Why I'm (still) Not Buying an iPhone
The iPhone 3GS came out today. And as always, there was just about as much media coverage as ever. Pictures of long lines, and people all excited about shelling out more money to Apple and ATT. While I think the improvements are nice, and the new 3.0 software has some cool-ish things, I’m still not at all interested in buying one. Heres why:
The big features of the 3.0 software that everyone is talking about are:
– Copy/Paste
I have this on Android, and most other smart phones do this. Pure catch up
– Landscape keyboard
Really? Only just now getting this?
– Type new messages while the old is still sending
This is a feature? I can do this on Android, or better yet, type a message, send it, go do something else, and still have my streaming music player open in the background.
– Spotlight search
This is very cool, and a nice addition
– YouTube video upload
Android, Pre, etc can do this already.
– Turn by Turn nav
Nice, but Pre had it out of the box, most all Verizon phones have this as well.
– MMS*
Welcome to the 21st century iPhone! Oh wait ATT still doesnt support this…
– Notifications
Nifty I guess, but my Android phone notifies me all the time, and Androids notification system is far better. More on this later
And the new 3GS hardware itself has some new toys:
– Compass
Ok, I have this on Android and I rarely use it, I wouldnt switch phones for this
– Video recording
Again, this is not new and somethign that should have been there a long time ago.
– Tethering
ATT is killing this, so no point in upgrading for it. T-Mobile wont let Android either. VZ lets you, and its pretty fast too.
– Voice control
Could be interesting, I would have to see how it actaully works in practice. I can do voice google searches already on my Android, but I rarely use it.
– Better battery
This would be by far the best part of the new HW. If the batt is much better a lot of people will be happy.
– Faster processor. This is the new Cortex chip, so should be a nice speed improvement. But the Pre has this chip too… and the Toshiba G01 has a Snapdragon that will toast anything else… so not a wild technology leap, but still a good upgrade.
Notifications were one of the biggest things hyped about the new 3.0 software. This is Apples answer to the cries for multitasking. But this still won’t matter. For example, say I have a notifications enabled IM app, and then I go off and open Pandora and listen to some tunes. I get an IM and I get “notified” however that happens to look on the phone’s UI. If I switch to the IM app, I still have to kill pandora and my music goes away.
Now, lets look at this scenario on Android. I’m playing music on fast.fm. I get an IM on gChat. It pops up in the notifications area and I can simple slide the notifcations bar down, read the message and be done. Or, I can click on it and gChat opens and I can respond. And guess what? My streaming music is still playing!
In the end, I this won’t stop the complaints about no multitaksing, it will just finally make some things actually work ok on the phone – IM clients and the like.
So for me, while I love the physical design of the phone, and the interface is so nice and polished, I just don’t see how I could upgrade and lose out on things I do the most – IM and txting, and being able to do those things while I have whatever else I want running at the same time. Oh ya, and ATT still has a sucky network…
Apple do limit your devices potential by only allowing 1 application to be running at once. However they do this with good reason where the 2.5G + 3G are concerned as they only have 128MB of RAM. Most of that is taken up by Mail, Safari, iPod and Phone running simultaneously with no way to close them.
Now enter the 3GS with a whopping 256MB RAM (still a little low but a worthy upgrade none the less) and a faster processor. This iPhone is ready to multitask and with a little bit of Jailbreaking and an application called ‘iphone-backgrounder’ it works a treat.
Jailbreaking is possible on the 3GS however it requires a program called ‘redsnow-0.8′. The baseband will not be changed and the whole process is completely reversible using iTunes to restore the latest version of the OS.
After installing ‘iphone-backgrounder’ you can then send an app in to the background by holding the home button for a second. It’s not limited to one app either, you can run 2-3 fairly successfully, more if they focus on lean memory management or don’t do much.
@Iain Kay
I agree that there are some potential ways around the lack of background apps. However the vast majority of the user base is simply not going to jailbreak their phone or do anything out of the ATT/Apple ecosystem.
I don’t agree with your point that the limited RAM/CPU in the iPhones is a valid reason to limit users ability to run multiple apps. For example, I have an HTC Magic and it has 192mb RAM, this is in between the old iPhones and the 3GS. I run background apps all day – IM, gChat, 2 widgets, etc. And I have far better battery life than the iPhone.
Also, look at the Palm Pre, it is very similar to the 3GS in terms of RAM/CPU and it runs background apps out of the box and has at least as good of battery as the iPhone.