba 240GB drive in there with 2GB of flash to provide a cache and sell it at $349. I think it would likely kill the sales of the Classic dead – which is almost certainly the long-term goal Apple has. A

I can dream, can’t I?

I’m trying to see how well this works. Ideally, I’d be able to manage comments from here too, but I can’t complain.

And now, a test picture:

(Apparently, that picture didn’t go. Oh well.)

Wired has a good article up about why the future of digital music is still the crusty old MP3 format from the late 1980s. Probably the most important reason, though Wired mentions it only in passing is compatibility. Everything – and I really, truly mean everything – supports MP3. Looking around the house, I’ve yet to find a device or gadget that plays music in a format other than MP3. Sure the iPhone supports AAC, and the N800 supports Vorbis, but both devices support MP3 and that’s why I think MP3 will be around a long, long, long time yet. And judging by popular reaction, I’m not alone in this frame of mind.

In fact, the best way to understand MP3′s wide compatibility is to look at a market where there is not a standard like MP3. For example, I would very much like to backup a number of my Indian movies, which are already suffering from disc rot. However, there is no one single file format that I can save my movies too. If I save it in DivX, the most widely used video file format, I cannot play them back on the television, since none of the devices connected fully support the playback of DivX. Neither can I watch them on my iPhone, since DivX is an alien concept to Apple. On the other hand, saving the file as a H.264 file ensures I can play back on the Xbox, but the file will stutter on the iPhone. If I choose to setup a file that doesn’t stutter on the iPhone, I artifacts that make the file unwatchable on the Xbox. And heaven forbid I should try to watch this on my N800, or on the computer. I find myself in the unenviable task of having to making five different versions in order to ensure universal playback, a situation that should never arise in the first place, if there was a standard that just worked, like MP3 does for audio.

So, if anyone has a good solution to my problem, I’d love to hear it – what’s the video version of MP3?

One of the most interesting things I’ve discovered since I got my iPhone is how much more I use the internet now, than before, whilst on the go. To put this in perspective, during my entire N80 ownership period (October 2006 – March 2008), I used approximately 300 MiB of data on the phone, untethered. (If you include the tethered amount, that quintupled to about 1.5 GiB.)

By contrast, just in the past 30 days, I have used 380 MiB on my iPhone. Total usage since April? Approximately 1.2 GiB.

And there are two reasons for this (well, two and a half):

1. The browser. Unlike the S60 browser that takes months (and really, months) to startup – the iPhone’s Safari browser starts up immediately. The browser is hugely responsive. I never felt, like I did with my N80, that the browser was about to collapse. Going back to the N80, and trying out a friend’s E51, it hurts to see how sluggish a web experience S60 users have. I don’t disagree that the S60 browser has more features, but between features and speed, on a mobile device, I’d choose speed. And really, the S60 browser falls way behind Safari on the features that really matter to me – web standard compliance.
2. The RAM. Unlike my N80, which was perpetually starved for memory, the iPhone never seems to run out. Oh, it does, and sometimes, opening Terminal or Mail takes a few seconds longer than when the app is loaded in memory. However, it feels like a true multi-tasking OS. I was able to precisely once browse the internet and listen to music at the same time on my N80 – and that was when I was on a WAP site. Loading anything more complex than, say, Google’s homepage would instantly kill my music, or give me an “Out of memory!” error. I hear that Nokia is finally playing catchup and adding RAM, but the OS is still too slow and sluggish, feeling more like Mac OS 9 than Mac OS X. S60 was never designed as a multi-tasking OS, and all the hacks and improvements in the world will never change that. (Just see what happened when Windows was dragged screaming and kicking into the Windows 95 era to see how well OSes handle a fundamental structural change.) Perhaps Maemo will become the future platform of choice for Nokia, giving them a true multitasking OS, but speed and reliability will remain major issues.

The half-reason is the battery life. I tend to keep the WiFi running all the time, which probably doesn’t make for the best situation, but nonetheless, the iPhone runs about 36 hours before dying pretty consistently. In practice, this means that I can charge it every night, with a comfortable margin for excess usage during the day. By contrast, the N80, on a brand new battery would die within six hours if the WiFi network search was enabled. Note I said WiFi network search – not usage. Using WiFi would kill the battery dead in less than half that time. I left it off most of the time – using it briefly when I knew I was in range of my home network to use Fring, or some other bandwidth intensive application. I have no such compunctions about leaving the iPhone’s WiFi running 24×7. The battery keeps up.

Probably the most damning indictment of S60, though, is how the iPhone has changed my behaviour. Earlier, I would routinely sit with my N80, but if I had a quick question or something to lookup, I’d open up or start my laptop and do it there. Now, I grab my iPhone to do the same, often leaving my computer off. There have been weekends where I’ve not bothered to turn on my computer at all.

So I find myself agreeing with David Pogue (not one of my favourite writers – he specializes in something I affectionately call verbal diarrhea): we’re witnessing the birth of a fourth major platform – Windows, *nix, Mac OS, and now, iPhone. More and more, my iPhone is replacing my other machines to do everything. In time – not now, probably not with the iPhone 3G – I think that my iPhone will become my primary platform.

As someone who has been waiting for a good mobile platform – one that allows me to leave my computers behind for good – all I can say is “about bloody time”.

This entire post has been typed on my iPhone. For the most part I have not been looking at the keyboard and have been looking at the screen. That there are such few mistakes despite my keeping up a very rapid pace and having thick fingers is a testament to incredible user interface (UI) design. I have long been a proponent of the “do as I mean not as I say” approach to UI design and have often thought that the best UI is no UI at all.

Coming from a Nokia where UI interaction was a very strong point – I’m fond of saying that I never had to look at a Nokia user guide or manual before picking up and using a phone – this is both amazing and slightly scary. I have never before really trusted a non-human with this sort of thing, so its amazing to see what I hope will one day be a paradigm of proper UI design courses: that no user should have to think about interaction at all!