I’ve now had my iPhone for a bit over two weeks, and it seems to be easier to write about others’ gadgets than my own software, so here’s a bit about this one.  Note that this isn’t an attempt at a structured review — it’s a conversational, “luke hates stuff” review.  I do a much better version in person, so feel free to corner me at the next conference.

Overall, I think I made the right decision.  The momentum (and thus the developers, the apps, etc.) is clearly behind the iPhone, but more importantly, my wife can easily use hers while nursing, or sitting with sleeping babies, which turns out to be really important.  The fact that the iPhone never requires two hands is critical for her.

See, I think the g1 was actually a better option for me, but the iPhone is a dramatically better option for her, and my geek snobbery loses out to her practicality.  It’s also true that the device itself is much better — I can comfortably put it in my pocket, and I find that the soft keyboard is just as good as the g1′s physical keyboard.  And all of you crackberry addicts whining about two-thumbed typing, I do it all the time on my iphone and I’m about 10x faster that way, probably about as fast as I was on the g1.

That being said, my main conclusion about the iphone is, “welcome to 1987″. That’s the last year you couldn’t run multiple apps at the same time on the Mac, and this is one of the two main things that sticks out about the iphone for me.  That, and the modal notification dialogs.

For those who didn’t suffer through MacOS 7.x and earlier, modal dialogs require your attention and will not go away or let you do anything else until you deal with them.  And they suck, horribly.  There’s absolutely no excuse for them in a modern operating system, and yet…

Here, on the iPhone, we have an OS that can’t run multiple apps at the same time, and if I get a text message while I’m working, I can’t do a damn thing until I deal with the text.  These, combined with the lack of any real task switching (“it’s easy – press home to start all over again!”), mean that you’re pretty much back in the 80s computing experience, except with a touchscreen and the interwebs.

Obviously I’m exaggerating, but it really is ironic that Apple going to have to relearn the MultiFinder and modal dialog lessons all over again.  I’m sorry, this push thing just won’t work — even if the technology works, and the devs adopt it, and it scales for ten million poorly written iphone apps, you still have the modal notification dialogs to deal with.

The g1 had this completely licked — it had a single notification space, and you had both non-modal notifications, and something like builtin task-switching because you could go from the different notifications straight to the correct app.  Oh, and you could hold down the home key to get a list of the most recent six apps.  Crappy task switching, but task switching nonetheless.  Whereas the iPhone just says, “hit the home key!”

For those of you saying, “oh, well, sure, maybe for *some* people, but that doesn’t matter to me!”, I have a relatively normal scenario for you.  I went for a bike ride the other day, and I chose to involve two apps:  I was listening to podcasts, and I was using TrackThing to track my bike ride.  Unfortunately, my podcast was 50 minutes, and my ride was an hour and a half.  Thus, partway through the ride, my soundtrack ends, and I have to switch apps.  Because TrackThing is stupid, I thus lose my current ride state.  Actually, in retrospect, I don’t think the state was gone, I think it just looked like it, because it used a stupid snapshot as its startup screen, implying there was no data.  The point is, something changes and you have to switch apps, and most of the time you really do have to switch apps, and now you’re stuck.  Especially since one of the favorite techniques to get you to pay for an app is to provide storage in the paid version.

But I have a simpler example of how the lack of background apps and the lack of non-modal dialogs suck:  Instant messaging.  I was an IMing fool on my G1 — it was almost justification for the phone by itself.  But I can’t use IM at all on my iphone, because none of the apps can run in the background.  And imagine what life would look like if they could:  You’d constantly be being interrupted, being forced to deal with each new IM.  This problem is exactly why Growl on the Mac is so great:  Passive notification but no need to act immediately.

The lack of backgrounding  means that the *only* option for IM is a solution from Apple.  There’s just no way anyone else can provide anywhere near a sufficient solution.  Sure, I can use Meebo or Palringo, which will keep me logged in for a few minutes, but I’ll have to continually switch out of my current app to the IM app (going back to home, then the IM app) to see if there are replies or whatever.  Useless.

And the worst thing is, even if Apple does provide a great IM app, it’ll still suck because of the modal notifications.  If I’m writing an email or reading an article, I don’t want to deal with the IM that second — I want to deal with it in a couple of minutes, when I’m ready.  This is exactly how we’ve all learned to do IM by now, but you can tell the iPhone will never allow it.

And for those of you saying, “oh, well, I don’t use two apps in the same day, and I don’t use IM”, then suck it, because you also can’t use Facebook or Twitter or whatever.  Or rather, you can, but you can only use one of them, else you’ll constantly be rotating around each of these apps.  I have this list of applications that I just open periodically on my iphone to see if anything new is happening, because they can’t notify me.  And for the record, Mail isn’t one of them — I actually don’t want push email, but I need push IM, and I wouldn’t mind some forms of push Twitter and Facebook.

And for those of you saying, “Oh, I use SMS instead of IM”, please, make a single friend in another country, and you’ll be so busy in the second job you’ll need to pay for the text messages that we won’t have to listen to your silliness.

Now that I’ve gotten past the really annoying, in your face, this-is-stupid part of the review, let’s cover a couple of other bits.  First, there are some great things about it.  The touchscreen, and the keyboard, are great.  It’s a device I constantly want to use, want to find a use for.

The app store has clearly inspired people and companies to make apps they wouldn’t have made for any other phone, and it’s very clear that plenty of people are making real money on the apps, which is a great thing.  I think Apple’s store and the dev community around it are 90% of what’s great about the iPhone vs. the g1 (the device itself being the other 10%, but that hopefully won’t hold up as more Android phones get released).

I’m a bit shocked how few apps deal with both landscape and portrait mode, and especially shocked that the Home screen doesn’t.  In retrospect, the g1 apps, including the main screen, were surprisingly good at this.

I really like how few buttons the iphone has.  I like the lock button, the volume buttons, and I *love* the silence switch.  Love it.  And I love that the touchscreen is used for everything.  Except…

Why aren’t there more interesting gestures used on the iPhone?  Can you even name a single gesture used other than the flick used to switch albums in the iPod or whatever?  Why can’t I use gestures to authenticate?  Why aren’t there other gestures (e.g., ones with more than one direction) available for things like app shortcuts, app switching, phone speed dials, or whatever?  While Apple is making steady progress in the things you can do with their trackpads (albeit still annoyingly focused on straight lines), the gestures available on the iPhone seem to match their absolute earliest efforts with trackpads.

And that’s mostly it; that’s been my iPhone experience so far.  This may seem like an unnecessarily negative review.  To some extent, that’s true — I’m a hater and always have been.  But at the same time, my stupid Razr four years ago did AIM pretty damn well and it was a total piece of crap (although notifications *were* modal).

To top it all off, literally ever person I’ve ever asked has said that I absolutely must have a case on my iPhone (one Apple employee even implied a case would help me fraudulently convince Apple to replace my iPhone if I broke it), yet the iPhone 3g dock won’t work with any case.  Oh, and it would cost me $100 to have a dock that I can plug into the wall ($30 each for the dock and power, $20 for the cable).  Considering that the iPhone must be charged every night, this is almost a necessary investment for each of our phones, so my wife and I can easily charge while we sleep.  Crazy.

So, we’ve got a phone that is absolutely ground breaking, sets a completely new interface standard, is a great device.  And it constantly pisses me off for being not quite there, and it’s especially bad because it brings back all the horrors of really early operating systems.  Remember how much you loved having computers that couldn’t do symmetric multiprocessing?  Yeah, me neither.

It was definitely a non-rational response, and I feel stupid-guilty about it, and I’m still not quite sure it was the right move.  The main reason I did so is because I just wasn’t sure, at least not enought to commit to 2 more years with T-Mobile.  What wasn’t I sure of?

Well, I wasn’t sure if T-Mobile would ever have a 3G network worth a damn.  They don’t have 3G in Nashville, nor any announced plans to ever do so, but even worse, their network is really young and they’ve got no real track record, other than being last to the party.

I also am not exactly confident of Google’s ability to maintain a phone OS.  All they’ve really demonstrated excellence at so far is making money from ads and building a search engine — every app on my start page is still in beta, none of them talk, and there’s still some weird, nebulous difference between normal Google apps and Apps for your Domain apps (e.g., I can’t use Reader with my madstop.com account).

I’m not confident in Google’s Market.  Did they do a good job with API design? Again, they have no history, Apple has tons and it’s directly portable.  Their decision to wait until early next year to allow non-free apps means a lot of developers won’t show up until then, which means you just might not know until then.

I’m not confident in the device.  It’s bloody stupid that it doesn’t have a headphone jack, but I could have stored my credit cards between screen and keyboard after only 2 weeks — slightly frightened what it would look like after 2 years.  I’m not sure how much better the battery was ever going to get, either.

I think in the end, though, what made me send it back is that I didn’t want to be the only guy in the room with a Zune.  And it would have been worse here, because there’s no network affect with mp3 players — my ipod never got more valuable because my friends have one, but my iPhone will quite likely increase in value as more of my friends have them, because we can all use the same apps and services.

Fundamentally, the main reasons I’m keeping it are that I couldn’t see a huge differentiator pushing me toward the iPhone, I didn’t really want to switch from TMobile to ATT (TMobile will unlock my phones for me and has said they don’t mind tethering apps), and I like the more open nature of the gPhone.  Assuming someone actually makes a tethering app at some point, it could save me and everyone at my company about $60/month, since we’d otherwise need to buy a separate device to get constant ‘net access for our laptops.

Here are some things I particularly like about the gPhone:

• The Status bar: I really like this.  I like one place for notifications and information, and a single consistent interface for all of them, along with my ability to either answer them or ignore them.
• The Dialer Application: I think this is great.  I don’t know that it’s a ton different from the iPhone’s, but I really liked this version.  I liked the previous calls list, the favorites list, and easy searching for contacts.
• The mid-call menu: I didn’t get a chance to try this out on the iPhone, but I loved this on the gPhone.  Press the menu button and you can enable/disable your bluetooth headset, switch calls, put someone on hold, and more.  Call switching and conference calling was astoundingly faster than doing so with any other phone I’ve had, which is pretty awesome considering how often I make conferences calls between myself, Andrew, and Teyo.
• Task switching: You can hold the ‘home’ button down for a second or so to get a list of the last six applications you’ve used, and you can switch right to the application without having to go to the home screen.  On the iPhone, you always have to go to the home screen to get to another application.  Welcome to 1987, people — this is MacOS 6, but with no excuse.  Android also has a Task Switcher application that just switches across all installed applications; it mostly sucks, but it’s encouraging that task switching is one of the first problems attacked in the OS.
• Notification lights: This seems like a small thing, but the phone has three small, colored LEDs; a green LED for message notification, a red light for low-battery, and an orange light for charging.  I really like these — they’re small enough that they don’t stab you like so many LEDs do these days, and they provide a great, simple way to know what’s going on with your phone, without having random vibrations every who-knows-how often.  I was using a friend’s iPhone, and it literally vibrated every three or four minutes without any indication why.  I’m assuming it was a notification I was supposed to track down, but there was no way to figure it out without going to the home screen and searching for red numers.
• Home screen vs. App Management: Android has a home screen with three panes, and you can arrange them however you want — apps, links to URLs, etc.  It also has an applications tab pull with every app on the system, arranged heirarchically.  This is great because you can set up a subset of your applications on the home screen, arranged how you want, and then you can peruse the whole app list alphabetically.  The iPhone, on the other hand, only has the home screen — you add more apps, and it adds more panes.  You apparently can’t change the four “most common” apps on the bottom, and there’s apparently no easy way to browse the apps alphabetically.

The combination of app management and task switching go a long ways toward making this phone feel more like a real operating system on a phone, rather than the iPhone which feels more like a phone trying to be a real operating system.  It’s weird, because I know the iPhone has a real OS under there somewhere; it’s just not acting like one.

I kinda like the keyboard, although I don’t know if it’s that big of a difference for me (I’m hopefully never going to be much of an emailer with my phone), and I like how responsive the phone is.

There are some things I really don’t like about it, though.  Browsing is a generally crappy experience — the zoom thingie completely blows, in that it inconsistently accepts touches and it’s just a crappy interface in general, and it’s also not-quite-impossible to actually click the links you want.  However, using apps like  Google Reader works fine, and I expect it will only get better.  And, again, this isn’t what I mainly expect to use the phone for.  It’s fine for stop-gap, like sitting in the Doctor’s office waiting room; it’s just not something I’d want to do a ten day trip with.

I’m pretty concerned about the durability of the hardware; I could already store my credit cards between the sliding screen and the keyboard.  Hopefully I’ll be able to replace the phone as necessary for the first year, and by then I hope they’ve got it figured out.

I do really wish the phone supported multi-touch, and with it the multi-finger gestures like the iPhone pinch.

I also wish there were just a Quicksilver-like interface for the whole phone — give me a single gesture to bring up Quicksilver, and I’ll never go to the home screen again.

An Aside

This is neither iPhone nor Android, but it must be said.  What is up with how unimaginative people are being with the touchscreen support?  Why is it that the only way to interact with either of these things is directly touching visible objects, or a traditional keyboard?  Where are my full-screen gestures that I can define, where are my accelerometer-based navigation, where, basically, is anything that really takes advantage of the form factor and touchscreen to be different?

The gPhone has pretty cool gesture recognition for unlocking — you get a grid of nine dots and have to make a specific gesture to unlock the phone.  Why can’t this same theme be used for, well, everything?  I’d like global gesture support for shortcuts to my most common applications, for instance — a Z to open one app, a loop to open another.  I haven’t seen a single situation where I need to drag in multiple directions without lifting my finger, so I don’t see what it would interfere with.

Both of these phones basically suck for context and task management.  Each phone has a “back” button, where the iPhone’s is on-screen and the gPhone’s is physical.  What?  A back button?  Back buttons suck in browsers, why would anyone ever think they make sense as the primary navigational paradigm in, well, anything, ever?  Sure, if you’re stuck in a completely linear world, sure, but on a phone where I regularly use 5-10 applications a day, and could conceivably use 20 or more, a back button just doesn’t suffice.

It bugs the hell out of me that people aren’t taking the Wii as their example — do something different, something weird.  If people aren’t laughing at your ideas, then you’re not trying hard enough.

Cheers.

Rather than a sinister plot, it turns out that Google has updated the Market with new software. Any application that didn’t meet the requirements of the new Android Market software won’t be available until they are updated. This will happen over time. So relax, G1 users, you’ll have plenty of applications to sort through when the device becomes officially available later this week.

Pretty ridiculous.  At the least, there should have been some reasoning on one of the android-related web sites.

Update: Looks like the apps are starting to reappear.  This is clearly a pretty big miscommunication between Google (who manages the market) and Tmobile (who shipped the phones to customers two days early).

So, I decided to give their new Google Phone, the G1, a try.  They’re supposed to be pretty comparable — similar sizes, touchscreen, app stores, large popular companies behind them, blah blah.

I’m not that far into toying with it (about 8 hours), but so far, I’m leaning heavily toward buying a set of iPhones for the lines I’m on.  I’ll be pretty upset about it, since I hate the locked App store and I hate that I can’t unlock my phone for international travel and the like, and of course, I could always just stick with a schmoe phone that didn’t do cool things like have a GPS.

Anyway, the reasons I’m leaning away from the G1 are:

• The app store is either a joke, or not launched yet (apparently the official launch date isn’t for two days, so maybe…).  For instance, locale is supposed to be the hotness, won awards, all that — not avaialble.  Heck, there are only about 15 apps on the whole store, which is crazy.
• I can’t tell whether the touchscreen requires pressure or not, or really, how it works.  It feels very non-deterministic.
• I spent about ten minutes today trying to make a NYTimes popup thing disappear.  Really.  I’d scroll, it would scroll.  I don’t know if this would happen on the iPhone, too, but I wanted to shoot someone, or even worse, make the person who’s to blame figure it out.  Talk about torture.
• It just generally seems hard to get around — unintuitive, at least.  The six buttons don’t seem related in a clear way, the menu button is silly, the trackball seems like wearing suspenders with a belt — either you trust your touchscreen or you don’t — and I can never quite figure out if I’ve got navigational context or not.
• There’s clearly an operating system on this thing, and it clearly has a theory of organization, but I’ve no idea what it is. Why is there a desktop?  Why is it different from the main app window?  Are there other folders?
• I was able to hack my computer to sync contacts to Google and then to the phone, but for some stupid reason it skipped the most important contacts of all — mine and my wife’s.  And my only iSync device was my phone, which is now gone, and stupid iSync doesn’t treat Google as a separate device, so now I can’t trigger a sync without setting my old phone back up.  This is Apple’s fault, but it still makes the phone less good.
• If there’s a speed dial, I can’t find it.  It might not be necessary, given voice dial (which I haven’t tried yet) and actually ok contact search, but still…
• As already commented, it’s annoying constantly flipping between keyboard and no keyboard, and even worse, you can’t even go into landscape without opening the keyboard, which is silly.
• Half the time the GPS thinks I’m three blocks from my house, but the other half of the time it’s perfectly correct.
• No clear idea of how to configure apps, and most apps have about 1/10 the number of settings I’d expect.  There’s a big settings app, with lots of random settings, and each app can have settings, but they aren’t divided consistently or intelligently.

I think those are my main complaints so far, at least the ones big enough to make me want to bitch about the phone as opposed to just niggles.  The phone feels a lot more like a lump than the iphone does, and I despair of comfortably sitting either in my pocket for long periods of time (especially doing things like sitting on my couch with a computer on my lap, as I’m doing now).

As expected, it looks like the battery is charge-once-a-day, but so’s the iPhone, and any ‘net-using phone, as far as I can tell.

Some positive notes on the phone:

• The tactile feel of the phone is good — non-slip, comfortable, etc.
• I like the slide-out action of the keyboard, in a “cool gadget’ kind of way.
• The screen is nice and bright, and attractive.
• The phone is pretty cool, but that’s coming from someone with a heinous Moto W490.

I’d like to say there’s more about the phone I like, but… Maybe it will get a lot better as it gets updates and the app store actually launches, but I’ve only got 14 days to make a decision, and so far, not so much.

I’ll do my best to post an update once it’s been a bit.