After all that, I’m still getting an iPhone 3G. But why?
The official SDK is clearly too closed for my tastes. I still hold that paying $99 in order to stick an app you write on a device is complete bullshit, never mind what the current trend among competitors is. (Just like DRM was bullshit even when everyone did it two years ago.) The phone itself does leave MMS and competent Bluetooth integration to be desired. And there’s no shortage of people telling me that I can’t criticize something and then buy it because that would be wrong. Or something.
But you know what? I wrote a lot of positive things about the iPhone, and they’re all true. There’s no user interface like it currently, and in a parallel universe where the iPhone was never invented, had Nokia and Motorola and Sony Ericsson and Samsung and LG had the next ten years to do it, they wouldn’t have gotten it right. They don’t even get it sorta right, not even now. Maybe Android will eventually as soon as someone starts seeing it as a whole cohesive product instead of a set of puzzle pieces you can assemble and skin.
But by and large, the established companies just don’t have it in them. They have it in them to add function after function after function after function after function, until they realize they have too many functions, at which point they categorize the functions, and then they keep adding functions, and then they make the list prettier, and then they recategorize the functions so they can add more functions, and then they stick bigger screens on so you can see more categories at once, and then they add some more functions, and then the phone starts getting slow so they think it’s a performance problem, which it is, so they rev their OS and break all third-party apps, and port everything function by function and recategorize everything again and hold a developer conference and now everything’s running smoothly for the first few hours until you find out you’re still running everything because of the preemptive multitasking they added with all that new CPU capacity or added memory and now they ask Intel to make a new CPU for them and then they adopt that CPU and now their battery time sucks and you still can’t get anything useful done, but you can get the same crappy performance in slightly different menus in ten subtly different models with their own skins and model number and model line, which is code for “you can’t make a phone that’s both a good camera phone and a good music phone, or maybe you can, but we’re not gonna label them like that because that might be handy, but hey, you can choose which of four concentric circle layouts you want on your keypad”. Never once looking back to see what you can fix. Never once considering that these snazzy animations you just added look like shit at half the FPS, which they usually run at. It’s not a miracle these nuts didn’t invent threaded chat-like SMS conversations.
I’m going to be okay with the phone, especially equipped with SwirlyMMS which actually works just fine. And I’m going to be okay with developing software since like-minded people will crack the problem and open up development to anyone, like jailbreaking used to do. (There are reports that they already have, and probably just need to adjust this for the new hardware. I’m guessing I’ll be able to use the official SDK’s tools and some glue to write apps for a “jailbreaked” iPhone within three weeks of July 11.)
Had this been a contest between two phones, one released by Apple and one released by anyone else, that are in fact equally good, I’d jump ship in a second. To the extent I’m loyal to Apple, I am so because they regularly, but not constantly, earn my respect when it comes to thinking about the user experience. Apple thinks “replacing” a folder means “obliterate the folder, and then place the new folder in its place” instead of “merge the two folders”, for which I will always hate them. Apple tries to nickel-and-dime everyone who uses QuickTime by upselling them on “Pro” bullshit on a computer they already bought for $599 or up, so I use VLC. Apple makes crap mice, so I buy other mice. Apple makes crap set top boxes, just like everyone else, so I don’t buy any set top boxes. Apple makes crap online services (although this may be changing), so I don’t use them.
But Apple does make the best mobile phone in the world; a claim which isn’t incompatible with it not being the most perfect phone in the world, or it being one of the worst mobile phone deals in Swedish history. (I’ll be able to work around this. Only fools pay full price; very few fools will pay the equivalent of US $144 — WHAT!? THE!? FUCK!? This fail is so epic, so grande, it surpasses The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, in which a character lives to be 37 times older than the Universe itself, in epical extent; it looks like a fucking knock-knock joke. — monthly for the top plan and not get unlimited data.)
There’s no other phone I can run to that’s as good on the whole. There’s no other mobile platform that’s as technically competent. And if that means I lose out on J2ME compatibility, video ringtones and FM radio, and may not be able to type on it after being submerged in sawdust and Cheetos for several hours, I think I’ll manage to survive somehow.