Why I despise the iPhone.

[kevwright]

Originally Posted by irblinx

Well as I said I've not seen any such problems and I do get that sort of email, I've just checked and emails from Gameshadow, Playstation, Rockband, Napster & Reverbnation all in full HTML, graphics etc all appear perfectly and resized to fit in one screen wide. You can of course zoom in very easily! Oh and in WM I just get the click here if this email doesn't display and then the opportunity to view it poorly formatted in PIE.

I am with you on emails, in fact, on all WM phones, up to and including the TP2 I just sent back, all of them need you to click and wait for images, AND you have to tap to scroll sideways.

The very same email formats 100% perfect on the iPhone (3G), so I don't know how the others here have to scroll sideways on iPhone?

Mine is gMail, BTW.

Kev

[kevwright]

Originally Posted by waveydavey

Oo, I'd be interested to hear what the screen is like on the Omnia HD, it's an OLED capacitive jobby isn't it?

The screen is AMAZING Davey!

But, Orange will shortly have it back......why?

I think I will do a new thread with reasons, and my recent experiences with phones, which will include the TP2.

Now, what to call the thread.....why I despise everything BUT the iPhone

Kev

[mikem]

Originally Posted by irblinx

I'm sick of not having an OS upgrade path for our WM devices, I'm sick of the fact that even the OEM apps are so poor in their use of memory that the devices are inherently unstable and prone to not even starting and I'm sick of the god awful clunkiness of the OS resulting from trying to shoehorn a desktop OS into a mobile device.

Spot on, I'm afraid - and again from somone who has used CE/WM since the year Dot.

Microsoft had a huge lead on Apple in the Mobile device market, plus loads of dosh to throw at development - but really they just sat back, took the revenue to spend elsewhere and fobbed WM users off with new versions which really didn't have that much to separate them from the previous versions (generalisation, but..)

The Office suite is a similar example - I remember praising the Lord for Microsoft Access v2 (having fought with the 'first' relational DB, Paradox for an unpleasant six months) - but when I look at Access v2007 it has just become a directionless piece of bloatware, with a ghastly UI and the odd bit of lipstick here and there to try and hide the fact. Again, they get huge amounts of income from Office, but divert it to other areas once the monopoly is established.

Interestingly I don't find this attitude with their Server software division however - go figure.

The iPhone is the iPod all over again - when a company gives the majority of the people what they want, and it just 'works', they are bound to clean up. I'm as irritated by Mac ads and Mac obsessives as the next longtime Windows/WM user, but it is hard to argue that there isn't substance behind the advertising.

Frankly, unless they've sacked the entire WM team, and gone for a whole revamp, I doubt if there's going to be very many surprises in WM7.

Which reminds me - the Microsoft hype machine can be its own worst enemy - I remember hearing how Windows 7 was going to be oh-so-much-faster than Vista when it was first being talked about... but I see that in a recent test by (I think) PC Pro, they couldn't actually see much improvement, if any.

I'm praying that I don't end up having to buy a Mac as well as a iPhone in the future... I've managed to resist iPods at least... )

You know, I've been firmly in the Windows camp since Win95 when I finally gave up on my two Amiga 1200's. However due to the impending arrival of iPhones within the company I have just had to go out and buy a MacBook Pro to allow me to develop line of business applications. It has taken a bit of getting used to but I have to say that I'm very impressed overall, plus I have a fully functional clone of my other company laptop (6 month old HP running XP that died yesterday!) running flawlessly in VMWare Fusion.

Apple are so far ahead of the game with regards to physical design of their kit and to be fair OSX is a lot slicker than the last version I used a couple of years ago

However it cost a bloody fortune

[Griph]

I cant honestly say that I have had that experience with any emails I have received - they are all easy to read.

As for the keyboard - I have had a number of harware based keyboards, but none of the am I as fast as I can type on the soft keboard of the iPhone - OK it takes a bit of practice - but no more than it took me to master the speed with the gestures of the early WM devices. I can hold the device in the palms of my hands and use both thumbs simultaneously and you only need to brush the screen lightly for it to register.

[waveydavey]

Check this out. I like the way this guy thinks. He's thrown himself into the iPhone more than I did (and it's the 3GS as opposed to the 3G that I used) but I think he gets across his point very well:

"I attempted to do something daring with my iPhone 3GS. I attempted to work. I say attempted, because what dawned on me -- separated from my laptop, a netbook, or any viable computing system -- was that I couldn't really get much of my work done on Apple's bundle of joy. It wasn't the first time I tried to get work done on my phone, but it was one of the first times that I really thought about how frustrating the experience is.
...The iPhone keyboard truly sucks if you're trying to type words it might not be familiar with. You know, like tech terminology which isn't exactly part of its native dictionary. Additionally, typing quickly during a conversation with lots of people is severely hampered by the inaccuracy of the on-screen keyboard.

I would have left it at that, but my work requires that I use a bunch of web tools, look at lots of news sites, and have a feed reader open... basically, things that would require some level of multitasking. Imagine the frustration of having to constantly break the connection in chat to go look at a site or work on a post. It's frustrating, let me tell you. The idea of jumping into and out of applications -- of having to actually quit an app to move to another one -- is an incredibly outmoded and foreign idea in 2009. Additionally, the email experience on the iPhone is brutal -- and to get anything done in a day as Editor-in-chief of Engadget, you need your mail. As a Gmail user, the way the native iPhone mail application handles messages is counterintuitive at best. Google presents a lovely browser-based solution for email, but it is markedly hampered by the browser environment itself. It's slow and inaccurate to navigate, though obviously better if you need to bounce between an open page and your mail. Funnily, the Safari experience provides better multitasking than the phone itself. Adding insult to multiple injuries, the system of notification for SMS, calendar events, or even push IM messages (which still gives you limited options) is intrusive, productivity-stalling, and frankly upsetting. It doesn't aid productivity if you're constantly being hammered with pop-ups.

The whole, painful experience set me thinking. Is this really what Apple wants me to be doing with my phone anyhow? The company has added lots of features -- like decent Exchange support -- so that its phone will appeal to enterprise and business users, but can these users really get what they need out of the device? Basic functionality, like calling people, email, and certainly document editing still feel inelegant and clunky due to the onscreen keyboard, and the lack of multitasking makes moving around through those typically important tasks difficult to say the least. The experience on an Android device, S60, the Pre, a BlackBerry, or even Windows Mobile just makes more sense. Let me say that again: those experiences make more sense. Now I'm not saying the execution of those experiences is better across platforms, but the philosophy of letting users multitask is more natural to us. The iPhone doesn't even have a method for switching between recently used or favorite applications.
We don't work like this on our computers -- why does Apple think we want to work like this on our phones?"

Full article here:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/10/e...he-job-market/

Nope, you're right after all mate it is rubbish cos it doesn't multitask .........

Hang on though, what about WM. Trying to run more than one non OS app is going to end in tears as for some reason it appears to be impossible to make apps that don't leak so much memory that nothing else can run, even for the OEM's. I might as well remove the camera from my S730 as it only starts up if I reboot the phone and have nothing else running.

Once again all this does is prove that it's a bad idea to try and shoe-horn a desktop OS into a mobile handset. It's also a bad idea to try and do everything you can on a desktop using a mobile handset, there are some situations that mobiles make sense in and some where they don't but Microsoft is obsessed with WM being a jack of all trades, unsurprisingly it has become a master of none.

[Bassey]

That's strange. I usually have half a dozen apps running at once and rarely have any problems. Just been out training with SportyPal tracking my progress/speed/distance by GPS and logging it all to google-maps and Kinoma playing music. In the background were facebook, pocket outlook, SMSChat, launchpad and Manila.

[tonybro]

I'm with you Jim, hardly any issues I can think of with memory leaks or memory shortages. Apps sit in the background sweetly.

I've pretty much lost interest in this thread as the solution for all is simple - use what you find works best for you.

For me iPhone is a million miles away. The others are only half a million!

I haven't had a reliable camera app on any of the HTC devices I've used, they all complain about the lack of memory and refuse to start, bloody annoying and makes the built in camera useless for me. The least said about my two none HTC WMpro experiences (and e-ten and a toshiba) the better.

The problems I see may now be restricted to smartphone as I have only used pro devices fleetingly in the last couple of years but there again is the issue with developing for multiple devices. The MS Facebook app is a good example on my S730, it runs like a dog, crashes frequently and seems to be particularly bad at eating resources. I suppose there may have been an update for that particular app but unlike the iPhone I'd have to keep checking to find out wouldn't I?

The biggest issue is the lack of upgrade path as an enterprise is very rarely in the early adopter category and so in our case we have a majority of WM6.0 devices and only a very small handful of WM6.1 as we will only change a handset when it gives up the ghost.