[Nexus One General] bofslime:
I have issues with the iPhone and Apple’s approach to it. I think it’s an amazing concept — people holding hands, skipping down sugar-encrusted roads with pink ponies and colorful rainbows — but the execution falls flat in many ways if you’re a hardcore phone user, and Apple has constantly missed the mark in almost every area.

Part of my main issue with the iPhone, and this applies slightly less to iPod Touch, is that there’s practically no logical sense with Apple when it comes to technology. Everything is touchy-feely and emotional . While you could argue that being this way is way superior to “statistical” and “analytical”– it might be 95% of the time — you still will almost always lose that logic and that amazing feeling of connecting to your network. People would be crazy to die for their android phones, but people would die for their BlackBerrys – and they feel like their lives are in there. People feel connected to their BlackBerrys. Some sleep with them next to their pillow. No one gives a crap what people think about their Android phone, there’s zero zombified worship like you see with Apple fanboys. The closest example would be Palm’s webOS. A great concept, besides Google’s android OS, it’s the fairly polished, the most friendly, and the most useful. Do you see that?

Hello. ****ing. Humans. If you’re going to use that line, at least have the sense to actually make it make sense. Plus, isn’t the point of all this technology to make everything feel more natural and more useful? I mean, that’s why we have robotic dogs that learn (shout out to Just Blaze and I for having Sony AIBOs), that’s why our car remembers our personal settings when we enter the cockpit, that’s why our TiVos know exactly what program we want to watch. And yet, with everything moving forward in the technology space, iPhone's continues to feel pretty but useless.

Andy Rubin is brilliant. To this day, I still compare things to the Sidekick OS because it was so ahead of its time in every way, and it made sense. But the iPhone still feels half baked even after three years. And you can’t prance around smiling without raising the bar. You can take your non-multi-app running device and shove it — it’s inexcusable.

There are so many fundamental issues with iPhone’s OS that still haven’t been addressed and it really makes my head spin. Functionality is not a word you’ll find in the iPhone’s dictionary. How about the fact that all the application icons are the same size. Uh, why? Since there’s transparent padding around the icons — you know, something that takes up space — I have no where to put widgits if Apple even saw fit to ever include them. It’s a small, but very important point that really reflects how poorly the iPhone is designed in some areas.

Other issues that I can’t live with day to day? Why can't I just click on text such as addresses and phone numbers from like an email, webpage, or SMS, or even a 3rd party application and have it take me to Google maps or call that person? Oh, I can’t. The iPhone didn't even have copy and paste for two years — a joke!

iPhone vs iPod even doesn’t make sense as a whole. It’s fragmented, poorly executed, the Apple's Market for apps is a mess, and developers still have their apps pending approval for weeks. There’s not one single good IM program that I could rely on day to day (I don’t use Google Talk), the browser is decent at best. It’s faster now, sure, there’s a undisclosed 3gs CPU under its ass, but it’s not intuitive, and there’s always erroneous touch events; when I want to hit something I hit another link, button or app by accident.

For a company that’s so smart, and makes so much sense, it’s unbelievable how little sense iPhone OS makes in most places. I just can’t see why you’d want to run iPhone over the Android? Multitouch? Ok, we’ll enable that in a matter of days! What else? App Store limitations? Come on. Plus there’s a chance Android 2.5 will be announced in literally weeks away (Google will up their screen resolution on the Nexus Two to probably double, and have a new resolution for their “slate”) — you can be sure Google is going to come out swinging. iPhone isn’t a game changer. It’s a decent OS, dreamed up by an incredibly smart man, with unlimited resources and unlimited access. That’s why even in iPhone OS 3.0, it’s so disheartening to see an operating system that I can’t use daily.

I apologize for comparing this to the Android OS so much, I really didn’t set out to. But I’ve used an android phone every day of my life since it first came out in addition to every BlackBerry ever available simultaneously, and I actually had an open mind about the Nexus One possibly replacing everyone's iPhone. I felt like maybe they will want more “freedom” and “flexibility” and not have to deal with Apple’s ridiculous train of thought sometimes. Some people are too plugged into the Apple ecosystem. Willing to paid out the ass to upgrade an entire library to non-DRM status, they can even use Exchange and Gmail, both are supported on the Nexus One — nothing is holding anyone back.

In the end, I found that the lack of any meaningful applications for the iPhone really made it a no go from the beginning. I’m talking about quality — re-read the word quality — applications, here. The best VNC and RDP applications on the iPhone are a joke. There’s not a single enjoyable Twitter application, and any application that’s on iPhone that is available on the Android pales in comparison. If you can find an application on the iPhone platform that’s better than the Android counterpart, I’ll send you a BGR Ninja hat.

Seriously Apple, you take no responsibility for the actual “experience” of this phone, yet you tout it as your tag line. Applications in Apple Market don’t work for all devices. They have to be updated, they might not work with a new resolution, or all touch screen display — try using one of those NES/SNES emulators on the iPhone since Apple baned them! — the comments and “reviews” on apps are worse than Sidekick user’s AIM screen names, there’s Apple is GOD like authority and accountability in Market, and outside of people that know what they’re doing, you’re basically leading the rest into a forest with wolves in the dark, while they’re bleeding and blindfolded. Why does the VNC application I bought and paid for crash on the iPhone with a Java.IO error? Because your entire OS is rarely gets updated, poorly driven, overly policed, and because in typical Apple fashion, you’re sitting on to the 2 year old devices while everyone else comes out with new technowlogy. What happened to ferociously making sure the absolute core applications in your package were 100% perfect before shipping? BlackBerry’s email application is flawless. Google's web browser is flawless. But there’s not a single application on iPhone that doesn’t have a fart or soundboard copy of its self.

Here’s another issue on why for the foreseeable future iPhone OS won’t be anything like what Google or another company can offer: coders are free to be designers. It’s really as simple as that and anyone in the business will know exactly what I’m talking about. That’s why Google's entire developer ecosystem is different, because believe it or not, Apple’s developers are amazing designers that make beautiful things, and they happen to know how to code.. but boy oh boy do they take their sweet time about it. That’s entirely different from someone who’s the best coder in the world and doesn't even have the choice to create something that looks, works, and feels great. And so, this is my issue with iPhone OS and why you won’t see applications of Android-quality on iPhone aside from any SDK and programming hurdles.

If an app like twidroid existed on iPhone, I think the Apple Market would literally crash, die, burn, and hang itself by how natural, beautiful, and thoughtful that application is. Now, multiply something like that 5,000 times and you’ll have an idea of why all this Apple iPhone hype amounts to very little. We have the best Android device ever made in the history of the world, finally! Oh wait, Apple’s event is in 2 weeks, maybe they'll finally allow multiple apps to run at the same time. Until Android 2.2 launches adding multitouch for the US as a simple software update. Then I’ll write another review.