Anand Reviews the Apple iPhone 3G
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 16, 2008 8:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
MobileMe
It’s only been in the past couple of years that I started to understand exactly what it is I do for a living. I’m a writer, woo! I happen to write a column for CPU Magazine every month, I’m constrained for space there since it’s print (750 words or less, or your pizza is free). Last month I wrote an article titled Apple Takes on...Google?
The article talked about Apple’s foray into the world of web applications - it was sort of prep-work for today’s iPhone 3G review. You see, alongside the firmware 2.0 and iPhone 3G announcements, Apple also introduced something called MobileMe at this year’s WWDC.
.Mac is now MobileMe
MobileMe is Apple’s own web-based application suite, featuring an email client, address book, calendar application and support for file and photo sharing. In essence, this is Apple’s answer to Google’s online applications - except you have to pay for them.
MobileMe Push Email
A MobileMe account costs $99 a year, but what that gives you is the ability to sync your email, address book, calendar, files and photos across any computer (Mac or PC) and iPhone, in real time. You also get 10GB of storage, and the big kicker - push email support.
The concept of push email is simple: when an email is sent to your push-enabled email account, the notification is sent directly to your device (computer or iPhone) and you receive the email instantaneously. Normally, the greatest frequency you can check your email account on an iPhone is every 15 minutes, which can be a problem if you depend on responding to emails as soon as you get them.
Push email on the iPhone, without Exchange. Awesome.
I do sorely miss push email from my Blackberry days, MobileMe gave me my first taste of that in over a year. It took less than 10 seconds from the time I sent an email to my @me.com account to when I got it on the iPhone, which is just sweet.
The push email support for MobileMe alone is almost reason enough to cough up the $99 per year, but when you realize that works out to $8.25 per month just for email you really have to ask yourself whether the push email is really worth it. Honestly what needs to happen is push email support from Google, that would make the iPhone a real alternative to the Blackberry from a consumer standpoint. Granted enterprise users now have push email support with Exchange, but for the rest of the world it’d be nice if there was a free alternative.
MobileMe is a nice online application suite and is incredibly easy to setup, allowing all of your Macs, PCs and iPhone to remain in sync but honestly for me it just doesn’t make sense. My iPhone and main machine are always synced, and it doesn’t really matter that my notebook isn’t since I have my synced iPhone with me wherever I go. The $99/year MobileMe account would be nice, but it’s far from a necessity.
The ability to keep tons of files synced between all of my machines is also a plus, but honestly my upload speeds aren’t fast enough to make this terribly practical for things like videos and music. For small files, I don’t want to have to manually copy them to my iDisk, I want to mirror my Documents folder by default.
Yes, this is a web-application, it looks very good but unfortunately I've had connectivity issues over the past few days. It's not as speedy as I'd want for $99 a year.
MobileMe is a great way of getting a glimpse at the totally networked future we’re not too far away from, there are just too many shortcomings for me to justify giving Apple another $100 every year on top of the annual iPhone upgrades I seem to be doing. Give me Push Gmail and I’ll be set.
Alternatively, if Apple provided web-versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote, as well as real time document syncing between all of them (ala Google Docs), then the $99 fee starts becoming more attractive.
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cocoviper - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
Well I think it depends on how we define free. Since you're paying so much for the iPhone's plan one would think they could (or should) include it at some point.The Instinct does turn-by-turn voice GPS and it's included in the phone's plan.
jcal710 - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
Anand,You talked about the problems with contact syncing on Exchange. How configurable is it? Does it automatically default to your top level 'Contacts' folder in your Exchange mailbox, or can your point it somewhere else? Do you have the option of choosing whether or not to sync subfolders?
Griswold - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
I'm glad I didnt go for the first iphone, that way I can appreciate my 3G more(besides the fact that it wasnt sold until the 11th of july in this country and I would have been forced to import one and jailbreak it).Anand, your friend with the huge lips doesnt listen to the name of S.Tyler by chance? :P
ViRGE - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
Anand, do you know if Apple's A-GPS implementation requires cellular network access? Some do, others can revert to traditional GPS operation if there's no cellular network to offer location assistance. I'm curious which of this it isObrut - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
So how is it even remotely possible that there hasn’t been a real iPhone competitor in the year since the original’s release?Nokia N95 8GB is far superior to iPhone and it was released even before the first iPhone.
It's right to say there's no competition here. Apple need at least 3-4 more years to be truly competitive to Nokia. I think iPhone is better solution for americans. In Europe you need 3.5G or 4G phone to be truly connected.
michael2k - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
You're serious aren't you?Let us count the ways then:
iPhone screen resolution is 2x the Nokia screen resolution
iPhone is nearly half as thick as the Nokia
CPU of nearly twice the speed
The Nokia's one physical advantage is the 5MP cammera (which is only possible because the Nokia is twice as thick).
Obrut - Friday, July 18, 2008 - link
OK, let's count, Michael...1. Screen resolution is bigger and it should be simply because the display is much bigger. The display is much bigger because it's a touchscreen, though not big enough for my fingers.
2. iPhone is thin and that's because it has merely 4 buttons and a low profile, low-end camera. By the way how do you play games without buttons?
3. Speaking of games how do you play OpenGL games? I play Quake 2 with full lighting effects and FSAA at 40 FPS. What about the JAVA games?
4. N95 8GB is a dual CPU solution (2 x ARM 11 @ 332MHz) hence no lower performance here.
5. The 5MP camera of N95 8GB is more that just megapixels - it has Carl Zeiss optics, decent flashlight and can capture movies at 640x480@30FPS. In addition - correct me if I'm wrong but I don't see the front camera which every decent 3G phone has. How can I make a video call with iPhone? After all this is one of the best 3G features.
I can continue counting the battery, office productivity and so on, but this is not the place. I don't want to engage in a Nokia vs. Apple or N9x vs. iPhone battle here. I just don't like statements like "there's no competition", "best phone ever" etc. The most accurate thing to say is that iPhone is the best touchphone to date.
Griswold - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
Why talk if you dont know what you're talking about? 3.5G is called HSDPA (an extension to UMTS) in europe, which is supported by the iphone 3G. 4G isnt even available yet, think 2010 for commercial use, so why mention it?Why is there no competition? Because none of the competition has a smartphone that comes with this usability. All the other phones can do the same or more, yes. But all of them feel clumsy like a brick when using them. That is why there is no competition. And this comes from somebody who truly doesnt like apple and its godfather jobs...
cocoviper - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
Speaking of not knowing what you're talking about...HSDPA isn't 3.5G, it's definitely AT&T's 3G and that is what the iPhone 3G supports. That's the 3G that Anand complained is not really that much faster.
If there were a "3.5G" in AT&T's portfolio it would be HUPSA (the one that they just upped the offered speeds on.) However AT&T currently doesn't offer any phones that are HUPSA capable. They only have a couple of Aircards for laptops.
And yes, 4G is available in many parts of the world besides the US my friend. WiMax alone is deployed 119 countries currently. LTE is the only 4G that's "not even available yet," and that's because it's yet to be developed. (LTE isn't even into the whitepaper stage yet.)
So don't slam other people especially since there's always someone that will know more than you.
sources -> http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/93...">http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Te...A0BF6-62...
http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/wow/index.cfm/20...">http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/wow/index.cfm/20...
cocoviper - Thursday, July 17, 2008 - link
*HSUPA not HUPSA :-P