The iPhone and I have parted ways

The wonderful honeymoon came and went, and a couple of weeks ago it was time for the iPhone and I to sign the divorce papers (hey, we were together for almost six months, a record for a phone and I). Don’t get me wrong, I loved her, dearly, and will forever cherish the bright future she showed me, but even in light of all the pretty and polish, she just didn’t fit in as well as I would have liked.

This little rant is by no means an indictment of the iPhone; it is the phone for the majority of the population,¹ and will be for the foreseeable future.² Furthermore, I appreciate — more than just about anyone — what the iPhone has done for the mobile world. However, as it stands right now, it just gets in my way more than it should, and given that I go through phones like most people go through a gallon of milk, I didn’t see the point in waiting any longer to move onto something else³ (though we all know I’ll be back).

Corporate e-mail

I’m an IP attorney. IP attorneys e-mail. A lot. Like every other large entity, my firm uses Microsoft Exchange for its e-mail, and while I could “do” work e-mail on the iPhone, it was kludgy, annoying, and generally impractical.

For one thing, e-mail was not “pushed” to me.⁴ To check it, I had to launch MobileSafari and head to the Outlook Web Access page (IMAP wasn’t an option). Could I get my e-mail through OWA? Yes. Could I respond to e-mail through OWA? Yes. But, the entire process was unbearably slow (and user-hostile), not least because there was no mobile implementation of the site — you always got the same page (i.e., same markup, same size) no matter your browser or connectivity.

Moreover, the message body area was a fixed size, which meant that if I needed to read an e-mail containing a sentence(s) that spanned more than the width of the message body area, I had to either zoom in and use a magnifying glass, or zoom out and scroll back and forth. It couldn’t have been more aggravating.

Is any of this Apple’s fault? Of course not. Do I expect Microsoft to create an iPhone-only interface? Of course not. Would it be nice? Maybe, but the core problems would persist, namely e-mail would still not be pushed, and contact lookup (if you needed to add someone to a reply or a new message) would likely still be so annoying as to be unusable, or at least unpleasant.

Yes, I’m well aware of the recent opening at Apple for an Exchange engineer, and this looks very promising (i.e., I think it’s safe to assume that any support would be baked into MobileMail, which would be great); however, I just don’t see whatever comes of it wooing me away from the BlackBerry.

General day-to-day use

I enjoyed using the iPhone, don’t get me wrong, but as far as day-in, day-out operations went, it just wasn’t for me.

Before getting into this section, let’s go back a few months and look at something I wrote just a few days after I got the iPhone (I apologize for quoting so liberally, even if from myself, but I feel it’s warranted):

I’ll likely get rid of my iPhone sometime in the next few months; just like every mobile phone and PDA (remember those!?!) I’ve ever owned, I’m guessing I’ll tire of it rather quickly and soon be on the hunt for the next best thing []. However, the difference this time around, and for the foreseeable future, is that there will be no hunt — the next best thing is going to be the next iteration of the iPhone. Can any of us go back to a pre-iPhone phone after playing with this thing for a few days? Everything else is kind of laughable at this point and I think it’s going to be at least a couple of years before the iPhone begins to see any legitimate competition.

The best part about Apple making mobile phones is that I no longer have to scour the earth looking for the “new hotness” and then hoping that it’s unlocked, uses GSM, and costs less than $1000. The worst part about Apple making mobile phones is that I’ll now be the rule instead of the exception (and I think part of me kind of enjoyed being the exception).

A lot of what I said there still holds true; that is, the iPhone still makes almost every other device look silly when it comes to sheer sexiness and the ability to get people to imagine what’s possible going forward. If you want to argue that, I’d like to hear from you. Furthermore, its interface and the [usually slick] handing off between applications (e.g., when you get a phone call while browsing or listening to music) is always going to invite a “wow” from its users. That said, it isn’t yet as useful as some other devices.

I kind of hate to say it, but one of the things that annoyed me most was the touchscreen. Sure, everyone wants to get behind this technology and herald it as the holy grail of device interaction, but for some things it just doesn’t work. I think the only things I truly enjoyed doing with the touchscreen were cycling between photos, zooming in and out of them, and zooming in and out of sections of a web site; realize that the first two things I mentioned were only ever done when showing the iPhone to someone who hadn’t yet played with one. It annoyed me in almost every other context (you know, like making a phone call).

Take, for example, scrolling in MobileSafari. If I was reading an article that required me to scroll, there was no way to simply page down. Instead, I had to start scrolling and pay close attention to where I stopped reading so as to not lose my spot and scroll past it.

Typing with the touchscreen was OK, and infinitely better than I thought it would be before I actually used it, but I didn’t particularly like using it. In fact, I didn’t much like it at all. It was totally usable, but never felt quite right (even in the face of me trying hard to convince myself that it did).

Sadly, there probably won’t be a non-touchscreen iPhone for a long while, if ever, because the interface has proven to be so popular. Indeed, there may even be a BlackBerry “touch” on the horizon (not to mention the countless others who have followed the iPhone’s lead).

Another thing that I found terribly annoying after just a few days was the lack of copy/paste. After having used a few BlackBerry devices, I came to rely on this quite a bit, and missed it dearly in the iPhone.

Finally, the last day-to-day thing I’ll mention is the speakerphone, which was essentially useless given its lack of volume. It’s very rare that I hold a phone up to my ear — I’m either in my car using whatever Bluetooth headset I bought that week, or I’m at a desk using the speakerphone. The iPhone required me to always remember to bring my Bluetooth headset to and from the car, lest I be made to actually hold the iPhone while talking.

There are surely other niggling things that started to grate on me after a while (e.g., couldn’t use headphones without an adapter, couldn’t SMS to multiple people, couldn’t voice-dial (especially egregious in light of RIM’s tagless voice-dialing) etc.), but I digress.

What will I miss most?

Tabbed browsing, without a doubt. MobileSafari wasn’t perfect, but one thing it got right was tabs (even if switching between them always seemed to take more time than it should). It was so nice to have the same few sites I always have open on my desktop, open on my mobile phone (i.e., Gmail, Google Reader, Vitalist, and Twitter). And the best part? Session restoration. When MobileSafari crashed, as it was prone to do, it relaunched itself and brought me right back to where I was, tabs and all.

I’ll also greatly miss the idea of having OS X in my pocket.

Will I buy the next iPhone?

What do you think? Have I ever not bought the latest and greatest mobile device? Ever? To be honest though, I may not buy the next-gen model if the only real changes are under the hood (e.g., 3G, bigger flash drive, etc.). The fact is, I’d really like to see a hardware keyboard, but something tells me that this, like a proper two-button mouse from Apple,⁵ is a pipe dream.

OK, enough talk about the iPhone; all I’m thinking about right now (and indeed all I’ve talked about for the last year and a half) is the “ultra-portable” MacBook [Pro], hopefully to be announced at MacWorld in less than a month. I. Can’t. Wait.

Canon PowerShot G9

First of all, thanks to everyone who e-mailed me regarding the initial post about point-and-shoots — your comments, suggestions, and questions were much appreciated.

About a week after I published the aforementioned post, I picked up the FinePix F50,¹ and a week after that I bought the Canon PowerShot G9, which I’m here to tell you is awesome. I’m in love with this camera. Plain and simple.

It’s built like a tank and comes packed with “pro” features, and this combination combats well the inescapable thought in the back of your mind (if you shoot mostly with a DSLR) that you’re taking throwaway shots on some shoddy point-and-shoot; indeed, you feel like you’re taking legitimate photographs on a DSLR-in-the-making (save the shutter lag). Canon gets it right in its ad copy when it says something to the effect of, “It doesn’t know it’s not a digital SLR,” a phrase buttressed by the camera’s many features and niceties, including:

• RAW support
• Full manual shooting mode (plus aperture-priority mode)
• 12.1 megapixel sensor
• Available wide-angle, telephoto and macro supplementary lenses
• 3-inch screen (which just looks wonderful)
• Flash hot shoe
• Optical image stabilizer
• Face detection
• Brilliant build quality (had to mention this again)
• Optical viewfinder (not always the easiest thing to find in a point-and-shoot these days)

If you can’t afford a DSLR, simply don’t want something that large, or just want a less cumbersome complement to the DSLR you already own, and you are OK with not having the smallest camera on the block, then the PowerShot G9 is probably a good choice (assuming you have at least a moderate understanding of how to operate a camera outside of “auto”).

Overall, it’s a great little camera that I’m happy to have with me when my DSLR just isn’t practical.

Various reviews you may find helpful: Digital Photography Review, PhotographyBLOG, and LetsGoDigital.

Smart Archives v1.9.2

There are two main “fixes” in this release. The first has to do with trailing slashes in URIs. Up until this point I had been kind of forcing my aesthetic preference onto users of the plugin by manually chopping off their permalinks’ trailing slashes (if they didn’t do it on their own). However, this posed a problem for those that insisted on using a non-future-proof URI structure (e.g., “?p=129”), among other, fairly uncommon setups.

Also, it seems WP is now a bit smarter regarding the URI structures defined by users (at least that is what users of the plugin have told me). In light of these issues, I decided to remove altogether the code that nixes trailing slashes; if you want/need it going forward and you can’t figure out a way to get WordPress to automatically build it into your permalinks, please e-mail me and I’ll explain how to do it.

Another issue brought up by SA users was that some posts weren’t always showing up in the order they were posted (within their respective months). Turns out, this was due to changes I made some time ago (for reasons I can’t remember now), but it seems the changes are no longer needed with WP v2.3+.

Have at it.

Google Reader mobile removes an annoying step

At some point in the last few days Google fixed one of the most annoying things about Google Reader mobile, namely that it didn’t automatically take you back to your list of feeds after you clicked “mark all as read,” but instead just reloaded the page sans posts (if no unread items remained). That one extra step (i.e., having to load an effectively empty page) could make you want to pull your hair out, especially when without fast connectivity.

Also, the 20-item “mark all as read” issue has been remedied as well.