iPhone OS, the review
May 10, 2010mike 1 Comment »
Alright for those of you who are regulars here, you know, I am not the biggest fan of Apple. Well I am sad to say the first Apple product ever to show up in my household showed up this weekend (not mine!) and I spent some serious time touching it and comparing it.
First let me say, designed by Apple in California, good work. Obviously I have spent plenty of time handling your products including this one (an iPod Touch) before, but I do want to say again good job. When you first get the thing and it has to phone home to Uncle Steve before you can use it (Apple remember when you used to make fun of Microsoft for their devices phoning Uncle Bill?). So here we sat (well drove home actually) with an iPod Touch that can say USB => iTunes and that’s it, and impressed we still were. Everyone knows Apple knows how to box their devices, and this is no exception.
Setup… NOT enjoyable. I’m sorry… I don’t want to ruin people’s lives here, but as a non-Apple guy, our home PC probably had version 1.0 of iTunes installed on it! So a million years later after iTunes 12 or whatever number we’re on installed, Quicktime reshuffled, all my songs and dodads where categorized, I signed my life over to Apple in user agreements and I HAD to enter a credit card number for the App Store (not mine! not my iPlaid) finally I could boot the iPod Touch to the screen (that looks just like the decal that was on it in the box at the store)… woohoo!
So now its on… and on it is… well nothing… ok that’s unfair… there is Email (set that up pretty easily for a Yahoo account, will see how another one goes) App Store, YouTube, Safari (web), iPod, Calendar, Calculator and a couple other things.
First things first… go to the App Store and fill the thing with Apps!!! So one very nice feature is the ability to sort Apps by free or paid (the default of course is paid) but not being my device I’m not going to load it up with expensive Apps of course. So a little facebook, some Pandora, Bing (just to put MS on there!), and a handful of other things. Pretty quick over WiFi, boom loaded up.
I sideloaded half a dozen songs from my PC onto it and its off and running.
Now some observations first off, I have a Palm Pre, I have had a lot of Palms and have always liked them, so my comparisons are predominately between the iPhone OS 3, the Palm webOS, and the old Palm OS (which is the OS of the phone of this iPod user and my older phones mostly).
iPhone OS 3, very snappy, impressively so. My Palm Pre has a faster processor than the 8GB iPod Touch (same processor as the iPhone 3GS and the bigger Touches) but I do have to say there are certain instances where the iPod is snappier. Now we’re not quite talking Palm OS snappy, but definitely webOS snappy and often snappier. Actually the “theory” behind the iPhone OS 3 is similar to the one behind the venerable Palm (Garnet) OS. One program (app) at a time with very few exceptions, touch the icon, throw the program in your face. The Palm OS snappiness comes from the program running on the device and only using the web if needed, the iPod does similar things and unlike the iPhone, only has WiFi connection speeds, in the past the AT&T “3G” network has shown, its the network (that’s the problem). When cruising around the house in strong WiFi range, the iPod Touch is darn fast even for internet connected use.
The “theory” behind the iPhone OS 3… is an interesting one. Multitasking is limited to more than one Safari window in Safari(web) or playing the iPod (not Pandora) in the background. This is how good old Palm OS worked too, music playback in the background and that was it. It kept things lean and mean, and it works well. As a Palm webOS user now, there are times when I find myself punching the upper left corner to bring down a menu which sounds like just a habit, but where are the in app preferences (oh wait they’re all configured by his royal highness). Also I find myself hitting the hardware button and going to open something new and then wondering where last thing I had open went (oh yeah it closed). I am not sure how I feel about no multitasking (I know OS 4 is going to have light multitasking) I like the snappiness of full RAM and CPU for each app, but I miss being able to have a couple things open at once, and no Pandora open in the background is just plain annoying!
All in all, the iPod Touch and iPhone OS 3 are very nice, its great to have so many apps (though in all honestly most of the ones I loaded from the “Top 25″ category are out for the Palm webOS in some way, shape or form), I think Apple has a very nice product here, but I would recommend to anyone thinking of an iPhone who doesn’t currently have AT&T (or who does) to think about a Pre, play with the webOS and the iPhone OS, they have more similarities than differences, but some of the differences are immense!
August 9th, 2010 at 4:50 pm
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