One of my main reasons for getting a new phone was that the iPhone was unable to get a signal in my flat. This is partly because of the construction and materials, and partly because the radios in the iPhone 3G are not particually good. The Desire gets a far better signal than the iPhone does in the same place, with the same SIM.

As an actual phone, they handle much of a muchness. I don’t actually like making phones on a smartphone, I sweat all over the screen, it gets icky and horrible. The Desire and the iPhone are both as good and as bad as each other in this regard. The speakers and microphones work, the quality appears to work, it works as a phone.

The interface is a different thing, though. The android device keeps its “Phoneness” front and centre, with a button labelled “Phone” at the bottom of the home screen. Press it and you get the phone app, complete with last dialled numbers, missed calls and such. Start typing a name in the search box at the top, and it’ll find the number for anything matching that. Press to dial.

Actually, the press-to-dial is the bit that annoys me. Generally, I don’t want to phone someone unless I press a big green button saying “dial”, and I keep – after a couple of months now – accidentally phoning people when I just want to view their contact details – which is what the same action does in the contacts view, which it otherwise resembles – or phoning someone back when I want to find out *when* I missed their call.

The iPhone interface on this is superficially similar, but more consistent. Clicking a contact brings you to the contact’s page, where there’s a clear call-to-action button to dial, message or email. These things seem small and insignificant, but they’re actually most of the big problem with Android (Including Sense) as a interface, all the functionality works, and sometimes works far better than on the iPhone, but even on native apps there are inconsistent reactions, meaning that you have to second thought most actions, think about where you are in the system, before you can do anything.

For example, the Desire has a “Back” button. What does it do? Most of the time it takes you to the screen you were on before you hit this button. “Back”. But that’s contextual, so if you clicked a notification saying “You have one new Twitter mention”, it takes you to the Twitter app (The official one, in this case) and to the page with your mentions on it. You click the mention, it has a URL, you click the URL, you’re in the web browser, you click a link in the web browser and you’re on a new page. Back, you’re on the previous page; Back, you’re on the tweet that mentioned you; Back, you’re on your Twitter mentions; Back, you’re at the home screen again.

However, if you launch twitter from the icon, you get the main menu. Mentions, Tweet, URL, New page. From there, Back to the URL, Back to the mentions, Back to the main menu, back to the home screen. From the “Mentions” page, therefore, you cannot tell what’s going to happen when you press the back button. If you came in from one direction, you get one action; from another place, another action. If you hit the “Web Browser” icon on the desktop, you’ll get the URL from the tweet. Click back from that and you’re at the home screen, consistent user action leads to inconsistent results.

That’s an example, and not one I have a solution for, but because apps define these behaviours, they all do it differently, and even within the core apps it’s not perfect. The aforementioned contacts problem – where tapping a contact might open up more information, or phone them, sometimes text them – is another. Neither are insurmountable problems, but they require someone to treat them as problems and solve them, rather than hope some kind of consistency comes out in the wash.

There’s masses I can do on the Android device that the iPhone can’t even touch. I could have half a dozen different alarm programs going off at different times. I could install an SSH server and run Aquarionics from it. I run IRC connections in the background while I’m websurfing, I can tell what’s using my battery (Maps drinks it). It’s a massively flexible device, but with that seems to come a lack of focus. I can upgrade the memory.

One of my main uses for a “superphone” is as my local music player. For this, the iPhone is great. I already have all my stuff in iTunes, in playlists, smart playlists, podcasts and folders. I tell iTunes that I want these playlists on the iPhone, and it syncs it. As it’s doing so, it installs the latest versions of my apps, trims heard podcasts and installs new ones. The sync is two way, so when I listen to something on the android, it’s marked as “played today” on the playlists, and the smart playlists update with it. If I play a podcast on my phone, it’s marked as listened to.

The default way of sending music to an android device is to drag a folder full of MP3s onto a mass storage device.

The music player finds any MP3s on the storage device and lists them, sorting by album, artist and collection as best as the tags allow, and this is fine.

Doubletwist is great, because it does the one-way sync bit as well as iTunes does, if a lot slower. It imports my playlists as best it can, it manages podcasts to some extent. I understand the problems a lot of people have with iTunes. It’s heavy and hungry, it doesn’t work under linux and it doesn’t even like Windows very much, and it lacks important music management things (like duplicate detection, lists of MP3s it can no longer find, et. al.) but it gets the two way sync right. Doubletwist is getting there, and I hope one day it works as well.

Finally, there’s the future.

Next year, Apple will release the iPhone 5. Anyone who bought an iPhone 4 will feel slightly dejected that their shiny isn’t the shiniest any more, iOS 5 will work on the iPhone 4 (missing some new features), work barely on the iPhone 3GS (maybe) and not at all on the 3G, which will be consigned to the same “unsupported” box that the original iPhone now resides in. Apple will spend from now until then constructing and polishing the unholy alliance of hardware and software they specialise in.

In the time that it took me to get a Desire, HTC had announced several new phones to succeeded it, some of which have launched by now. Some are faster, some have better battery life and some more memory and higher resolution screen. HTC currently appear to be releasing a new set of handsets – bigger, faster, better – every two months, and are significantly less than speedy about releasing the new Android revisions for the older ones.

Froyo – the new Android release – will make my phone feel faster. It’ll give it more features, more things the Android can do that the iPhone can’t. Gingerbread – the one after that – will solve all my problems with the Android interface, giving me a consistent UI I can trust to do what I want it to.

In the future, Androids will conquer the earth. It’s a great system, and it’s open, and it’s a far more flexible base than iOS is. But Android will be great around the corner, the jam will come tomorrow. The iPhone is here now, and it works.

I’m sticking with the Desire, at least for now. I’ve been a bit harsh on it in these articles, in part because it has so much it could be doing much better, but I like the idea of a system I can open up and fiddle with, even if I’m never going to get around to doing so.

If a less technically-minded person wanted a “superphone”, though, I’d recommend the iPhone. It has jam, and it has it in a pot ready to use.

So, a couple of weeks ago, Apple announced that the iPad release date for the UK was delayed. Deprived of my chance of a shiny new gadget, and on top of the news that the new iPhone 4 release Just Won’t Work in most respects on my phone which as of the announcement was only one revision behind current, I gave in, bit the bullet, and bought an HTC Desire on a non-contract basis. Starting now, I’m going to bring together my thoughts on the differences. Some of these things are a perspective thing, possibly. I’ve been using an iPhone for close to two years, and the Android for less than a month. On the other hand, my Android device is brand new, and my iPhone is nearly two revisions out of date.

Unboxing

Around two years ago, I eventually got an iPhone. Apple’s industrial design goes all the way to the box, which is made of high quality cardboard, opens easily, and feels high quality. The Desire box clearly takes inspiration from it, although with a more traditional – for phones – slide out packaging. One of the neat things about the apple box is the way the inside of the top is padded where it touches the screen, avoiding the need for cheap plastic film to protect it in transit. The HTC box is still a step above most phone boxes, however.

Out of the box, the iPhone turns on, and contains a semi-charged battery.

Out of the box, once you’ve taken the back off, installed the battery (and memory card if you need one), the Desire also turns on and contains a semi-charged battery. The Desire’s back case removal seems flimsy and breakable, and while you’re only going to need to remove it for rare things – new sim, new memory card, swapping batteries – it’s something of a point of worry. Maybe it’s more sturdy than I credit it for.

The iPhone box contains a special glorified pin for poking into the hole to eject the battery and install the sim.

From a usability point of view, the iPhone wins this. Putting aside the argument about user-replaceable batteries and memory cards (That’ll come later) getting the HTC from box to turn-on was faffy and required dealing with cheap, plasticky components that made me feel like I was breaking the phone. Not a wonderful start, however:

First Boot

I turned on the Android device. I was taken though a slightly under-brief tutorial on how to use the on-screen keyboard (it’s interesting that Apple don’t do this. They give you a keyboard, and expect their usability design to do the rest. The Android keyboard is almost exactly the same, but they don’t trust their own design enough to expect you to be able to use it. On the alternate, the “hold to select special symbols” functionality is explicitly covered in the tutorial, and is the one thing iPhone users used to miss. The 3GS may have fixed this somehow). During a setup wizard thing, I gave it my Google Apps account details and the wifi password, and it slurped down my contacts and emails. It asked for twitter, flickr and facebook accounts, and I gave it these too, and then it slurped down contact photos from facebook for anyone who put their mobile numbers into their profile. It showed me how to use the wigetized home screen, and then left me to it.

I turned on the iPhone. It demanded to be connected to iTunes. I was on a train, and my computer was far away. I turned it back off, put it in its box, in its bag, and sat quietly reading my new phone contract until I got home.

Advantage Android, I feel.

Once home, and the phone was connected to iTunes, it ran roughly the same as the android thing without the tutorial (There’s a mini-tutorial in a manual that comes with it). I used NuevaSync to treat my google account as an exchange account, which gave me all the automatic syncing I mentioned above (There’s now a way to do this natively using Google, but it never worked for me as well as Nueva does). The Facebook app for iPhone does the contact picture syncing I mentioned (and by the same method, linking contacts to facebook profiles via a “fb://$fbid” URL in the “URLs” section).

Sync or Swim

One of my primary uses for my phone is as a media player, so I wish to be able to sync my music and videos as painlessly as possible. All my music already being in iTunes (with complicated inter-layered automatic playlists, like “Stuff you rate highly but haven’t listened to in a while, plus some new, unrated, stuff.”) iTunes sync is most handy. By default, Android’s music, video and podcast sync is the most old-school thing imaginable, mount as USB device, drag, drop. This works, but has no real “sync” support. Better is DoubleTwist, an app that is  attempting to make music sync on the Android as painless as the iPhone. It has successfully imported my iTunes playlists (mostly. No folder support, and imports automatic playlists as flat) and synced the ones I selected across. It even supports updating podcasts, though it appears to put them straight into the music application and there’s no tracking of what’s been listened to or not. There’s no two-way syncing at all, in fact. Also, Doubletwist is slower than wading though frozen treacle.

Given that the iPhone inherits a lot of this structure from the iPods, it’s no real suprise that being able to sync your own music and song metadata to and from the device is one of the iPhone’s highlights, but the rest of the industry has had eight years to make this stuff even slightly more palatable than dragging files hither and yon; and to launch a “competitor” to the iPhone while thinking that this stuff in any way doesn’t matter is just astoundingly stupid. That Android even needs Doubletwist to exist is proof that Google have missed much of what made the iPhone quite so popular, and even if it didn’t there’s more.

End of part one

Coming up: The phone as a phone, actually using the phone, using it as a media player, apps, app stores, app markets, and WHY THE FUCK HASN’T ANDROID MARKET GOT AN “INSTALL ALL UPDATES BUTTON?”

Soon.

Depite my great and brand new phone and its wonderous open-sorcery, I still don’t hate Apple.

I mean, I assume my new phone is great, as I write this it still hasn’t arrived.

I said, at the end of that article, that the choice of whether I wanted to waste my battery life is mine, the choice of what I install on my computer is mine. This is because I am a geek, and it matters to me.

I actually believe that there is not a right to tinker. In fact, having worked Desktop Support for a while in both professional and power-user contexts, I am firmly of the opinion that the right to tinker by someone who “knows better” than the guy who set up the system is, sometimes, to be nuked. From orbit. Twice.

In fact, the concept of giving a barely-computer-literate a machine that will work one way, can do the things it should do and also let them change the wallpaper, is a Very Good Idea, because it would minimise the amount of time I, or someone like me, spent on the phone or in a dusty back-office attempting to work out how to revirginise the PC in front of me.

(My favourite, ever, was a machine with a Windows 2000 install where they had infected it with a couple of buckets of spyware, and then ran out of diskspace as the porn-bot-net it was running filled up the hard drive. They had then seen the “Compress Drive” option when looking for ways of gaining space back. As a result, you had a PC running out of memory, where all its swap files needed to be decompressed in memory before access. It ran like almsot frozen blackstrap molasses)

One of the favourite metaphors surrounding the closedness of the iPhone & iPad ecosystems (For those of you playing at home, the iPad and iPhone can only get software via the “App Store”, which required apple vet every piece of software available. The vetting process is currently inconsistant, which is bad, but there is no other way to install stuff, which people see as worse) is that of the car engine, and how this turns the computer industry from the old days where you could see where all the bits went, into the modern car industry where everything is hermatically sealled under a plastic case. The complaint is that the barrier to tinker with your stuff is now higher.

I can accept some of this. I have been tinkering with computers for longer than I can remember. one of my earliest memories is crawling along the carpet to behind the sofa, and pressing the magic button on the white thing that made the numbers go to zero. This – I found out many years later – was the tape counter on a Commadore 64. My first computer was this same C64, where the entire interface *was* a Basic input shell. Shift Run-Stop, Press Play on Tape. I can see how people would say that this meant more people would become computer programmers when they grew up, but I think we’ve already passed that. With PCs up until Windows 95 and the Rise of the Mac, you *had* to learn the basic concepts of computer command lines to use them, be it the ability to type “cd games\Doom” “doom2″ or the inner workings of the config.sys file on the boot disk you created for when you wanted to play Theme Park.

The rise of GUIs pushed a lot of the people who would have become programmers, I think, to having their first experience of source code to be HTML. It just shifts a bit, and if it means that people do not have to understand how a computer works in order to use it, that’s possibly even better. To continue the car simile for a bit, it’s not as if the rise of BMW-type sealled engine blocks entirely removed the people who know how your car works. I’m pretty sure that the people with the mental tendancy to tinker with code aren’t going to be put off forever because their phone or their video player doesn’t compile things for them, as they’ll gravitate to the ones that do, and if it means that I can know my non-existant Uncle Martin has bought an iPad and I won’t be spending the 27^th December scrubbing spyware from it, so much to the better.

The story of Flash on the iPhone is interesting.

I don’t want flash on my iPhone, to be honest, and I don’t want it for all the reasons Steve Jobs said in his essay yesterday. Firefox is a lot more stable if you don’t install flash, so is Chrome. Apple say that Flash is the number one reason for crash reports in OS X.

However, I said in my last thoughts on the subject that the iPhone isn’t very ideologically sound. I cut out the paragraph explaining that, because it distracted from the main point, but it’s probably worthwhile anyway. One of the main complaints about the iPhone from both a metaphorical software point of you and a literal hardware perspective, is that that it lives in a hermatically sealed environment. Partly, this is a function a phone OS developed in the US mobile market, which has always been more closed than the European one. You can make less hermetically sealled by jailbreaking it, but the process of Jailbreaking an iPhone is basically a three-shell game with firmware revisions, and if this doesn’t go 100% smoothly you may end up with a phone that no longer has any concept of such things as “how to respond to the on switch”. Apple’s approach appears to be to make this three-shell game slightly more complicated – more out of due-diligence to the phone companies who say you can’t run custom software on a phone than because they hate us – but every so often do things like rewrite the entire bootloader to make it 30% faster, with the side effect that there are now *five* shells and two of them are made out of explosives.

All of this is because most of the US phone network is built of sticky-back plastic, string, hope and tangerines; and this has traditionally lead to the US phone networks making an absolute – and somewhat paranoid – ruling that nothing not personally signed off by the network could be executed on a phone , just in case it went ballywacky and managed to bring down the entire local phone network (GSM, the mobile phone network protocol we use in Europe and that is beginning to take hold in the states, has a couple more safeguards). This has existed since days of Java apps. The years before the iPhone, where people could grab java games and apps and put them on their phone? The US missed 90% of that, because building an app for java in the states meant submitting every new build (and a java app needs to have several different builds for each version, because no two phones have the same capabilities) though an expensive, arbitrary and somewhat brittle certification process *per network* whose phones you wanted to run on. This is why the iPhone was such a revelation to the US market, it was a phone that didn’t suck on a fundamental level (Most .eu phones – being GSM – didn’t make it to the states. The most popular phone up until the iPhone there was, I believe, the Motorola Razr, which is a device with a user interface that actively wishes you to THROW THE PHONE UPON THE FLOOR AND STAMP ON IT WITH MIGHTY BOOTS).

Anyway, the upshot of this was that the iPhone had no capability to add software on launch – it was scary enough as it was for AT&T, being a phone they didn’t have enough control over – but even when they added the App Store for revision 2 it had no hooks for it to take over any of the phone’s basic features. In fact, the App Store official policy states that you cannot post to the store any app that duplicates existing iPhone functionality, and even if you could, there simply aren’t the “hooks” in the system to say “When you get a phone call, run this app instead of Phone”, or even “Use this app instead of the email client”.

Most of the reason for that appears to be control-freakery. Apple’s primary selling point is simplicity of use, that you do not need to know how to work it to work it, and stopping an arbitary app you install from being able to modify what happens when you click on an email address in an SMS is part of it. There is a way that an iPhone works, and this is it, everything else is in its own little sandbox.

Recently, they’ve made steps towards building a climbing frame in the sandbox that things have to build upon. The idea of an app that works the same on Android as on Palm as on iPhone isn’t good for them, because it won’t follow the UI guidelines for iPhone applications in order that, by having used an iPhone application, you roughly know what this button on this other application is going to do. This is actually important to Apple, which is part of the reason they put the block on cross-compiling applications. I agree with this, for the most part. The easist route for an app *should* be the one that follows the UI guidelines for what they are releasing it on, and doesn’t look entirely out of place on the phone.

However, it should be a fence. A short fence, white picket, which can – if necessary – be stepped over. It should not be a wall. For example, Safari and iTunes for Windows both look exactly the same as their Apple counterparts. Partly because maintaining one lot of code is easier, partly because they’re adverts for how shiny a real mac would look. They both follow some guidelines – the window manipulation buttons aren’t arbitary trafic lights, the application closes when you press the close button (not just the window), iTunes even integrates with the taskbar to provide a mini-player when minimised, if you want it to. Microsoft didn’t block iTunes from Windows because it looks entirely out of place (Which is fortunate, otherwise they’d have had to block Steam, Xfire, Winamp, Sonique, and thousands of apps down the line, including Office 2010. Also IE8).

So, basically, it’s not your decision, Steve. It should be mine.

That’s why I’ve just ordered an HTC Desire. I may go back to the iPhone, but at least this way I can pick my own variety of battery drain for a while.

I have an iPhone.

I didn’t get a first version iPhone, partly because I wasn’t convinced. I got a 3G one once they came out, and it’s a thing I require now. I have gone somewhat beyond the first stage of iPhonicness, where there is no moment where you are sitting down and not playing with it. I still play, obviously, but I attempt to put it away occasionally.

Anyway, my contract on it ran out in January, so I’ve been thinking about an upgrade, and because I am a geek I’ve been looking at Android phones, and with the HTC Desire, I think I have found a winner for my next phone.

It’s an iPhone.

The Android phones are nice, in fact they’re pretty awesome. The UI is progressing in leaps and bounds, and the hardware is getting more and more impressive. That’s actually part of the problem, in fact. When I started thinking “I need to get a new phone, what can Android get me now?” it was the Droid – the Milestone, when it was eventually released here – and then as my contract expired, Google announced the Nexus one. I thougt originally that the release date of the Nexus One was a cool bit of timing, exactly 18 months after the release of the iPhone 3G, which was the standard contract length O2 were offering for it. I was ready to sign up, switch to T-Mobile, and go. But it didn’t release here, only in the US. It may have released here by now, but I no longer care, because the upgraded model, better in every respect, has launched in the form of the HTC Desire.

That, from the Droid to the Nexus One to the Desire, is three major leaps in Android hardware in nine months, and I will be really unsuprised if another one isn’t announced in June, around the same time the new iPhone is announced.

The iPhone isn’t perfect. I mean, physically it pretty much is, and technologically it’s awesome too, but it’s not ideologically sound. The closed in hardware and software model is not one I like, but to be entirely honest for a device that I will be quite literally using and relying on every single day, I care a great deal about the UI, and the joined-up-ness of the software, but I do also care about the openness. A bit.

I’m also literally invested in the Apple platform, having bought a number of Apps over the last 22 months.

In July, the new iPhone OS 4 will be released, and many of the new features won’t work with my phone. Importantly, Multitasking won’t, because it has half the processing power and memory of the current model iPhone (and probably a quarter of what the next model up will have). But for a year, it was the best model available and would run everything. One of the standard anti-mac-fanboy rants is that there’s an upgraded model out before you’ve bought the current one, but if I buy the new iPhone in June, I can be pretty sure it’ll be the best iPhone for at least a year, and a supported platform for another after that. If I bought an Android phone today, it’ll not be able to run the newest stuff in six months time – possibly including OS updates – and by the time an 18 month contract expires I’ll be eight revisions behind, assuming advancements at current rates.

But we shall see what the next announcement will bring.