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.

Really, I usually preempt people by calling myself a snob, because I think it’s silly to be anything else.  Why own something you don’t care about?  You’ve got to wear a given amount of clothing, use a computer a given amount of time, own a given amount of dishes and furniture and stuff — why not surround yourself with things you actually like and prefer, rather than just settling for whatever crap wanders along?

Of course, this isn’t entirely feasible — I have plenty of bookshelves I don’t really care for, but my spending priorities don’t currently including spending a bunch of money on replacements, for example.  But certainly, all things being equal, care about what you buy and use.  Be a snob.

I was considering blogging this anyway, because it gives me a reason for writing a bit of a gadget blog — not specifically gadget, but review-oriented.  Obviously I’m not going to switch to all reviews all the time, but my research is thorough enough and (according to friends) my reviews are humourous enough that I figure it’s worth writing some of these things down.  Given I was already thinking of this, I was happy to see (via BoingBoing) that Bruce Sterling agrees:

It's not  bad to own fine things that you like.  What you need are things that
you GENUINELY like.  Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the
world.  The rest is dross.

Do not "economize."  Please.  That is not the point.  The economy is clearly
insane.  Even its champions are terrified by it now.  It's melting the North
Pole.  So "economization" is not your friend.  Cheapness can be value-less.
Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring.  Less can become too much work.

The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal,
boring goods that don't seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones.
 They are truly central.  The everyday object is the monarch of all objects.
It's in your time most, it's in your space most. It is "where it is at," and it
is "what is going on."

I completely agree.

So, you may see a few more reviews here than you might expect from a sysadmin blog, but hopefully you’ll find them useful and entertaining; and if not, you can always just call me a sock snob at the next conference.