Days 7 through 9, Second weekend with the iPhone 4

On Monday I will write reviews of:

Bluetooth use
More on ebooks and the reading experience
Software glitches I have seen
Ordering the free case
Some experiences with connectivity

Day 6, reading with the iPhone 4

I have a long history with books. Most of my life I have been an avid reader, although the last few years there has been a drop off. While in school I worked in a bookstore. In my house we have well over one thousand books in our library. I am a big fan of the book experience. . I also have to admit I like holding a book, the smell of the pages, the comfort of putting it on the shelf after reading and seeing it there reminding me of the journey we took together. So I have moved slowly in the ebooks arena. Last year I bought my wife a Kindle, and while she enjoyed the experience I watched as she quickly reverted back to using books. This did not help spur me on. Then the iPad hit the market and the demos of interactive books really caught my eye. I thought what a great experience it would be to read that way to my son. Still I held off, for many reasons, like waiting for the next iPad and not wanting my son to lose the experience of owning and reading real books. Along came the iPhone 4. As I have discussed I had a lot of reasons to get it. And along with it came iBooks. I already had a book or two on the Kindle reader for the iPhone on my 3G. I did not read them. I forced myself to pick a good book on iBooks and to really give it a try. What I found has surprised me. I truly thought I was not going to like it, it was too small, there was no feel to it, and it was not going to inspire the suspension of reality that a good book has always done for me. I thought that the plethora of features I held in my hand would detract from the reading experience. I was wrong on all accounts. The reading experience on the iPhone 4 not only captures the experience for me it has added to it. It is small, but the font clarity and the back lighting make reading very comfortable. The page turning gives the feel of turing the page of a real book. The tools, like font resizing, brightness control, search, and bookmarking add to experience of reading. The feel of holding a book is not really missed. I am sure much of this is the same with the Kindle, iPad, and the larger screen Android devices. I will be testing the Kindle reader on the Evo over the next few days. The iPhone 4 makes reading comfortable, fun, and easy. The shopping experience for books on iBooks was of course easy and smooth. I think I will be reading on the iPhone 4 quite a bit. As for reading with my son, I will stick to real books for some time to come

Days 3 through 5 with the iPhone 4, My first weekend and business trip.

Well I had my first weekend with the iPhone 4 and my first business trip with it as well. The device served me, as did the iPhone and iPhone 3G, very well, but with some differences. First doing the things I normally do on the weekends like look up movies, get directions, and find fast facts all happened much faster. Since the network has not changed I must attribute the efficiency to the device. Yes the processor is much faster and I should have expected to get better performance but that is not the only factor. In my last blog I talked about how the iPhone 4 does multitasking but I did not cover how, as a user, it can work for you as a time saver. Using the multitasking menu to toggle back and forth between suspended applications is a very efficient way of getting the information or services you need in what feels like one smooth session. As an example while on a call with a friend discussing some subject from a website I was also following directions to a location. I was able to, by using the multitasking bar, jump back and forth between the site we were discussing and the directions I needed to follow very smoothly. An easy use case, I admit, but the ease in which I fell into using the iPhone 4 method of multitasking is a testament to good design choices. During a short business trip this week I found the performance and multitasking to be quite helpful in my work day tasks. Going from meeting dial in information in my calendar, to email notes, to note pad, and back to my call screen was smooth and even a little fun. 

There were two areas that it fell short for me in my first weekend. Many of the pictures taken with it came out blurry, something I did not experience with my iPhone 3G. The ones that did come out were of much better quality, of course. The second area is in entertainment for my son. Where I felt comfortable giving him my iPhone 3G to play games on in the car, I do not have the same comfort with the iPhone 4. Not just because it is a new phone but because I just dont trust the edges. I am convinced that a corner land drop from hand height will result in a chip of the front or back edge. I dropped my iPhone 3G four times all of them resulted in corner landings. All I got for those was a few scratches to the back of the device. Yes a case will solve that but the "naked" form factor of the iPhone 4 is a key attribute of staying with the device.

As part of my process I am also looking at what will happen when the iPhone comes out on Verizon. I have very little doubt that Verizon will be offering iPhones by the upcoming holiday season. It may be pre-orders with shipments in mid Jan or they may have them on the shelves for the holiday shopping season, I am not sure which. But I am sure it will happen this year. So I must also decide in this twenty five day time frame if I want to keep it or give it back, get out of my two extension with AT&T, and wait for the Verizon release. While I am having very little network issues, that I have not always had with my iPhones, it is well known that the Verizon network is better in many ways. Of course if Verizon had the crazy data usage that iPhone users produce, on their 3G network they might have some issues as well. But I am sure that Verizon will move to 4G much sooner then AT&T. This could mean there is a strong chance that the first iPhones for Verizon will also be 4G capable. Some thing to keep in mind during the decision process. 

A bit off the subject of the iPhone 4, my good friend Jon Bostrom asked me to comment about the value of a live widget model. I guess I should first explain what a live widget is. A widget is a application that normally does very few things all based around some area of focus, such as showing stock quotes, an active clock with time zones, or a twitter or Facebook status ticker. Widgets usually are active image based icons on your home screen showing information at a glance. They do this by collecting information in the background from various sources such as the internet, the device, and even your environment and pushing that information into a small image based icon. It is important to note that most widgets are easily customizable to show you the information that is relevant to you within the framework of what the widget does. Meaning that if the widget is a twitter feed widget you will be able to set it to show the twitter feeds you want to see only. The iPhone does not yet have true widgets. It does have icon based notification of changes in a application but this is not the same as a information at a glance widget working to bring you your information in real time  

Now on to the value of widgets as explained above. These have existed in the PC world for a long time now and have not taken deep root. Many people have a few widgets on their desktops for stocks or to show a cool clock but not much past that. I on the other hand use the Apple widgets in dashboard very often I have clocks showing the many different time zones I work with, unit converter, language translator, weather at a galce, and a information widget about my computers system health. So I see the high value of widgets. Yes a mobile widget model is a strong differentiator for Android right now. Apple is no doubt tracking this very closely and can at any time put out a software update to add this kind of a feature. But the question fundamentally is do you want that to be your choice if you use them or not or Steve's choice if you get to have them or not. I am mixed on the subject but if put to the line I would have to say that I would like to have them. 

Next: using the iPhone 4 as a reader (iBooks and Kindle). 

Day two of twenty five, Steve comes out.

Looks like I have three things to talk about today, why I went with iPhone 4 over a iPad, multitasking, and Steve's press con today.

On the subject of Steve's announcement, in general I like what he has offered as a solution. It is not the most amazing solution and it was expected but it is a good gesture. I think he made a bit of a mistake when he tried to point out that many phones when cupped will have some drop in reception. It is going to be easy for people to knock a lot of holes in that. For one, to make the bars drop on many smart phones you have to practically shove the phone into your body covering the whole thing. Also there are smart phones that have extremely good antenna solutions that take into account the human body as a signal absorber. Nokia phones have some of the best antenna of all phones, no surprise they have been making phones forever and have some of the best radio people in the world. Steve talked about all the PHD scientists he has working for him on the iPhone. Well instead of hiring green boys right out of school maybe he should go get some grizzled veterans of the mobile industry. Come to think of it he should be doing that across the board when it comes to iPhone staff. Next he really should listen to his tech staff over his design staff. These two things will save him from any more press conferences where he has to apologize to his loyal customers.

Ok now on to why iPhone over iPad. First I had to make the choice because I can only get so many new toys a quarter. I decided to wait on the iPad to see if it gets the same increased

pixel density that the iPhone got. Next it was simply looking at which one I would use more at this time. Of course the device I have with me all the time will win that. Anyone that knows me knows I spend a huge amount of time on the phone, so that is my key point of contact.

Onto multitasking. First I would like to go through my understanding of the ways multitasking can be delivered.

1. True concurrency is where you can have two or more applications running at the same time all doing some tasks. I wont go into the time slicing and threading that makes this work but that is the gist.

2. Pause and resume is where you can have multiple applications that are open but only the application you are looking at is running and the others are all "saved" at where you left them so that when you switch back to them you pick up where you left off. This is a good model for fast application switching.

3. A mix of both. In this model some features (APIs) can run in true concurrency but most are pause and resume. This works well to support good battery life and lets face it not all features need to be running all the time. This is what I think the iPhone 4 model is.

What does multitasking bring to end users? Well a lot of great things like listening to music while reading email or having a IM client active while doing other tasks and many more. It will be a bit before we see a good number of apps taking advantage of this but I am sure great things will come of it. But that leads me to the majority of current iPhone apps that were not written for a multitasking environment. This causes a big issue since none of those applications have a End or Shutdown button. Here is why this is an issue. The iPhone 4 handles all applications the same regardless if they were built for multitasking or not. When you are in an app and you press the Home button the application does not shut down but it get suspended and put on the multitasking list. If you want to shut it down you have to go to the multitasking list (by double tapping the Home button) and then you have to put that list into a mode that will allow you to shut the apps down by pressing one of the apps in the list and holding for 4 or 5 secs. Then they all start to wiggle and you will see a red minus sign. Press the red minus sign and you shut the app down, do that for all of them and you will clear your multitasking list. Very clunky.

Tomorrow I will be taking about the camera, face time, and video.

Closing note, I sat down last night to just play with the phone and found that besides the screen looking really great and the device running very fast there was nothing much more then my old phone. Not sure if that is good or bad but it was comforting. Oh yes one more thing, reading books on it was much nicer. And as a shout out to my buddy Jon B. I have iBooks, Kindle, and Barnes & Noble readers all running on it ;-). But to your point Jon, I am sure I would like it better if I could run Java on it :p

Day one of twenty five, do I keep it or send it back.

So I took the plunge yesterday and purchased the iPhone 4. While I have always been happy with my iPhones (the iPhone 4 is my third one) I had some trepidation on this one. Long before getting on a list for one I did a deep analysis to decided if I should stay with iPhone or make the move to an Android phone. I guess I should go into some of the thinking that lead me to stay with the iPhone. Without getting too deep on the process, I looked at form factors, performance, network, content/apps, integrated services (web, PIM, apps), legacy support (mostly music), device connectivity features (tethering, WiFi hub), and customer service. The debate went back and forth over each of these areas. With only a few fully landing on one side of the fence or the other. The two big ones were network and customer service. For network it was a clear advantage from a big picture point of view for Android on Verizon. But since I live in an area that has very good AT&T coverage I did not put as much weight behind that as I did behind customer service. The new smart phones are complicated pieces of hardware and will have issues. It is very hard to fix these issues yourself so it is important that a very good customer service process be in place. Apple has the genius bar, you set an appointment, go in, and pretty much every time get your issue resolved. Try walking into a operator store with your android phone and do that. You cant really because the employees in the store are sales reps not trained service experts. It was the customer service item that put the iPhone over the top for me.

Tomorrow I will talk a bit about why I went with a iPhone over a iPad.

Todays report on the iPhone:

So far I have had no more dropped calls then I did with my 3G. The antenna issue seem to be a non issue for me so far but we will see with more use. I do hope that if apple affects a fix for it that they do something to fix all the iPhone 4(s) in the field. That would be a big cost but it would be the right thing to do.

Tomorrow I will talk about multitasking.