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We’ve all read and seen iPhone reviews. Even non-iPhone users could probably review the phone and point out its obvious pros and cons without messing with it too much. I’ve had my iPhone 3G[S] for nearly a month. Do I love it? Meh. It was exciting at first but the excitement is dying. However, I do like to take care of it to keep it looking sexy. I could go on and on about the pros of the phone but I think they’re all pretty obvious, so I’m going to go into the flaws I’ve found over the past month. I should mention that initially I was thinking of buying an N97 but after seeing the unboxing, it was rather unimpressive. Someone said it best with: “Once you get past the N97’s new home screen, you’re back in Symbian hell”. The main reason to switch is its simplistic UI. I was sick of performing so many steps on my N95 for simple tasks. Anyway, let’s begin:

Flash (in more ways than one)

No doubt Adobe Flash is a widely adopted interactive web technology. It’s been around since the 90’s and powers most of the video that you see online. Since day one, Apple has  said that Flash is coming. Adobe developed it and apparently the submission was shot down by Apple for draining the battery. This saga has gone back and forth several times and to this day Flash still hasn’t made it into Mobile Safari, nor is there any decent way of hacking it in with a jailbroken iPhone.

Lack of a camera flash leaves the new and improved 3.2MP Auto Focusing camera useless in imperfect light situations. Photos look grainy and dark. Even in good-ish situations, pictures are more grainy than they should be. The camera sucks compared to its competitors. Nokia’s cameras are now up to the 8MP range with a decent Xenon flash and Carl Zeiss lens. Unfortunately, the operating system and form factor in Nokia’s devices just isn’t there and they seem to be going in the wrong direction.

Oh, and that front facing camera? Nonexistent. Fortunately, that doesn’t bother me too much. I never used 3G video chats and I don’t really have much use for it, but Skype/iChat video calls may be sort of useful?

User Interface Inconsistencies

The iPhone is praised for its excellent User Interface. The simplistic and its multitouch screen is fairly intuitive, but if you look at some of the implementations, they’re just down right silly. Sometimes you swipe to delete, sometimes it’s tap to delete. Sometimes you can switch to landscape mode, sometimes you’re suck in portrait mode. The Calendar icon on Springboard updates every day but the Weather icon does not. Apparently it’s 23 and Sunny every day! I guess I’m nitpicking here but I feel that some of the features of the iPhone are hidden behind inconsistencies or unexplained touch gestures.

For example, the Maps application. How do you get to Street View? Sometimes the “little orange man button” is unavailable. Why? Because your pin isn’t EXACTLY on top of the road. You’d have to drop a pin on your location THEN enter street view. The new Compass feature in Maps requires you to tap the Location button twice. How is this feature indicated to the user? I wouldn’t have known about it if I hadn’t watched the WWDC keynote. Maybe it’s in the manual somewhere, but who reads them?!

Landscape mode is incredibly inconsistent. I hear 3.0 added landscape mode to a lot of the native applications but I still find it to be inconsistent. I personally find it essential for me to type faster as two thumbs makes it way easier to type however, I’ve also heard of users that can’t stand landscape. The N95 enabled landscape mode in every application. Applications on the N95 didn’t have to specifically support it, but could optimize for it if they wished. I guess this may make the user experience less desirable, but I hate having to rotate my phone every few seconds. Not to mention the incredibly insensitive accelerometer. Trying to get the phone to specifically turn from landscape to portrait is often a frustrating task.

Settings for Applications are also all over the place. Some are located in the official Settings App, some in the application itself. If you forget to check the either you often miss out on a ton of features.

Grip / Scratches

The back of the iPhone is incredibly slippery. I feel this thing is always about to slip out of my hands and land a giant scratch on the screen. Many were disappointed that the rumored mate back for the 3GS didn’t happen and I can certainly see why. The back scratches extremely easily even when handling the phone with care. I’ve gone to the effort to ensure I’ve never put the phone in my pocket with keys and coins but alas, it’s still scratched. The screen however, has no scratches whatsoever (and it gets fondled far more often). The oleophobic screen seems to certainly help wipe ear grease off the screen with a simple wipe on your pants, maybe that’s helping with the scratches too?

The form factor is also unnatural. It looks great but feels so awkward in your hand. To operate it you really need two hands (one holding and other hand as a finger(s) stylus) unless you have really big hands. If you do happen to use one hand, swiping your thumb from left to right often results in thumb cramps. Maybe I just haven’t got the leet skillz yet. Landscape mode, one hand, impossible.

Getting Work Done

I’m one that does a lot on their phone. Remote desktop, SSH, Mail, RSS, IM, Gaming, Music, the lot. I’ve had the phone for less than a month and I already have 9 pages of Apps. Getting work done on this phone isn’t easy, and there’s several reasons why:

Springboard organization sucks. 9 pages of Apps and no categorization makes it hard to navigate efficiently. The 3.0 update brings Spotlight-like Search which allows you to launch an Application by typing its name. It is the only way of getting around your unorganized clump of applications. If you do happen to need to browse applications, you’ll spend a lot of time organizing the applications on each page. You’ll be frustrated by the fact that moving an application around the Sprinboard can randomly move other applications if you don’t perform the finger gesture perfectly. Not to mention, syncing and backing up your phone does not save the positions of your Applications on the Springboard. For example, if you you need to do a Restore, iTunes will sync  just about everything except the way you organized your Springboard. Re-placing your Apps on the Springboard, when you have a lot, is time consuming. This is one area with simplicity is not always best.

Joshua Topolsky from Engadget wrote an excellent article stating why the iPhone sucks for doing work. It basically comes down to:

• A crappy touch keyboard
• Too many notifications
• No background tasks

If I’m working in a Remote Desktop application I shouldn’t have to cut my connection, head back to the Springboard, find the other application I need, head back to the Springboard, open up the original application and reconnect. I should be able to switch between them with some sort of task switcher. But what about Backgrounder for jailbroken iPhones? Sure. It solves part of the problem, but it doesn’t solve the excessive amount of time I have to spend going in and out of Springboard to get to other applications.

Notifications for the iPhone often interrupt what you’re doing, and again, you must sever the connection in your current application to open the application that issued the notification…and then back again. Complicated much? Backgrounding isn’t even a necessity here. Perhaps a way to access often used applications without having to head back to the Springboard every time would be a good enough solution

The lack of an accessible file system also makes it hard to get things done. You can’t save files from say… Mail, then use it in another application such as, QuickOffice (a Word/Excel document editor). Applications are sandboxed to ensure one application can’t access another’s data. Sure, that can be great for security, but it significantly hinders your efficiency to get things done and share data, like attachments and such, between applications. No USB storage is also a bit of a bummer but overcome by the fact that you can use ad-hoc wireless networks and SSH to grab files off your device. What ever happened to To-Do List Exchange syncing? Sigh.

Oh, and battery life. It sucks. 4-5 hours of normal to heavy use. 6 if you’re lucky. It can barely make it throughout the day, which currently has me looking at battery pack cases. Standby time? Excellent, 12 hours of standby drains about 8-10%. Do the math.

The App Store / iTunes

Is full of junk Apps. No doubt there is some excellent gems in the store but they are usually hidden behind stupid soundboard-farting applications or bubble wrap popping games. Free applications are often filled with advertising unless you fork out money for the “ad-free” / “pro” version. Can you really believe there’s a “pro” version of the Bubble Wrap game?! Or that the “More Cowbell” application costs $1.99?! You’ve got to be kidding me right? Those ads in the “free” / “lite” versions make the sexy iPhone UI… unattractive. Some of the better applications are priced ridiculously. $30 for a Remote Desktop application? I think not. In the end, you’re probably going to be spending about $100+ on top of your original iPhone costs to get the features you really want, legitimately.

Not to mention there’s no trial apps. You have to trust the sometimes misleading application description that has been placed there by the developer. Or just pirate it. All hail Appulous.

I used to be an iTunes hater and to an extent, I still am. I hate how it’s a memory hog and launches 3 or 4 background applications just to do its thing however, I was impressed by its ease of use, sorta. It will never handle my music library (Windows Explorer ftw) as I refuse it to add cover art or touch my ID3 tags of my original files. I found a few things that bugged me in iTunes:

• When tagging music: sometimes tracks don’t appear as part of an album as they aren’t tagged correctly. Fair enough, but you can’t drag that track into the album like you could with Zune. You have to manually edit the tag. Such effort.
• XP x64 isn’t supported! You can apply some hacks and get it mostly working, but if you need Recovery or DFU mode, you’ve gotta move to a supported OS.
• Now, I’m not sure if it’s because I’m using an unsupported OS but the UI can often be laggy. Clicking on a section or button can render the application unresponsive for 2-3 seconds. This often results in a click-fest and iTunes opening a NEW window for the section you wanted, without switching to the section on the main window. I guess it might be hard to understand the frustration in this unless it happens to you.

Vodafone? Or is it Bluetooth Tethering?

I went with Vodafone for Visual Voicemail. Yes, I said it, voicemail. I hardly use the feature but my state of mind at the time was “well, I may as go with someone that unlocks all the capabilities of my new phone”. Three were out of the question due to their excessive roaming data charges and me being on the border of a 3G zone. Optus charged excessively for their tethering options and Telstra’s offerings were excessively priced.

At my house I often get “No Service” and I find that 3G coverage can be patchy. Maybe patchy is a bad description, it’s more like “no 3G when you think there should be 3G”. Disappointing. Though, I hear I can enable national roaming to roam to Telstra’s network and calls still be included in my cap, which I may enable (data not included :/).

However, that’s not the problem I want to express. I’m not sure if I can blame Vodafone on this issue, yet. I do use XP x64, which is unsupported, and I may very well have some dodgy Bluetooth drivers, but Internet access over Bluetooth tethering is practically non existent and I can’t figure out why. ICMP pings to sites work perfectly and in a timely manner but loading a webpage or connecting to MSN shows HUGE delays or complete unresponsiveness. A brief inspection with Wireshark showed that packets were often being retransmitted which I believe is the cause of the problem. I am yet to try USB, so I can’t blame Vodafone, yet, but if it is Vodafone, I am one sad-panda. I should note that website loading on the actual phone is very responsive (and I’m sure they’re both using the same APN), so I’m not sure what’s up. I should also note that my N95 worked perfectly over Bluetooth as a modem, however, this is Bluetooth as a Personal Area Network. Maybe something’s going on there. Will test more later.

And finally…Accelerometer Gaming

One of the first games that was showcased by Apple and used the accelerometer was SEGA’s Super Monkey Ball. A game where you guide a monkey, in a ball, to collect bananas while avoiding obstacles by tilting your phone. Cool game. There’s also Time Crisis, the good ol’ arcade shooter by NAMCO, ported to the iPhone. Tap to shoot and tilt to reload. Both are excellent games with a huge flaw: They refuse to take your current holding position of the iPhone as the “center” for the accelerometer. What do I mean by that? Both games assume that you’re holding your iPhone at a particular angle and to calibrate the accelerometer, they often ask to place your iPhone on a flat surface, faced up.This is all well and good if you’re sitting normally and have the screen titled optimally but if you’re laying down or in a different position it often leads to frustration.

In the case of Super Monkey Ball, you often find yourself moving backwards because the most comfortable position for yourself conflicts with its calibration, or vice versa, you find yourself tilting the screen away from you so that you can’t even see what the hell is going on in the game. Problem is that the game refuses to calibrate unless they’re on a flat surface or even worse, has absolutely no calibration options. A huge let down for games with extremely fun potential.

Overall? I feel like my N95 can still “do more” even if it may be through a convoluted UI. I would not buy “iPhone 4.0″. Android, WinMo 7 and Maemo are certainly looking good. Unfortunately, even at 3.0, the phone still needs homebrew applications. And until I think of more….I’m done here.

Edit: Oh yeah, FM Radio. I sort of give up there. There’s an excellent application called Wunder Radio which lists practically all your stations as web streams using Location services. Pretty cool. You can also get add-ons from Griffin Technology that plug in and add the functionality but I think Internet radio and Backgrounder will do as a substitute to FM Radio.

I’ve had it up to here *raises hand* with a certain “feature” of Firefox. Firefox being one of the most popular and feature-filled browser out there today it’s nearly impossible to switch to an alternative if you’re a heavy web user. The “add-ons”, previously extensions, is what keeps me using Firefox. I couldn’t live without the extra functionality, whether it be for development or just every day browsing. Safari, IE and Opera just don’t have the same extensibility as Firefox. However, Firefox’s most attractive feature is also it’s downfall.

Why? Well, firstly and most obviously…the browser is still fucking slow when compared to any alternative (except maybe IE). The add-ons slow the browser to a crawl which makes starting the browser from a fresh start extremely painful. Of course, this is hardly comparable to alternative browsers seeing as they extensible functionality is significantly less…

But that’s not my problem. My problem is that Firefox INSISTS on checking for add-on updates, updates to incompatible add-ons  and/or installing new add-ons before the fucking browser opens. Add this extra time to the already painful initial loading time and it becomes infuriating when in a rush to browse to something that you need ASAP. Let me set out several different scenarios:

1. You have a  slow netbook. You occasionally use it to browse the web. Due to this Firefox nearly always checks for add-ons since a certain amount of time has elapsed to check for updated versions. It takes ages to load the browser due to the low processing power in the netbook AS WELL as the time to check for updates.
2. You use Firefox in different connection scenarios. Sometimes you have to use a proxy. Sometimes you have a direct connection. Sometimes the proxy is unavailable (because you are no longer at a location) and need to change connection settings. The update dialog pops up and starts auto-checking for updates. It timeout-fails because the proxy is unavailable, BUT YOU CANNOT CHANGE THE CONNECTION SETTINGS BECAUSE YOU CAN’T TILL THE MAIN BROWSER POPS UP.
3. You are on the go. You have a Mobile Internet connection. It happens to be in a 2.5G area and Internet is slow. Firefox insists on checking for updates and begins to download them. Not only is it using your Internet quota but it’s fucking slow because of your current connection speed. You are ON THE GO, YOU WANT THE PAGE NOW, not after some useless add-on has updated.
4. You want to load a local HTML file. You have NO connectivity. Firefox add-on update timeout-fails. I just want to view the OFFLINE file.
5. You just finished updating your add-ons (finally). You are now bombarded by millions of tabs that you didn’t want (and it slowed your browser load time)….just to be told that the add-on (you don’t really care about) has been updated! Fuck. Off. I guess this is more directed at developers than Mozilla.

I’m all for updating things, whether it be for features, compatibility or security, but this add-on update dialog has to be fixed. CHECK FOR UPDATES AFTER YOU LOAD THE FUCKING BROWSER. FUCK. I WANT THE PAGE NOW, NOT 1 MINUTE LATER.

Oh, and get off your arses and pass the ACID 3 test.

That is all.

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.5/ gogogog

Here it is: the Optus iPhone 3GS pricing

It also happens to include new pricing for the iPhone 3G, due to the new US$99 price point, and charges for tethering your iPhone in the 3.0 firmware.

The plans are….mediocre at best. The original 3G plans were far better value for money. Optus now charge you a $9.99 just to tether your phone (or use your phone’s data allowance as modem allowance) which is frankly, crap. I’m looking to buy an iPhone 3GS, and I will, though I have no idea which provider I will use. Vodafone have yet to announce their plans and Three say they won’t have plans till July, which I’m not waiting for. Since Vodafone and Three are partially linked now, it’s possible you won’t see Vodafone plans till July either (or maybe not). Telstra are clearly out of the question due to their rip-off prices. Then there’s also Virgin Mobile…which practically are Optus. Their plans seem to be far better value for money, but there’s been absolutely no announcement of plans as of yet.

So, what sort of pricing am I looking at? Lets see…

$59 Cap + $14 handset + $9.99 tethering = $82.99

That’s nearly as much as I’m paying for my N95 8GB (I purchased it as soon as it came out) and Optus would only give me 700MB (* for a limited time…usually only 500MB) of data, compared to my 1GB on Three. I could limit my budget:

$49 Cap + $19 handset + $9.99 tethering = $77.99

But as you can see, price difference is minimal due to the increased cost of the handset (and over 24 months, sigh). That option would give 450MB of data (* for a limited time…usually only 250MB). Which I don’t think will be enough for me.

Coupled with the fact that it’s over 24 months…is a hard decision. You could always go ahead and jailbreak the phone and hope like hell that you could “hack” the tethering option to try and get free tethering…but then you’re in violation of your contract and risk a disconnection. This hasn’t been reported yet, as you can’t jailbreak a 3GS, yet, and they aren’t out in Australia, yet. How would this work? Well, the only way Optus could tell whether or not your using tethering is to assign the modem part of your phone to a different “Access Point” (or APN). Therefore, your phone will use one APN for when you use Apps on your phone, and a different APN when you using tethering. Currently, if you jailbreak a 3G you CAN change the APN of the tethering APN to equal the phone APN. This is how users are currently using their phones with free tethering on Optus (and other Australian providers). The only possible way for Optus to track this would be by analyzing network data. For example, the phone may use a certain TTL on packets but your laptop (or whatever you’re tethering your phone to) may use a different TTL.

Which brings me to my next point. The 3GS is not yet jailbroken. I sure hope it can be, and no doubt there’s a huge hacker base out there to eventually do it, but, I’ll be disapointed if jailbreaking for the 3GS is not out by the Australian release date, June 26th. Also, I’d love to know exactly how Voice Dialing works….with the jailbreak application, Backgrounder. As far as I know, Voice Dialing is activated by holding the “home” button on the iPhone….Backgrounder also works by holding the “home” button. How will this conflict work out? Well, I guess we’ll know soon enough. Without Backgrounder, I think I may be worse off.

June 2007. The month of Project Halcyon. It’s 2009, most of the warrenties are up, what survived? what didn’t?

What died:

• SilverStone Zeus ST85ZF 850W Power Supply, DoA
• Western Digital Raptor 150GB Hard Disk, 1 DoA, 2 RMA Later
• ASUS P5K Deluxe/WiFi-AP Motherboard (details), Replaced with another faulty board, gave up and bought a Gigabyte EP-45-EXTREME
• XFX NVIDIA 8800 Ultra xXx Edition – Started to artifact, RMAed, replaced with a GTX260
• 2 (of 4) Corsair 1GB Dominator XMS2-8500C5D, gave up, replaced with OCZ RAM (damn MSY and their lack of Corsair stock)
• Logitech Z-5500D Speakers, Control Unit died, RMAed, should be replaced Monday

What didn’t die?

• Intel Core2 Quad Extreme QX6700
• Creative X-Fi Fata1ty
• LG DVD Burner
• LiteOn DVD Burner
• Gainward NVIDIA 8500GT (Fanless)
• Hitatchi Deskstar 7K1000 (1TB) x2

That’s a pretty short list of things that survived…

And that’s just the parts that I purchased for my Desktop PC. What else went wrong?

• Dell XPS-M1330’s heatsink/fan began to make loud noises, replaced next day on site
• Dell XPS-M1330’s hard disk is significantly slower and casuing BSODs, yet to be replaced
• Bang & Olufsen earphones, left ear goes very dull. Replaced for free, then the left ear goes dead. Replaced with SuperFi 5 Pros…
• Ultimate Ears SuperFi 5 pro earphone wire splits, purchased a new wire, but pulling the wire pulled out the internals of the earphones. RMAed, waiting for a new pair
• Random generic microphone, started making lots of noise, $5 replacement. Meh

If there’s one person that’s sick of parts dying, it’s me. Once get my speakers and earphones fixes, the only thing I have left to fix up is my laptop’s hard disk. How I’m going to convince Dell to replace it, as it still sort of works, is beyond me, for now.

• Flash
• Front Facing Camera
• Improved Camera
• Video Support
• Compass
• Turn-by-turn Directions (with TomTom)
  
• Downloadable Maps (with Tom Tom)
• Background Applications (?, Well, Jailbreaking partially does it)
• FM Tuner
• BT Obex (with Jailbreak)
• Voice Control
  
• Document Management (with QuickOffice)

So, I really can’t decide. It’s a pitty that the refreshed hardware didn’t include a front facing camera for iChat/3G conferencing or an FM Tuner (even though the chipset can apparently send and receive FM signals, interesting). However, with 3.0’s support for 3rd-party hardware, perhaps a small FM tuner is an option, much like the iPod addon (which doesn’t work with the iPhone or iPod Touch). There’s still the lack of decent background applications, but I’m starting to wonder if that’s less of a big deal now. Then there’s always the  lack of Flash, but, maybe it’ll come sooner, than later, due to the extended battery and improved speed (seeing as Apple complained that Flash was too CPU heavy). Oh decisions. Either way it’d be on Optus, probably a 1 year contract.

With WWDC ‘09 around the corner, hype around the Nokia N97 and Palm Pre is really diminishing compared to…the iPhone. I’ve been on record saying that the iPhone lacks major features that other smartphones have had for quite some time….here, and here.

I write this completely utterly useless post here to say that my stance is…slowly changing *shock horror*. I’ve been trying to convince myself that maybe buying an iPhone wouldn’t be that bad. With 3.0 around the corner, and possibly new hardware, it may very well be a decent buy to replace my N95. Frankly, I’m a tad fed up with trying to perform time-criticalish tasks (like finding a route with GPS) because of slow software or convoluted user interfaces. I’ve always thought that features significantly outweigh ease of use, and to some point, I still sort of do, but 3.0 is starting to get there.

I’ve gone back to my list of “things the iPhone doesn’t have” and tried to weed out things that either a) I’d probably never use, b) Can be sorta done with jailbreaking c) Are now in 3.0 and d) Has an App Store or Hardware add-on alternative…and we have this:

1. Flash! There’s been talk about this since 2007! Promises that it’d be here “very soon” in 2008. The saga still continues for 2009. Flash in Safari is practically a must have.
2. Background applications – There was a very recent rumour that Apple was actually thinking about allowing background applications, with some limitations. A limitation of two simultaneous applications and/or the application must be tested against Apple’s defined resource usage criteria. Backgrounder, for jailbroken iPhones can do this…although I’m sceptical how well it works. I’d love to borrow an iPhone/iPod Touch for a few days to test this out.
3. A decent camera. 3MP+ We might be in luck here for the next revision of hardware.
4. USB Storage Area. Unfortunately, we’ll never see this. Using your iPhone as a USB storage device isn’t really going to be an option, even with jailbreaking it. Fortunately, you can store and send files with Bluetooth OBEX if you have jailbroken it. I guess it’s not that big of a deal, who wants to carry around that silly proprietary dock connector anyway?!

So, OK. But what will we likely see at WWDC? I don’t know, but these things have been thrown out there to be reasonably credible:

• New iPhone hardware – 3.2MP, 32GB Flash. 256MB RAM, 600MHz CPU
• 3.0 Final
• Snow Leopard updates?

I’m hoping for more (on the software side of things). There has been some features that have been found by digging around in the 3.0 betas, but not been announced. This includes: Video recording, Voice Dialling and a Compass. I have a feeling we won’t see these at WWDC, though. Some think there’s some sort of tablet or iPhone Nano coming, but I highly doubt it.

If I see an updated camera and background applications, I think the next-gen iPhone is the way to go. Flash will come eventually, I guess it’s just a waiting game. No doubt I’ll be buying the FM Tuner, if the new generation doesn’t have one, and replacing my Zune with it.

So I’ve been told that there is apparently NO ART IN COOKING TWO MINUTE NOODLES. I somewhat disagree. I’ve also been told that Mi Goreng is now way cooler than the good ol’ Maggi noodles due to the innovation of suppling abillion and different flavours in one packet. Well you’re clearly all wrong. I am currently writing my awesome cooking secrets with no sleep for the past 24+ hours…and was even motivated to cook myself the “10 Minute Noodles” because they’re JUST THAT GOOD. If you’re looking for a low fat version of 2 Minute Noodles, turn back now.

What do you need?

• A Stove and Pot. Microwaves just aren’t gonna cut it.
• Water!
• Dull Flavoured Maggi 2 Minute Noodles. Chicken or Oriental work best. Chicken & Corn and Beef, not so much. I couldn’t find the awesome Cheese flavour that they used to sell. It seems they culled a lot of them
• Margarine or Butter.
• Half of a Kabana (that sausage in a red skin).

OK, we’re good to go.

1. Use your fist to lightly pound the packet of noodles…so they become broken up inside the packet (and not a giant block of noodles). Try not to pop a hole in the packet.
2. Cut open the packet and put the noodles into the pot. All of it, crumbs included.
3. Fill the pot with water so that the noodles are just floating in the pot, no more, no less.
4. Start up your stove, start cookin’ (on the highest heat possible). Add the flavour packets and stir so that all the noodles are covered with the flavvvourrrrrr.
5. Keep stirin’.
6. Stir some more till the water starts to boil then stop stirring.
7. Check the softness of the noodles by poking them with a fork. Your noodles are done cooking when they’re pretty soft and the water has boiled and left a filmy patch of flavour bubbles in the middle of the pot.
8. Stir it once more to spread the flavour and stop cookin’ em.
9. Now, drain the water…WITHOUT a strainer. Carefully pour the water out without losing the noodles down the sink. The goal is to keep as many as possible in the pot. If you wish, you can make a game out of it to entertain yourself. You’re done pouring when there’s just enough water left in the pot so that the noodles will slither out into a bowl without having to scrape them out with a spoon…but make sure you don’t turn it into a noodle soup.
10. Slither those noodles out into a bowl and scrape out any leftovers (leftovers are the best!)
11. Now, grab a knife and put some Margarine into the bowl. About the same amount as you’d use on a single slice of bread. Two slices if you feel like pigging out or fat.
12. Stir the Margarine so that it melts completely and touches all the noodles.
13. Cut up that half o’ Kabana into thin slices and place them under the noodles (so it warms up!)
14. Eat and enjoy.
15. Clean up later, etc.

Trust me, they’re purely amazing.

It’s that time of year again. Time to rant about the most non-functional fashion-phone available on the market. The iPhone. See my original iPhone review Here. Technically this isn’t my 3rd rant; however, the first preview of the iPhone OS 3.0 has been released and I have to point out the flaws to all of the fanboys that are going to go on about it for 6 months after it’s been released.

Apple announced some fairly minor changes in iPhone OS 3.0 and there really isn’t much to talk about. They did respond to the community a bit, but the phone is still flawed significantly.

The Bad:

One of the new APIs that was released was In-App Purchase. Sorry Apple, I do not wish to buy my application multiple times. When I buy an app I expect to have the whole damn thing. I can see how this would work for subscriptions and such, but some of the demos included Games asking if you’d like to purchase a new weapon. Seriously?

ONE Rocket Launcher, $0.99? Please, fuck off.

The Good:

Finally! Cut, Copy AND Paste. That’s right, the user-interface paradigm for transferring text, which has dated back to 1974, has finally made it into your iPhone. Congrats. Frankly, I always thought the reason of “OH, We can’t think of a good gesture to do this” was bull. Even I could of thought up the gesture they ended up using. There’s also undo and redo for copy and paste; cool, I suppose. EDIT: Apparently the reason was “Security” which I also find to be a pretty bullshit excuse.

Turn-by-turn navigation and “BYO Maps” (a.k.a. Offline Maps)! Developers are now able to use the API to create their own Navigation applications so anything is possible. Apple can’t license Google Maps for turn-by-turn navigation, unfortunately, but now you can go overseas AND use GPS without getting charged excessive roaming data charges from your provider.

Better basic phone features. These features are things that should have been there to begin with but were clearly overlooked. Better landscape support in most Apple applications, Forwarding/Deleting multiple messages, MMS (but not iPhone 1.0), Voice Recording/Notes, Subscription Calendars with ICS.

Searching. Apple introduced a mini version of Spotlight in each of their applications as well as a Universal Search that searches most of “things” you have on your phone. Of course, other cooler phones like the N95 already have this. Not something I would have expected to see or care about, but cool none the less.

The Mediocre:

Push notifications. The architecture that was promised over a year ago is now here! The reason for not using background applications is, you guessed it, battery life. I can see how push notifications could be good for such things as News, Sports Results and Stocks, but I will never see this working for IM applications. A combination of background applications and push notifications would be a GOOD thing. a) IM applications can work natively at all times, b) Developers wouldn’t have to work on some crazy proxying technique to take IM messages from MSN/AIM/etc. to the Apple Notification Server and c) You wouldn’t lose the state and connection in an application when switching between apps (Safari to IM, for instance). Apple also mentions they will make NO uptime guarantees, sigh.

There were several other small features that were added which really weren’t significant to talk about (Shake to Shuffle, really?). This nice image from Engadget sums it up pretty well:

Alas, the phone is still flawed. Kudos to Apple to partially listening, but with just about every product and update they release, they constantly leave out features that are in high demand. For example, the iPod. The thing still lacks an inbuilt FM Tuner and support for other popular media formats even though the features are available in competitor’s products. This irritates the crap out of me.

So, here’s the “wish” list, even longer than before and in no particular order (off the top of my head):

1. Front facing Camera – for Video Calls (hello? it IS an iPhone 3G) or iChat, perhaps?
2. Video Recording – Because Qik is fun.
3. Decent Camera – decent lens, 5MP+, flash.
4. File storage area – for documents, media, etc., accessible via USB, sendable via Bluetooth OBEX.
5. Removable Battery – it just doesn’t last long enough.
6. Tactile keyboard – I suppose touch keyboards can be fun while drunk.
7. Background applications – See above.
8. Wireless Sync – Even my Zune does this *rolls eyes*
9. Document Management – i.e. a mini version of iWork/iLife that opens Adobe, Apple and Microsoft documents. QuickOffice on Symbian phones does this well.
10. Voice Dialling – Just about every phone has this.
11. Text to Speech Caller ID – With the enhancements to text to speech in Leopard, you’d think they’d fit this in. What about that new in-game voice feature!?
12. Flash in browser – There was talk about this by Adobe and Apple not too long ago. Officially “there’s no announcement on this yet”, which I suppose means it’s probably in the works.
13. Inbuilt FM Radio – Just about everyone fights me on this, but I still want it without the silly dongle attachment thingie.
14. Favourite/Recent Contacts – Yet another basic phone feature.
15. Modem Tethering – Apparently, this is “being built in” and they are “working with providers”. Apparently it’s coming in 3.0, but still being developed… but so was Push Notifications. Maybe 4.0?
16. Blocking Calls/Messages from Contacts – Sometimes I don’t want to talk to specific retards; another basic phone feature.
17. Ringtones – Sure, we all hate annoying, horrible sounding songs as ringtones, but I’d refuse to pay money to put a clip of a song as my damn ringtone. I want to use anything I damn want, unrestricted.
18. Bluetooth HID – External keyboards are much win when you have one and you don’t want to carry a notebook. I have one with the N95; works brilliantly.

So when does this 3.0 come? Winter ‘09 (for the southern hemisphere). The beta is out for developers now, so I expect the leak soon. Just like 2.0, this is a paid upgrade (US$9.95) for the iPod Touch and free for the iPhone. Also, there was mention of Bluetooth being “unlockable” on the iPod Touch 2.0 (it has that Nike chip thingo).

What phone am I looking at these days? The Palm Pre, maybe. The Nokia N97, maybe. Their lack of multi-touch slightly annoys me, but we’ll have to see when they’re actually released. So in conclusion… What can iPhone 3.0 do over my N95? Lets see, that multi-touch touchscreen thing? Wait that was 1.0. Um… Nothing. Sorry Apple. It’s certainly a move in the right direction but your phone STILL only has the cool UI and slightly better ease of use as an advantage when comparing features to a 2 year old smartphone.

Grant would also like to add that liking Apple products or being an Apple fanboy does not automatically make you computer literate or worthy of a “geek” title (that may make you look better in any way, shape or form). Please, go back to your hole.

I don’t have an iPhone but I’ve heard enough and messed enough with it to tell you this phone is an overhyped fashion item with no functionality. As soon as other phone manufacturers start creating touch UI phones (i.e. 2009), this phone will be left in the dust. Apple fan boys, shield your eyes.

My current phone is a Nokia N95 8GB. It doesn’t have a sexy UI nor is its form factor cool. It’s a black brick with a Web 1.0 interface but it does at least 1000 more things than the iPhone ever could (even with the unofficial “jailbreak” hack). Apple are competing the market with looks and a revolutionary touch UI, that’s all.

Let’s start with the good about this phone (it’s a short list):

The touch UI and form factor

I don’t need to tell you the iPhone looks good and the UI is both intuitive and sexy, everyone knows that. It goes downhill from here though.

GPS

I was very impressed by GPS on the iPhone but only due to the speed it was able to give me a location. Loading up the Maps app took less than 30 seconds in giving me an accurate location. Compared to the N95, that’s about a 600% improvement, which might actually make GPS useful.

iPod

Whoa! It’s an iPod too. It’s debateable that the iPod is the best MP3 player on the market (mainly due to its lack of format support and radio) but I’m sure the numbers out do me there, so I won’t argue.

Safari

One thing Apple definitely did right was Safari. The browser renders pages accurately and large screen area makes it shine. Touch UI and zooming makes browsing the web nearly as fast as if you were in front of a desktop. Although it doesn’t fully pass ACID 2 or 3, it’s close. It’s definitely the best mobile web browser on the market (but only because of the touch UI).

And here’s the bad (it’s a long list):

The App Store

The implementation and ease of use of the store is great. The users and developers however, are horrible. Comments turn the App Store into the new Digg and there are only a few GOOD developers. Quality apps are at an all time low (especially free apps) and users have reported apps being the main problem in bricking and crashing their phones.  Users also seem to think that quality apps at the store are things like “Bubblewrap”, which turns your phone into bubble wrapping paper, and “iBeer”, which turns your phone into a glass of beer,  …seriously?  Steve showed off the crème of crop for apps at WWDC, which was only impressive to an Apple fan boy. You can argue that the phone has only been out for a couple of months, but developers have had an SDK that “has made mobile development revolutionary” since March 2008.

Background Applications, Push Notifications

At WWDC Apple announced they would not allow background applications and instead announced a Push Notification system, which they fucked up. As of today, the push notification system doesn’t exist in retail builds of the firmware making it impossible to do any sort of Internet multitasking on the phone. Their excuse? Hackers will get your phone! Background apps slow your phone! Sorry Apple, but no, Symbian OS has supported multitasking for quite some time now (enabling Instant Messaging applications to run in the background) and you have to ask yourself, when was the last time your phone was hacked? Oh what, never?

GPS

There’s no turn-by-turn voice navigation and the developer’s license forbids creating an application to do so. Maps also need to be downloaded on the fly making it useless if you’re travelling. Don’t Apple know roaming data costs a shit-ton?

The Camera

It sucks. Not to mention it’s impossible to send the photo you take to anyone except via e-mail. No Bluetooth transfer, no MMS. Oh yeah, no video either. Oh yeah, no front facing camera for video calls on a phone that’s marketed as 3G.

Touch Keyboard

Steve promised me that I could trust the thing but alas, unless you have the skinniest of fingers you’re going to make mistakes…a lot. Not to mention the lack of tactile feedback makes it impossible to write a comprehensible message while drunk.

VPN/Proxy Support

OK, so I’m getting a bit picky on this one because it only applies to very specific users BUT…Apple offer good VPN and Proxy support, in terms of protocols, but alas some of their apps will refuse to use the proxy (or proxy through HTTP) making it impossible to use half the applications on the phone when at a workplace/school. The proxy also refuses to apply itself when using the VPN making the user choose between usability and security.

Battery

I can’t complain about battery life, any phone with a lot of features will die fast, but the lack of a removable battery makes it impossible to swap in a new battery when you run out. If you actually used your phone, it dies….fast.

Things that SHOULD BE THERE

Copy and Paste! To-Do lists! A whole lot of things big names on the Internet have complained about…and every other phone has. Bluetooth features (i.e. modem, file transfer) just aren’t there. Applications that attempt to implement some of these features (mainly the modem) get pulled from the App Store. It’s a 3G phone, Apple marketed this thing as being fast, so why can’t it be used as a modem for your laptop? Just another thing this phone lacks compared to any other phone on the market.

People

And lastly, the people. Apple fan boys, I’m sick of you. People that buy this thing just for the hype and looks (without actually knowing what it does), I’m sick of you. Developers that create web applications JUST for the iPhone (even though they work on other mobile browsers), I’m sick of you.

OK, I’m done here.