Kedar’s Tech Blog

I have seen the Smartphone generations catching up slowly from the sidelines – with Nokia Communicator with Symbian OS and then Palm flavors with Palm OS/Windows CE/Palm webOS, and then the BlackBerry, the iPhone, and all the way to Nexus One. Seems like the first smartphone concept was from IBM and Bellsouth in 1992, called IBM Simon. It was a touch screen phone without a physical keyboard.. !

My first smartphone was the Palm Treo 650 which I bought in 2005 – only because I had a Palm PDA before that. So I thought it was logical to have both my PDA and phone to be same. But I never took any interest in developing anything for it and I never had a data plan for it. So it was a smartphone that could not act smart

Sometime in 2004, I got a iPod nano as an award for the work I did at my workplace. From that moment on, I got hooked on the iPod. Before that, I did not feel the need to have a MP3 player and after that, I did not understand how one could live without one! So when iPhone was introduced, it made perfect sense to have my favorite MP3 player and phone to be the same. To top that, this one had the most compelling set of features. After enjoying 1G for 2 years, my son decided it was time for me to upgrade to 3GS (!) and while he was playing some game, my 1G iPhone accidentally fell in a tub full of water! Without a thought, I connected it to its charger which shorted its battery and the phone suffered a premature death. By that time, I had already started developing apps for the iPhone and I couldn’t have continued that activity without having an iPhone myself. Thus came 3GS..

I never considered BlackBerry to be a “smartphone”. I know there will be a million people ready to fight with me on that.. but the fact of the matter is, whatever be the capabilities of that phone, the users that use BlackBerry’s are just using it for doing dumb things like checking email or occasional (and poor) web browsing or to listen to music (only because it can, not because it is good at it) or to take a picture (again because it has some camera). That phone has not been put through real torture like the iPhone’s, Palm Pre’s, Symbian phones, Windows mobile phones or the Android phones have been or will be.

I somehow never considered or looked at Windows Mobile phones. They were there but never felt close enough.. that’s pretty much what I can say about them.

When Palm Pre was released with much fanfare and expectations, I looked at their Palm webOS SDK for a brief period of time but didn’t really bother to try it out. And their promise of competition with the iPhone is nowhere to be seen now!

Even when Android came on the market, I noticed it only because of Google. The initial Android phones like HTC Dream or HTC Desire or Motorola Droid did not pose any threat to the mighty iPhone. Apple continued their merry way with their App store and restrictive policies. Come January 2010, Google announced Nexus One from HTC…

Nexus One Arrives!

This was an open phone that sounded promising.. I wanted to get into Android App development. I did not want a new contract with any phone company.. So I got the unlocked N1 that can work with AT&T’s 3G network and asked AT&T to switch my iPhone plan to the normal data plan (same price – $30), switched the Voicemail (Visual to normal) and told them to switch the IMEI to Nexus One.. I was in business in no time.

And the comparison started :

Points in iPhone’s favor:

• iPhone is like the NetBeans IDE whereas Nexus One is the Eclipse (you will understand if are a software developer and you have used these Java IDEs) – so, iPhone feels and works in a very tight, no-nonsense, integrated way, whereas N1 is more open and dynamic.
• iPhone Music Player (iTunes) ROCKS! Nexus One is nowhere close when it comes to music and media playback, organization and user interface is concerned. No Equalizers on Nexus One, the interface sucks!
• N1 has a LED flash for the camera but still somehow iPhone’s pictures look better
• iPhone’s touch screen is more accurate than N1. The buttons at the bottom of the screen on N1 are off by 2mm or so.
• iPhone’s onscreen keyboard is way better than N1. The keys on N1 are too small and error prone.
• iPhone excels in UI overall..
• iPhone Contacts ..see the a-z index cards on the right of your contact list? You can jump to a contact starting with say ‘p’ easily. No such thing in N1.. you just start scrolling and then you will see a tab appear on the right which you can hold and drag to take you to a letter.
• iPhone brought Copy/Paste a bit later but they did a perfect job. N1′s copy/paste is a bit of a disaster.
• iPhone enjoys a great collection of very cool games. N1′s games currently are nowhere near that quality.
• N1 is wild wild west when it comes to Apps, now some might like it. But you always have to be careful before you just download an app, because it might not have been tested well. Now this is a gray area. iPhone did a very good job at perfecting everything for over 85% of users who just want a smart phone that works as promised. The rest <20% who want to hack into it and expect to have all the freedoms are more vocal (and noisy).
• N1′s Browser is a bit slower than iPhone’s
• No Visual Voicemail in N1 like iPhone.
• N1′s headphone/mic SUCKS in a huge way.. Every single N1 is shipped with a headphone/mic that does not work right. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=4fde24402797f306&hl=en . An update to this is, upon calling HTC, the Customer Support immediately sent me a good replacement – no questions asked. So just to go HTC website and call their Customer Service representative.

Points in Nexus One’s favor:

• N1 has a 1GHz processor whereas iPhone is 600MHz
• N1 has a much preferred non-slippery back. iPhone is shiny and all that, but it can slip out of your hands and it then becomes an emotional torture to see the scratches on such a nice device!
• N1′s ability to transfer files (even mp3′s) via USB/Bluetooth is awesome!
• N1′s screen is pretty good (800×480 – much better than iPhone’s 480×320) – but not sure if it is visually so.. the camera pictures look much nicer on iPhone. Also take a look at this comparison (http://www.displaymate.com/Nexus_One_ShootOut.htm)
• N1′s external storage option (MicroSD up to 32GB) is great.. no such option for iPhone
• N1′s battery is removable. Now this may not be much of an advantage for most cases.. but whatever.
• N1 is thinnner and lighter
• N1′s camera is 5MP.
• N1′s Bluetooth stack – very rich.. iPhone? – only Bluetooth headsets!
• N1 has a rich wallpaper / desktop framework. Fancy, animated wallpapers are possible
• N1′s desktop supports shortcuts of ANY kind. Have a contact’s mobile phone number as a shortcut on your desktop or have ALL contact phone numbers as shortcuts for that matter!
• N1′s desktop supports WIDGETs.. So you could have a calendar widget on your home screen to display your day’s appointments or have a news widget to display latest news.. The possibilities are endless.
• N1 has an awesome free Google Navigation App that works like a real GPS with voice and turn by turn directions! That’s a killer.
• N1 allows Apps to run in the background. Yes, very cool.. very much in demand from the iPhone for a long time. They did a little bit but still nowhere close to where N1 is right now.
• N1 has Google Voice! Yeah, the one rejected by Apple/AT&T on iPhone. So when you call, you can either make that call using Google Voice or your carrier.
• N1 has a much faster processor
• N1 has an impressive voice dialing feature THAT ACTUALLY WORKS! iPhone voice dialing is pretty buggy.. and has never worked for me.

Common Ground:

• Both have App stores. Apple has an “App Store” whereas N1 has the “Market”. They probably differ by a factor of 10 at the moment (~170K in iPhone’s App store vs ~17K in Android’s Market) but I am sure the gap is closing. Apple charges $99 for a developer account whereas Google Developer Program is cheap at $25.
• They both don’t support Flash. Although, Android allegedly will support it once the next release of Flash is out. Apple hasn’t said anything to that effect.
• There is a iTunes lookalike for N1 – called “doubleTwist”. It can sync exactly like iTunes and can even import all playlists from iTunes and push them to N1.

Now most of these “advantages” with N1 can easily be embraced by the iPhone if Apple changes its policies and lets users be responsible for their own actions. Nothing groundbreaking here. What Apple did was huge and N1 clearly has BUILT ON TOP OF IT. Whether it is the accelerometer or the swipe to unlock the screen idea or onscreen keyboard or switching to landscape mode when you turn the device or capacitive touch screens.. they broke huge ground when they created the iPhone.

For quite some time, they stood there alone and could dictate their terms.

But now, I think they should pay attention and adapt. Otherwise the competition posed by the first version of N1 itself is formidable and it might be too late as the next releases start shipping.

I really hope Apple gets afraid.. and acts – in the right way!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Computers, Gadgets, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.