Monthly Archives: March 2011

If you are in the UK don’t forget to put your clocks forward one hour tonight. If you need to get up at a particular time tomorrow, you may want to use a backup alarm clock if you normally use an iPhone to wake you up…

UPDATE: My alarm worked on the iPhone 4.

My life away from the iPhone 4 has not started well. The first task was to see how well the Orange San Francisco could deal with satellite navigation on my trip to work and to check for traffic issues. Let’s just say that after 15 minutes of driving I still had no valid GPS signal. This could be easy to fix of course, but the problem is more fundamental than this one issue.

To be fair, someone like me trying to use an Orange San Francisco as my main phone is never going to work and I don’t know why I thought I would. I have persuaded myself over many years to always own the best smartphone available and the San Francisco is never going to be that, even though it is a very competent smartphone.

I had decided to look at either webOS or BlackBerry again, but straight away I come up against a big problem. Neither platform has a decent sat nav software solution that comes anywhere close to TomTom or Co-Pilot. If I were to make a permanent move it would require the purchase of a separate standalone GPS solution and this makes little sense to me.

This experiment has failed before it even started for different reasons, and it is a damning indictment of the state of the competition that means I cannot move away from the iPhone at this time.

* webOS has no decent sat nav software available for it, but is easily the next best mobile operating system on the market today.
* Windows Phone has no decent sat nav software either and is sadly lacking in far too many areas to be taken seriously at the moment.
* BlackBerry has, yes you guessed it, no decent sat nav software available for it and is a little too confined for my tastes. I love the OS for pure productivity, but the flexibility is limited somewhat even if the hardware is consistently the most practical available.
* Symbian has TomTom available, but (I am sorry to say this) it is not nice to use at all. Forget the cameras, forget the great build quality, forget the superb battery and call performance- there is no Symbian phone available today that isn’t a complete pain to use.
* Android ticks all of the boxes theoretically. There is a huge choice of hardware and the app availability is as close to iOS as any other platform gets.

So it is Android then? No, not at all. Let’s ignore my obsession with GPS and pretend that I am happy to buy a separate unit. When I do this, I still find the others coming up short in too many places for me to move from iOS at this time.

I will completely discount BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Symbian straight away. They all need a refresh and don’t feel like operating systems that are at the top of their game. Windows Phone is close, but too many omissions are too noticeable.

webOS should be a natural choice, but the hardware is the main problem currently. I await bigger and better things in the second half of 2011 and am hopeful that it will become a major player- it feels like the operating system with the most potential and which offers a more natural experience than the others.

Android is the obvious choice (the only choice?), but there is something going on here that keeps me at arm’s length. It does everything I need, it has thousands of apps and hardware choices by the dozen. It can be cheap, it can be high-end and it can be almost everything I want with a few tweaks.

It is an operating system that feels as though it was born in the pre-iPhone era. I am sure many of you will disagree, but there is something about Android that feels to complex and too disparate to me. I have to think about what I am doing when I open an app. I have to concentrate when I am typing on an Android device and too much of the interface feels like a computer rather than a personal tool designed to make everyday tasks quick and easy.

Potentially Android may grow into an operating system that does not feel like software and the latest Nexus offered a glimpse of improvements in the usability area, but the fact remains that Android looks and feels like a desktop operating system squeezed into a phone. If I take this further I have to try to explain the nuances that Android doesn’t seem able to achieve. Use an iPhone, or a Windows Phone, and there is something very special going on with the touch interface. It all feels incredibly natural and takes away the thought process when doing multiple things, one after the other. You jump from app to app, feature to feature, message to message and it all happens in a way that does not feel like a piece of technology. Android does not have this ability yet. I don’t know what is going on with the marriage of hardware and software in iOS and Windows Phone, but it is difficult to give up when you have experienced it over a period of time.

So, I am not giving the iPhone up anytime soon and the fact that a replacement for my broken one has already arrived (long story) means I do not have to. All I want is for someone to make something that makes me think twice about iOS.

Today’s comment of the day comes from Peter regarding Facebook- “I hate it with a passion that burns with the intensity of a thousand suns.”

James has offered another view of Facebook- “Feelings about the owners/administration of Facebook and feelings about the service itself are two different things. I’m frequently given pause by some of the stated and suggested ways in which my data is apparently analyzed and distributed, but that’s not the same as what the service does for me.

As for what the service does for me, I love it. I love being able to see a richer tapestry of the life details of my far-flung friends, family, and old classmates.

Sometimes you just don’t have enough “meaningful” stuff to say to someone to write an e-mail. Sometimes, the little details/frustrations/joys of day-to-day life are worth a quick status update, but when someone you care about is 500 miles or even an ocean away, you’re not going to bother “composing” something. With Facebook, I put a little mention about my new glasses, or my frustration with the subway, or whatever is passing through my mind up in my status. Those are the little details of life that are part of our regular interactions with people who live with/around us or work with us. But for those people far away, we miss those little things.

I have some friends from high school who are still back in my hometown. We don’t need to have a long conversation (we’re guys – c’mon). But I can drop a funny quote from a movie we watched together over 15 years ago on one of their walls and away we go – comment after comment sharing quips and memories, sometimes for days on end. And then, when one of them was feeling crappy the other day and mentioned it in his status update, I can respond and let him know that he’s a cool guy. Twitter has it’s place, but it’s just not the same dynamic.

What kills me is that my relationship with my sister has a lot in common with these old friends – we can make jokes and share little things all the time. But she absolutely refuses to get on Facebook, and I’m in New York, while she’s in Chicago. So, we text/SMS sometimes, but that costs money or can be a little intrusive if your phone chimes at the wrong time. But with Facebook, you’re not really expected to respond right away. These passing moments to laugh and share the small stuff don’t come up in a “dedicated” catch-up phone call on the weekend or in a full e-mail – they just aren’t big enough to bother. And if you get into something bigger and deeper – a political or religious issue, for example, you can either have a stimulating back-and-forth online where your friends can chime in, or you can take it to a private message if it gets deep/personal.

“Virtual proximity” can be a wonderful thing. Friendship isn’t always about the big stuff, it’s about the little ways that we can have a give-and-take day-in and day-out – just like how a marriage isn’t summed up by the wedding.

I’ve read and can understand the argument that our focus on “virtual” relationships can hurt our real-life relationships. But for my family and oldest friends who are far away, it’s either go virtual or give up. It helps that my Facebook friending policy is that I don’t friend you unless we’ve shared a classroom or a drink (and often not even then) – we have to have a real connection/friendship in real life before I’m going to friend you online. I’m glad Facebook is around so that I don’t have to give up, and not letting your online life overtake your real life is a choice you make. Either/or is a false dichotomy. Facebook is the way I make my real life a little more accessible to the people who can’t be here to share experiences in person.“