Obligatory thoughts on the threegeesus iPhone
Seeing as today was the day of the much-heralded 3G iPhone launch -- such as it was -- some thoughts on it seem called for (currently, 33,947 times called for, it seems). (Addendum, 10 minutes later: now we're at 216,814 hits. So there you go, give me a moment and I'll try to get us to 216,815.)
A big part of the question for original iPhone owners has been whether it even makes sense to upgrade. The only hardware changes appear to be GPS, which the original phone can approximate by cell tower or wifi base station triangulation, and 3G data speeds, which also mean a higher monthly phone bill and shorter battery life. The other components -- CPU speed, storage capacity, camera, screen, etc -- all appears to be unchanged.
The bigger change, which original iPhone users get for free, is the updated system software, and the new App Store. While this means long overdue improvements to the built in apps -- contact search, wireless push sync of mail, calendars, & contacts, scientific calculator mode, parental controls, and a whole lot more -- the flagship feature is the iPhone SDK that third parties can now use to develop using a toolkit both similar to and unique from the ones available for traditional computers. While some computers are starting to have built-in cameras, the rest of the iPhone hardware remains unique: few if any laptops or desktops have touch screen controls, motion sensors, or geographical self-awareness, not to mention the fact that it's, you know, a phone. There's a line of thinking that this represents the birth of a new generation of ubiquitous computing, an idea that has been on the drawing board for 20 years now, but still just gradually starting to come together.
So, now that the prelude is out of the way, how has the first 24 hours of life with iPhone 2.0 been? Some random observations.
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I'm glad I'm not working at an Apple store for this. With the original iPhone, the store part of the transaction was about as simple as swipe a couple of bar codes, swipe the credit card, and off you go. On the launch day last year, a line that went out the door, down the corridor, then back up the side of the mall was processed in about 90 minutes, no chaos, no problem. (Or so I was told -- somehow I ended up being the only one that had the day off that day, so we went for ice cream instead. Yum, ice cream. Then Bijan called to ask if we had any iPhones left, and could I set one aside for him. Heh.) This time around, to prevent the revenue lost to iPhone unlocking, the activation had to happen in the store, or you can pay extra to avoid AT&T, but either way, Apple gets their money up front. Which is nice for Apple, but not so much for the customers today, not to mention their employees.
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I like the idea of push mail and push sync. Reliable synchronization of personal data has been tantalizingly close to "ready to go" for years now, but it still never quite works in practice. Part of the problem, as anyone that has to merge software patches would recognize, is that can be hard for a computer to know which of two versions of a piece of data it should go with. For example, if you add a friend's email to your mail client, aad their phone number on your cell phone, then what should happen they get re-synced? As far as .Mac sync seems to be concerned, the correct answer appears to be any one or more of "make one record with both the email address and the phone number fields", "make two completely overlapping, redundant records for your friend", "leave one record but make the fields repeat over and over and over and over", "randomly omit some of the data", or "update someone else entirely." Who says software has to be deterministic, right? The appeal of push sync, in part, is that it reduces the opportunity for this kind of error, by always keeping the devices coordinated right away, without letting changes pile up and lead to bigger problems later.Two problems with this are jumping out at me as a first gen iPhone owner: (1) this doesn't appear to help, and in fact may still be making worse, the existing redundancies in the data, and more importantly (2) this appears to force the iPhone to have a lot more chatter with the server than was happening before. For new 3G users this shouldn't be a big deal, because it's like a DSL modem: the data connection doesn't interfere with voice services on the line, and it's fast enough that these bursts of sync communication should happen more quickly. But with the original 2G phone and the EDGE data service, it's looks like a potential problem, because EDGE behaves like a traditional analog modem: you can't use voice and data services simultaneously, and the connection is so much slower than 3G/DSL/etc that the sync conversation with the server takes 10x longer than it would otherwise. As a result, since upgrading to iPhone 2.0 on Thursday, I'm getting far more complaints that "the call went straight to voice mail" than I ever was previously. This is frustrating, and the first tangible thing that starts to make upgrading to 3G hardware make sense, but for now I'm just turning push back off and dealing with it. (Weirdly, it seems like the push service may be cellular only -- even when a wifi connection was available, it seemed like the EDGE connection kept popping up and so blocking incoming calls. Is it true that MobileMe/.Mac sync push to the iPhone only happens over the phone wireless link?)
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So it's a nice day and all when 500 or 600 applications can simultaneously morph from vaporware to shipping product, but maybe some of these were maybe a little half-baked, hm? With the old phone software, I very rarely had any problems. (And if you ignore the bane that is data sync, there had been basically no problems with crashes and the like for around six months now.) But since the new software got installed, I've already had several hard lockups -- no response at all, had to force-reboot the phone -- and even had to restore it (which was fun because it got back stuff I don't care about, like the fact that it was only syncing the "For iPhone" playlist from iTunes, which I never would have been able to sort out again from scratch, but it blew away and couldn't recover my SMS history, call history, call favorites, web site login cookies, stored cities for the Weather app, stored stocks for the Stocks app, yadda yadda yadda).But the worst is all the app crashes now. While it's nice that each app sandboxes all its data so that, one might have assumed, problems with one app shouldn't harm any of the others, in practice it seems like many of the apps I've tried are unstable, and when one app crashes, I can't seem to get anything else to launch, even if it had been working previously. And this is right after a full restore, which is "iPod/iPhone Troubleshooting-ese" for "the problem persists after nuking the system software from orbit, so the cause has to be either the data or the hardware". In this case it's safe to assume that the problem is the data (read: "the new apps"), but it's frustrating not being able to go in and carefully zap the offending .plist file or cache folder that so often resolves similar problems with the old version of OSX.
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Also frustrating is that, it's already a full day since the App Store launch, and *none* of the apps seem to have any updates yet. Okay, sure, so it's just one day, and I'm sure the developers are all out swimming in their shiny new barrels of App Store Monopoly Money to celebrate, but come on, they have to take care of their early adopters if they want to sustain their new businesses, right? Supposedly, though I can't find documentation of this at the moment, one of the iPhone 1.x updates introduced the ability to gather statistics when an app crashes, and send that data back to Apple on the next sync, so that common failure modes could be profiled & patched. Is Apple capturing this data for third party apps too, and if so, is it getting shared back to the developers? Hopefully.)
- Compounding the last item, and maybe I'm just being thick here, but I don't see the best way to delete an app in the first place. Is there a way to delete from the phone, or do you have to delete it from iTunes and then have it disappear on the next sync?
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It's interesting, and possibly a big improvement, that an iPhone configured for push-sync of calendar & contact data no longer is able to sync this data with iTunes automaically when plugged in. This is good for me, because I have data going back to my first Palm Pilot in the late 90s, and it was starting to take way too long to sync everything to the phone; now that's no longer necessary. On the other hand, if the sync with iTunes just got so much more clever and fast than it used to be, then why did it start doing a big, glacially slow backup job every time I sync the phone? With the old one, it seemed like it would start the sync by backing up some key data (I'm not sure what, but it never took longer than 20 or 30 seconds or so), then dive in to the rest (which would be the bulk of the time required to finish a sync run). Now it's the other way around, and worse: it can spend an hour or more backup up the phoe (I can only assume it's making a new full copy of everything, everytime, rather than trying to just compare changes since the last backup), but then because the slow items have been removed from iTunes, the sync itself seems to finish within a couple of seconds after the backup. Two steps forward, ten steps back.
I'm ready for my bug fixes now, guys.
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