Apple FAIL, or why friends shouldn't let friends use iPhones or AT&T

Even though I've been using Apple kit in the form of a MacBook Pro for the last year (almost) without complaint I've always resisted the lure of the iPhone. I was estatic that the Google Android powered G1 materialized as an option exactly as the iPhone appeared to be my logical destiny (about 90% or more of my co-workers use the iPhone). Appart from the obvious limitations of the iPhone at the time (no background processes, closed application environment, no compass, no focusing camera, no keyboard) and the complimentary advantages of the G1 the real killer, if I could ever discount all the aforementioned problems, was that the iPhone is married to AT&T in the USA and clearly Apple and AT&T were in deep together.

So it seems now that relationship, and the limitations of it, has come home to roost now that Apple has been caught red-handed doing the bidding of AT&T to kill the Google Voice application on the iPhone (not to mention Google Latitude although that probably had less to do with AT&T and more Apple). Because I have not been blogging here for some while you will not have heard my thoughts on Google Voice - but being lucky enough to have scored a GV account in recent weeks I can tell you Goggle Voice is quite simply "telephony done right".

Now I know that Google scored the GV technology from another party in this case (Grand Central), just as they scored Google Earth technology from a 3rd party (Keyhole). But believe me Google is making it even better and in bringing it to the masses (or at least trying to) they are poised to revolutionize telephony just as Google Maps and Google Earth have revolutionized mapping. So I guess we should hardly be surprised that AT&T executives are (no doubt) screaming bloody murder and peeing their pants as SMS, call revenue, massive profits and lets be honest all they really care about - executive bonuses - look to be ready to fly out of the window. But boo to Apple for ever chaining themselves to such anti-revolutionary forces for the sake of some guaranteed kickbacks. No matter how lucrative they were, and no matter how convenient, don't such cozy arrangements just fly right in the face of that whole Apple "were just an amiable little guy, not a big dumb PC" persona they keep trying to project. Believe me Apple, if people love to hate any company more than Microsoft it is usually their cellphone carrier so chaining yourself to AT&T wasn't such a smart move.

Now my own theory is that Apple will find this as a convenient PR disaster to ride the back of as they decline to renew their AT&T exclusive next year. And yet at the same time make it conveniently known that they are no-carriers bitch - and yes they will be open to Google Voice and any other legacy communications company killer technology that cares to come to the iPhone, including their own probably. Indeed if there is any conspiracy theory more likely it is that Apple just doesn't want Google to get a free boost to dominance before Apple has a chance to launch their own carrier-killer-telphony solution.

Google Contacts why doth thee suck so badly?

It has to be said the #1 worst part of using Google for all my PIM (Personal Information Management) needs is their contacts functionality. Right from the web UI to the lack of attributes to the lack of integration with external source (like Outlook) it is just the weakest, even substandard part of their PIM offering. When I got my G1 Android based phone I finally had to abandon Outlook which I'd been hanging onto for its contacts/addressbook functionality. Hands down Outlook has the best address book I've used and that's why I reluctantly hung onto it.

Migrating my 200+ contacts to Google was painful and lost a lot of meta-information that I had to dump into "notes" for each contact, perhaps in the hope that one day Google will support things like anniversaries, birthdays, and relationships between contacts. And now I've migrated to Google contacts the worst part is that to maintain it I have to deal with the crappy web interface they have tacked onto Google Mail, so tacked on that its kind of an afterthought, not only difficult to use but also just plain ugly. In fact its so bad that I actually tend to do this stuff from my phone if possible - at least it is easy to find there! Yes, yes, I know all this stuff is free so I shouldn't complain but really since Yahoo and Microsoft managed to do so much better why should Google be happy with coming a distant third? And lets not forget that there really is no such thing as a free lunch - Google actually provides all this for a reason and that's to establish brand loyalty and keep users on its web site, using its apps and seeing its customers adverts.

Given that Google is trying to push into the social networking world with its OpenSocial API you'd think that by now they would have created some kick-ass addressbook-on-steroids that left Facebook and others in the dust. If you think about it my interaction with email, chat, groups and other apps that are inherently social apps should begin and revolve around my contacts - not be some lackluster add-on feature that time (apparently) forgot. Lets just say I'm still waiting for something kick-ass in this department but not holding my breath. Maybe in 2009 Google? Are you listening? Please? Pretty please? Thanks!!!

G1 Episode I - The Android Attack Begins

Well I did it, I finally cemented my status as a Google fanboy by dropping $179 to pre-order a brand spanking new Android powered "G1" phone. It took a while to fight through the T-Mobile website issues - it seems they either completely screwed up launching the pre-ordering web pages or were suffering from horrendous website overload. Either way by 12:30p, several hours after the press-release event in New York was over I was finally able to go all the way through the ordering process and make the commitment. But that was after a couple of hours of trying - it took so long that I almost changed my mind at the last minute having learned there is a decent list of "obnoxious flaws" in the product.

I have to say that the lack of stereo bluetooth audio (A2DP) strikes me as seriously obnoxious. I have taken to using my existing 3 year old Windows Mobile phone (also by HTC) in my car with my Motorola bluetooth handsfree speaker phone, it plays tunes nicely and satisfies the California handsfree requirement. But now without stereo audio my G1 will be a pretty poor mono-audio player. I'd have to get a second FM transmitter or radio with an audio in jack (not possible in one of my cars that has a Bose factory radio I can't really replace). But I've tried to rationalize that A2DP must be in the hardware and a future software upgrade must surely support it especially given that Amazon is now the music store of choice for the G1 - anything that hampers the phone being a great music player has to be fixed.

Other obnoxious flaws bother me less lie lack of a video player other than YouTube at the moment (I'm going to assume you can play embedded video on a web page though) because I seldom do anything with video on my phone now and expect that there will be decent 3rd party apps later.

The lack of a standard headphone jack requiring a USB adapter which is not even supplied is a pain but I hardly, if ever use plugin headphones with my phone now - but given the lack of stereo bluetooth audio this becomes more important - I'll need that output to connect to an FM transmitter in my car. Then again my current WinMo phone has a non-standard 2.5mm jack that requires an adapter for most headphones so its not really a step backward - but they really could have done better. My guess is headphone jacks eat up a lot of internal space and cause issues with dirt and RF intrusion.

Lack of multi-touch is surprising but I've lived without multi-touch all my life and I'm sure I can continue to do so. Lack of an on-screen keyboard seems surprising - I don't much like them and have big fingers that usually require me to use a stylus with my WinMo device but sometimes its handy to have as a fall back. I don't much care for the iPhone on-screen keyboard BTW - the letters are still too small for me so perhaps there wasn't much chance I would have been happy with one anyway. Since this device has a real keyboard which I very much desire in a smartphone I think I'll be pretty much happy with input methods.

Locking to T-Mobile I wont care too much about until I need to go to Europe which I do at least once a year - I haven't seen any information about whether the phone supports the world GSM frequencies, given who makes it I'd be very surprised if it didn't although I know its probably not going to be compatible with most other 3G service frequencies. My experience is that T-Mobile is very good about unlocking phones for its current customers and since they are imposing a $200 contract break fee (how long can that last legally?) I would really hope that the G1 will be no exception. If not I'll be unhappy and have to bust out my WinMo phone - kind of defeats the point though... I wonder what AT&T iPhone customers do anyway - do they just suck it up and pay those usuary international roaming fees?

Being able to tether the G1 to my laptop would be nice - I can do it with my WinMo phone right now but again on reflection almost never actually do it. Part of the idea with a phone like the G1 is that its web and online experience is so good that you don't actually need to use a laptop 99% of the time unless it is for work. In which case your employer should be busting out a WWAN card for you to use. In the last year I've found this to be true and do much of my email reading and sending from my current phone - that should be much, much easier from the G1 especially as I've become far more Google-centric with use of calendaring and such in the last year.

I also realize that the lack of tethering has enabled T-Mobile to offer that $25 "unlimited" (I've read elsewhere its not actually unlimited - after 1GB of transfer in a month they reserve the right to dial down your bandwidth) data plan which is only $5 more than I pay right now. And that data is much faster than my current Edge service so it will be far more useful to me. Given that the $25 a month plan includes 400 text messages it will actually save me money since my current plan doesn't include any and costs me $.20 a pop - so 400 would cost a fortune. I couldn't really see me getting through more than 400 messages given the G1's enhanced email and chat facilities. The whole point is email more text less...

Lack of multiple Google account support as I do have a number of Google hosted domains each with its own Google account. But 95% of what I do now goes to a single Google account and I have webmail available for the others - there is after all the Google online web access too. Basically Google doesn't have a very compelling story for accessing multiple accounts anywhere, let alone on the phone - you still have to log out and in again and often times it doesn't get that right. I'm expecting when they do find a decent solution it will come to the G1.

If T-Mobile drags its heals over getting software updates to the G1 I'll be very upset, it took them a long time to release the widely available firmware updates for my WinMo phone. Eventually they declined to release the WinMo 6.0 upgrade for it, presumably to encourage people to upgrade to the virtually identical replacement phone they had for it. However I can't believe that Google would let them get away with that - lets hope the upgrades are relatively painless!

One final thing I really, really want to see is caching of maps with the mapping/GPS application. I travel out of cell reception pretty frequently and T-Mobiles network is pretty sparse anyway. So if all that GPS and mapping goodness is useless without a network connection it will be a serious drag. I experience this with Google Maps on my WinMo phone and it is the one thing that starts me thinking about buying a dedicated GPS - something I shouldn't need to do. With the amount of storage you can add to a G1 via a memory card you should be able to pre-load or pre-cache huge amounts of map data and then travel all over. I know that's not how Google Maps is designed to work but it is a must have for making the G1 an extremely useful utility that actually saves you money by not buying other devices. With Google's traffic and search facilities it will always be far and away more powerful than simple GPS - while you have the network connection that is!

Overall pretty much everything can be fixed in software so I really hope it happens. If I was to make my top 3 must have software upgrades for the first firmware rev it would be:

1. A2DP stereo bluetooth
2. Map and POI caching for Google Maps
3. Multi-account support

Mostly for me the "G1" is not about being a fanboy - its more of a technical investigation and I'll also use it as a development platform for apps. If it turns out to suck I will either wait for the next device which I guess will be the "G2" or end up selling it or moving onto some other platform such as a Symbian Linux tablet or the next big WinMo device (the latest HTC sliders are real sweet but way to expensive if purchased unlocked - and T-Mobile just doesn't get the cream of the crop, they always go to AT&T). Lets hope Google and T-Mobile got it right though, and they will continue to improve the device after the launch just as Apple and other have always done.

UPDATE: Apparently after howls of protest across the inter-webs T-Mobile has relented on their 1GB per month cap and promised to come out with a revised usage policy based on fuzzy "don't harm the network or other people's use of it" criteria.