Waxing Philosophic » Web/Tech

The much-anticipated, full and unadulterated review of the iPhone – three months in

jguttman — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 23:48:20 +0000

It’s been nearly three months since I began my second iPhone journey and if it’s any indidcation, the gist of this post has changed several times before I’ve managed to write it. The iPhone is a device that commands both loved and hated sentiments (but rarely anything in between), as Om blogged about last week. The first month of my second iPhone journey was pure bliss, and I’ll elaborate more on what made it so enjoyable. The more recent two months have been a mix of love, hate, disgust, frustration, joy, serenity and finally, disbelief during the many instances where the battery has died, rendering the device useless.

Starting on the upside (since I’m a positive person), there is a lot to love about the iPhone when it’s working:

Having one device that houses your phone, pda, music, videos is phenomenal.
Easy integration with iTunes makes for seamless podcast downloads and updates – I’m loving my NPR podcast subscriptions.
The way the music fades in and out when calls are received/placed is elegant and never ceases to feel good.
While not exclusive to the iPhone, a good stereo headset (mine is Shure) changes the phone experience and makes good audio possible.
The GUI of the device, Apple’s trademark, is as polished and refined as I can imagine. Simply opening/closing apps is fun every time…though considerably more fun when it happens quickly without delay.
What perhaps separates the iPhone most from other PDAs is the browsing experience, which is truly a pioneering achievement. The way web pages open, are stored and saved (up to 6 at a time simultaneously) is so cool. The way hyperlinks are executed and logins are magnified is extremely well designed.
Visual Voicemail – why didn’t anyone else think of that?
Building the iPhone as a platform, and opening it up to app developers, was pure genius and makes the power of the device nearly infinite, but how many of these apps do I use regularly?
1. The answer is not that many. My most used/favorite apps, aside from those native to the device, are: Facebook, KickMap (Interactive NYC Subway Map), Flixster, Yelp,
2. My second tier apps that I occasionally use are: StreetEasy (NYC Real Estate), Mint, iEasy Camera, Flex PhotoLab, Shazam and Airport Status.
3. Apps that I hardly ever use, but are cool: Paper Football, Labyrinth, PacMan, Urban Spoon, French.
4. The summary here is that apps are fun and cool, but not all that important or essential to my life.
Finally, the camera on the iPhone is strong. Photos are crisper than they were with my Blackberry Curve, and doing things with the photos I take (emailing, twitpic-ing, not MMSing), couldn’t be easier.

At this point in my iPhone journey (let’s call it January 15, 2009), I felt compelled to issue a public apology to Tony Conrad for my incessant provoking and making fun of his iPhone hardships. It seems that every time we’ve been together for the past two years, he’s needed to charge his ailing iPhone, whether we’re in a meeting, in Austin for SXSW or at a bar having a few beers. Proudly carrying my Blackberry, which lasted days on end without a charge, I found it fair to poke fun, unable to understand how the benefits could possibly outweigh the hassle. After some time using the device though, I better understand Tony’s decision. Truth be told, the benefits listed above are fantastic and for a while, clearly outweighed the hassle of the short battery life, so here it is. Tony, I apologize.

Now for the fun part. The first time I owned an iPhone, I lasted two weeks before growing frustrated with the touchscreen keyboard. With V1.0, there were no apps and the UI was less mature, so it didn’t take me long to call it quits. I sold it on eBay to someone in Sweden for 20% over what I paid. This time around, I’ve lasted a lot longer and continue to use the device, though recently more and more begrudgingly.

So what’s wrong with it? Where to begin….:

While Apple claims to have push email, it’s not really true. The iPhone shows if you have new messages, but requires a sync to pull them down from the server. When sending, it usually happens relatively quickly, but nothing compared to the blackberry, where messages are gone practically before clicking send. This delay introduces more opportunity for hiccups, as was the case today, when I had to get a quick email out to someone I was meeting for lunch. The message got stuck on my device. Luckily, I found my lunch companion.
Some of the shortcomings of the iPhone are just silly. For instance, searching for a contact takes approximately three times as long as on a blackberry. After you open your contacts, you need to scroll to the very top to access the search box, at which point you can start typing the name. This is always frustrating and takes too long. For reference, on a blackberry, you start typing a name the minute your contacts open.
No copy and paste? Are you serious Apple? I suppose this is a short-coming of a touch-screen display…no, I take that back because the Storm managed to do it. This is a huge and frustrating short-coming of the device. I look for copy and paste 3-4 times every week.
No MMS? Again, are you serious Apple? For a device billed as the ultimate multimedia pda experience, leaving out MMS capability seems odd, particuarly when blackberry has been MMS-compatible for years. Granted, the messaging format hasn’t exactly caught fire, but I’d like to read the messages that my two friends who have adopted the medium send me.
The battery life is dreadful. I touched on this earlier, but it’s probably the single biggest flaw of this device. Every committed iPhone user must invest in multiple chargers and use them frequently. My phone routinely dies on me (it’s on 20% right now and it’s only 6:20pm) and this is unacceptable. My Blackberry Curve rarely died on me.
The touchscreen keyboard is so-so, but significantly less efficient than Blackberry’s full qwerty keyboard. I think it takes roughly 50-100% longer to type than on the Blackberry.
The iPhone seems to have an issue with dropped calls. Talking to my dad last night, I was disconnected three times. Om referenced the same frustrations in his post last week. Not sure whether it’s AT&T’s network or the phone itself, but I suspect it’s the phone based on the behavior – the triple-beep and “lost call” messages I get.
The iPhone requires two hands to operate, which compared to a Blackberry, is a significant shortcoming.
The iPhone is fragile, somewhat moreso than other phones, leading Apple/AT&T to only warranty the device for 30 days (the same length of time that returns are accepted….hmm).

So that’s my take. As an entertainment device, the iPhone is fun, cool and well, entertaining. As a business device though, it comes up short of the Blackberry, adding time as well as frustration to one’s life. Is it worth the extra trouble? The answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no. Though after a hard days work, rocking out to my tunes on the subway before using the Yelp app to find an appropriate dinner spot can be rewarding. As for the public apology, I considered retracting it as my iPhone experience has evolved, but since Tony is my boss, I’ll leave it out there…at least until I retire the device.

Why Facebook has crossed the canyon, changed the way we communicate…and should buy Twitter

jguttman — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:49:33 +0000

Facebook has crossed the canyon. If the “chasm” is the leap from early adopters to mainstream, then the “canyon” is the leap from mainstream to mass commercial appeal. Facebook has taken that leap. In the past few months, my dad, uncle, aunt and the mother of a high school friend have all joined Facebook. Facebook has become, as I explained to a hold-out friend of mine last week, the most fun and efficient way to keep in touch with the people in your life. As recently as five years ago, I reserved most Sunday nights for catching up with people by telephone. That was the way I maintained friendships, particularly with people living in other cities, who I didn’t see face-to-face on a regular basis. I’d call them after dinner, speak for 20-30 mins, get an update on the past few weeks (or months in some cases) and then say goodbye, until the next time we called each other. Today, telephone conversations of this sort are passe. Why waste time on the telephone, a communication medium limited to audio, when we can peruse each others’ photo streams, see what events our friends have been attending, and most of all, from a single page, get a snapshot of their status’. The feature with which Facebook offers the summary view of our friends’ updates is called the News Feed. If we really care, we can review their historical status updates to get a more complete picture of how they’re doing. When’s the last time you received as complete of an answer to the question “How ya doin?” . Most industry wonks agree, the status update is Facebook’s single greatest achievement. It allows people to keep in touch with the absolute minimal amount of effort possible. It’s possible that Facebook makes it too easy, contributing to the loose ties effect that sociologists have been preaching, where our networks become less centered around a few close relationships and more around many looser ones. More than any other tool in my universe though, Facebook is having a significant impact on that shift in the social landscape. Their crowning achievement, the status update, is such a good invention that several companies have been formed around it, the most notable of which is Twitter.

Not surprisingly, Twitter’s growth trajectory has been similar to Facebook’s. Twitter virtually launched two years ago at SXSW in Austin, when it caught fire among a captive audience. Since then, it’s consumed the early adopter market and steadily made it’s way toward mainstream. In the past few months, several celebrities and consumer-focused orgs have caught on and grabbed ahold of Twitter accounts to communicate with their constituents. According to Compete.com, Twitter traffic measured by unique visitors is up 640% in the past year – though this figure doesn’t fully account for Twitter’s influence since a big chunk of their traffic flows through one of several messaging apps that feeds the platform. Like Facebook, Twitter is having it’s own effect on social behavior. I’ve recently noticed conversations taking place between groups and individuals that might be unlikely to converse otherwise. One example is GazaNews who has, not surprsingly, attracted a bunch of followers recently and engaged in some compelling back and forth. This is a good thing. Open dialogue and discourse between people that are geographically and/or ideologically far apart can only be healthy, and for a company as nascent as Twitter to be enabling this is a huge accomplishment. Twitter has essentially peeled off and borrowed a piece of Facebook by identifying and unleashing the full potential of this feature…not that there was anything Facebook could have done about it – it’s unlikely the status update could have been patented. Still, Facebook should buy Twitter to reclaim ownership of the feature and own the social media landscape that they’ve helped transform. It would re-establish them as owners of all things status update-related and give them another outlet for their ad sales activities. Better integration with Facebook would also expand Twitter’s influence exponentially, making it a far more powerful tool than it already is. The reality of Twitter is that it’s a feature that caught fire, but can probably only survive so long by itself. Facebook could likely acquire them for a reasonable price right now and quickly justify it by the further growth they can help fuel on the platform. It would also be a strong defensive move for them. If one of their competitors – in social networking, blogging or sharing – acquired Twitter, they’d essentially be stealing a piece of Facebook and I think that may come back to haunt them down the road.

NYC: Technology Rising

jguttman — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:30:55 +0000

There’s been a lot of focus recently on the macro economy, sub-prime debt exposure and a recessionary or even depressive economic outlook. A quiet, but growing sub-plot though on a micro level, is what this means for the technology industry in New York City. So far this year, the city comptroller estimates 40,000 jobs have been shed on Wall Street and it’s expected that this number may rise to 50-60,000 before it’s all over. Large Wall Street firms have dominated the New York economy for much longer than I’ve been relevant. There’s been plentiful discussion in tech circles, over the past few years, that one of the pitfalls of growing the tech industry in NYC is the difficulty in luring IT professionals away from deep-pocketed Wall Street firms. Now that there are two fewer Wall Street firms though and far fewer jobs, the local economy is poised for a transformational repositioning. An obvious sector to absorb some of that vacuum is technology. Crain’s NY reported a few weeks ago that New York added 1,100 technology jobs in the first half of the year to bring the overall number to 42,700. While the broader economy purges jobs by the minute, we’re adding them in droves. This is super exciting.

The WSJ reported that, in the first six months of this year, there were 67 NYC-based startups who received VC investment totaling $828 million compared to $480 million in the same period last year. I believe that growth rate will accelerate. With the flood of newly unemployed financial markets-focused professionals, there are more smart, hungry and creative people looking for opportunity than ever before. As the few i-banks remaining recast themselves as bank holding companies and accept federal funds and the compensation limits that come with those funds, high pay-grades that once lured many of the best and brightest IT professionals and managers may no longer be as significant of a factor. Compensation reform, generally on the verge of sweeping through all facets of our economy anyway, is only one more factor encouraging the aspiring business owner to finally go for it. The alignment of incentives that once made the leap difficult are severely diminished and in some cases (for employees of Lehman or Bear as examples), eliminated. Also, as other areas of the local economy decline – real estate prices fall, office space becomes more affordable, etc – other historical barriers to starting a company here also diminish. With the city’s history around financial services and the experience of the recently unemployed, I think financial services technologies is one area, in particular, that will likely see a lot of innovation in the coming years. When you combine this new reality with recent trends, NYC becomes an increasingly attractive market for VC investors. We’ve been ranked third behind the Bay Area and Boston for several years and while our growth has been accelerating versus Boston for a little while, I think these recent local developments lend reason to believe that we will inch even closer to them in the coming years.

As recently as August, I had continued to consider a professionally-motivated move back to the Bay Area. I’m convinced it’s something that every young aspiring technology professional occasionally thinks about. At the moment though, those thoughts are diminished as I see enormous opportunity for NYC early-stage technology. Boston should be on high alert because New York is biting at its heels.

Why I haven’t bought an IPhone – and still won’t

jguttman — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:29:39 +0000

I’ve been hearing pleanty of hubub about the new iPhone from friends and the media over the past few weeks – in some cases the same people representing both. The new iPhone’s launch was only slightly less eventful as the original. Back then, my dad called early on the Friday to let me know he was waiting in line and to ask if I wanted one. Interestingly, he reported that the line was 3x as long this past Friday, when he returned to the same AT&T store. Back then, I took the bait and bought one….how could I pass up such a gracious offer. I played with it for two weeks (mostly in the first few days) before selling it on eBay to a guy in Switzerland at a 20% premium. I sold it back then because I disliked the form factor, the keyboard, the battery life, the email functionality and most of all, because I had no complaints with my blackberry and my current email/calendar/contacts setup (this hasn’t always been the case). I had high hopes for the second rev, but early reports are unencouraging. Users I spoke to claimed that battery life has, in fact, decreased. It’s true there is a more powerful battery in the phone, but the 3G circuitry and chip drains battery life faster and net-net, the new phone dies sooner. This is a non-starter for me. My blackberry almost always lasts a full day, even when on the road under the most extreme circumstances. Tony’s iPhone frequently requires multiple recharges during a day, a situation that leaves him searching for outlets in restaurants, and one that would frustrate me. The other feature I had hoped for was a rotating keyboard so that typing long emails would be made easier. Everyone was calling for this initially so I’m surprised Apple didn’t follow through. Anyway, I’m even more comforted by my recent purchase of RIMM two weeks back. The blackberry is a solid product and one that I believe has a good life ahead of it.

Cell phones bad for your health?

jguttman — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:31:12 +0000

I’ve been preaching this for a long time. A few years ago, I compiled a folder full of studies on damage inflicted by cell phones. Now, it’s getting mainstream media attention. CNN devoted an entire Larry King to the topic two weeks ago. This article (and forthcoming scientific study) sound ominous. Those 4 years of I-Banking with that old school Nokia glued to my ear may come back to haunt me, in more ways than I realized….

Cancer and Technology: Top 10 Highest-Radiation Cell Phones

Yael Naim….wow!

jguttman — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:37:36 +0000

Saw Yael Naim perform last night at a celebration of Israel’s 60th anniversary. She stole the show (which actually wasn’t very hard though did require competing with MC, Natalie Portman). People who don’t recognize the name, surely know her most popular song, New Soul, licensed by Apple for the MacBook Air commercials. Along with all the other accolades afforded to Steve Jobs, people are giving him credit for discovering this talent. I’d be curious to know the real story here. I suspect an ad exec with a finely tuned ear suggested a few songs and while Jobs made the final call, it’s this anonymous (for now) guy or gal who deserves the credit. Either way, I’m in love. Here are videos of her performing the two songs I saw her do last night:

Sometimes, you’re better off on your own….

jguttman — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:34:00 +0000

As the quest to find decent customer service continues – one of my favorite topics – I had two infuriating incidents this week with Asus and HP. Bought a new router from Asus that has a usb port for printer sharing….’pretty cool’ I thought until I called the Asus customer service line for help setting it up. In what was probably the worst customer service experience of all time (yes, I know that’s saying a lot) we spent 20 minutes discussing the issue before the guy told me my printer was not compatible with the router. Infuriated, I hung up, only to figure the whole setup out on my own 15 mins later networking both my mac and pc. Later in the week, I had a scanning issue with the printer (post-networking). Similarly, I engaged HP customer service, which is leagues better than Asus (as it should be), but again was given poor advice. They suggested i uninstall all software and driver and then, reinstall. Unfortunately, this process continued for 3 days because the reinstall wouldn’t take. Eventually, I figured out that scanning wasn’t going to work on the printer networked through usb. In both cases, customer services provided little to negative value. Thanks guys.

Best feature of Google Checkout – don’t share your email with the merchant

jguttman — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:14:06 +0000

I just ordered a Jawbone bluetooth headset from eCost.com (cheapest quality merchant on Pricegrabber). When I went to checkout, they listed Google Checkout as a separate checkout option. I logged in and two clicks later, the transaction was complete. But along the way, there was a checkbox next to the statement "Keep email address anonymous from eCost.com". Why, yes, please, thank you. Google Checkout allowed me to order from a merchant without sharing my email address, preventing the inevitable onslaught of promos and sale notifications I would receive for several months or years thereafter. This is a huge benefit, not to mention the two-click checkout speed. Google Checkout has been fighting an uphill battle against Paypal for a while, and this won’t part the red sea for them, but it’s a nice enough feature, that it made me notice and so will bring me back again soon. Not to mention, I can charge the item to my credit card and get the miles, something that is more difficult to accomplish on Paypal.

AnswerLinks launches on Wordpress.com blogs

jguttman — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:50:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, a project I began exploring in late 2006 launched. A partnership between Answers.com and Wordpress, AnswerLinks is a tool that scans an article’s content prior to publishing and suggests words, terms and people, that may require additional detail, to link back to Answers.com definitions, explanations, bios, etc. It’s the first 3d party tool integrated into the Wordpress publishing interface, which makes it somewhat innovative and exciting. It’s also the first distributed application of Answers.com auto-linking technology, an area that we believed has significant growth potential. From what I hear, response from Wordpress bloggers has been positive so far and the partnership format has been noticed by others. AnswerLinks is also available as a plug-in for Wordpress.org bloggers.

Communication and Email woes answered – Microsoft, RIM, Mail2Web and Apple save the day!!

jguttman — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 06:40:52 +0000

I posted a few weeks ago about my frustration that so few email solutions provide the functionality and convenience I’ve come to expect. My problem was the following: (1) multiple computers and access points, all of which I expect to remain sync’d at all times (2) a blackberry device that also needs to remain sync’d (3) a calendar system that needs to communicate with my blackberry and interact seamlessly with other communication platforms. While gmail was exciting to me initially, it proved inefficient, as deletions required more than one click, my inbox soon reached 1,700 messages, and messages often slipped through the cracks, sometimes falling off my first page, sometimes lost forever. GCal was extremely disappointing. It couldn’t sync with the blackberry, only sending SMS messages before appointments, making scheduling a challenge and checking my calendar a nuisance. I looked into Yahoo Mail, but wasn’t impressed with its blackberry compatibility either. Well, after a bunch of research, my problems have all been solved. I researched virtual exchange servers and decided to purchase a plan from Mail2Web for $20 per month. Their virtual exchange sever allows me to use Outlook or Entourage to manage my mail, and keeps my email, calendar and contacts wirelessly sync’d between computers and devices at all times. This is the way the blackberry device was designed to be used and boy, does it make a huge difference. Never again will I miss a conference call because I forgot to manually sync my blackberry. Mail2Web offered the best package of the Microsoft certified partners and as a Canadian company based in Toronto, I found their 24-hr customer service department to be unusually skilled and helpful….note: no outsourcing to India here, every representative I spoke to was a true Canadian, eh? Finally, to throw another wrench in the mix, I recently switched to a MacBookPro for my work laptop, a move that I’m thrilled about…this is the most fun I’ve had on a computer in a long time. I played with Entourage for a week or so, but found it extremely inferior to Outlook 2007, which incidentally, I found to be a huge improvement over 2003. Running XP over Parallels on the mac, and adjusting the settings to optimize for performance, I’m able to run Outlook with good speed, not sacrificing email and calendar functionality. So there you have it. If you want more info, I’m considering doing some IT consulting on the side….