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I’ve blogged before about my various irritations with the iPhone, which last year prompted me to ditch the shiny Apple handset and opt for a Palm Pre. I liked the idea of the Linux based OS, the multi-tasking and the real keyboard. In reality, the OS was a little limited, but the multi-tasking and real keyboard were good. Build quality, not so much.

When a saw a friend’s HTC desire, I was hugely impressed. The large, bright, high resolution screen, excellent app support and good build quality certainly appealed, but it was the impressive 1GHz processor that sealed the deal. I’m sick of sluggish phones, and the HTC Desire is certainly not sluggish.

There are certainly areas where the Palm WebOS is better, and it’s probably not as intuitive to use as an iPhone, but my first impressions are that as an overall package it beats the competition hands down.

I’ve only had mine for a few days, so I’ll do a more in-depth review when I’ve lived with it for a little longer.

Anyone want to buy a slightly used Palm Pre?

Well, the excitement of the launch of Apple’s worst kept secret is over but the hype is probably just going to get worse. It would seem opinion is divided, with some believing Apple’s collective genius has once again solved all our technology needs, whereas others feel the iPad is overrated and something of a disappointment. After having a few hours to reflect, I’m afraid I fall into the latter camp.

Firstly, I have to ask myself what gap in the market the iPad is filling? According to Steve Jobs’ launch keynote, it’s the space between a phone and a computer. Specifically, it needs to be able to browse the web, do email, video, music, games etc., and it must do all these things really well. He then said that netbooks currently fill this gap and they don’t do anything well. So, in Apple’s opinion, the iPad is to occupy the netbook sector and be a lot better than a netbook. Is it? What would I want from a device like that?

I’m typing this post on my netbook. It’s a Packard Bell ZA8. It has a 1.2GHz 64bit AMD processor, ATI graphics, 140Gb hard disk, 2Gb RAM, 3 USB ports, VGA, a card reader and a webcam. It’s running Ubuntu Linux and can therefore multi-task perfectly and run any Linux software I wish. I can completely customise the interface, access my hard disk, plug in a DVD drive or any other USB accessory I like. (It came with Windows Vista on it, which also offers all these things – it ran Vista OK too.) I can plug in my mobile broadband dongle, go online anywhere, video conference – it’s just a smaller more portable (and less powerful) version of my main laptop and desktop, and that’s what I want from a device in this market sector. It cost £300 and it has a better than average keyboard and screen resolution for a netbook. The only downside is the woeful battery life, but at least I can change the battery if I want, and I can upgrade the disk and memory too.

How many of these things can the iPad do?

The Screen
The resolution of the screen is 1024 x 768. When did you last see a new laptop or monitor with that as a native resolution? Consumers want widescreen, not 4:3. Can you imagine how dire widescreen movies will look on this thing? They will play in a tiny strip. This is a massive oversight.

Processor
It’s a custom Apple chip called an A4 and running at 1GHz. Of course without knowing the IPC rate or cache values, it’s impossible to gauge how powerful this chip will be. Apple are pretty good at matching processor power to equipment, so likely it’s fast enough to do everything the iPad does. No doubt it plays smooth video too. My netbook is fine with DVDs, and with video streaming, as long as the canvas size of the video is not too big. Full screen BBC iPlayer doesn’t work on my netbook, but I imagine the iPad could do that… if it had Flash… which it doesn’t.

Disk Space
The iPad is available with 16Gb, 32Gb or 64Gb solid state disks. 16Gb is peanuts these days, and most netbooks offer 100Gb or more. What’s more, the netbook, being basically a cut-down PC, gives full access to the data on your disk, whereas the iPad runs what is basically the iPhone OS and unless they have made changes, that does not currently have any sort of file navigation or management.

No doubt the iPad will be syncing all its data with your desktop and that puts iTunes or whatever software package in control of what you store on your device, and that seems too limiting for a netbook. Frankly it’s annoying on the iPhone and I can only imagine it will be worse on the iPad.

USB
USB is an essential part of modern computing. The iPad doesn’t have it. That means no DVD drives, cameras, flash disks, backup drives etc., whereas my netbook can interface with all these things.

Webcam
Why is there no webcam? Surely a device like this is ideal for Skype and video conference? I can’t believe Apple thought about this and decided the iPad could do without a camera. It’s much more likely that they couldn’t get it in on this version.

Multi-tasking
I ditched my iPhone for a Palm Pre for the simple reason that the iPhone OS does not do multi-tasking. You might think this isn’t a problem, but I quite often spend an evening with my laptop or netbook out, browsing the Internet whilst chatting to friends on MSN or other IM networks. You won’t be able to do this with iPad, and I believe that’s a big let down on a device like this.

My Conclusions
Apple made a big thing about how cheap this device is, but the cheapest one has only a 16Gb drive, no 3G connectivity and still costs more than my more capable netbook. The 3G connectivity will be essential, because without it and without any USB ports, the only way you’ll be able to get online is via WiFi, and that means finding a hotspot. Plus, the 3G costs an extra $130, whereas mobile broadband dongles in the UK are now very cheap. The 64Gb version with 3G is a whopping $829. That’s an expensive netbook!

The iPad is not really a computer like your desktop, laptop or even netbook – it is a cobbled gadget. An iPad that runs OS X would have been an attractive proposition, but I don’t see any value in using a phone OS on a computer. Yeah, sure, it’s a great piece of design. It does what it does really well. Some of the apps look fab. But get past all of that, and it’s really just eye candy. Are you really going to want to scroll through loads of photos on your iPad? Bear in mind that you won’t just be able to hook up your camera to it, so you’ll have to first download all your images from your camera to your computer and then sync with the iPad. Sounds like more work to me rather than making things simpler.

What about music? Well, I already have an iPod, and I phone that can play MP3s. Heck, even my car stereo can play them. How many places do I need my iTunes, and do I really want a personal music player with a 9.7″ screen?

What was the real motivation for making this gadget?

Could it be that Apple sat and looked at its 75 million iPhone and iPod Touch users, and the 125 million app store accounts, and then thought… “how can we squeeze more cash out of these people”? They then looked at the Amazon Kindle and Sony’s reader and decided to make a book store and a larger iPod to put it all on. Then they dress it up as a tablet computer and tell us that it’s the thing we need to fill the gap in our computing life.

Apple fans and gadget fans everywhere will rush out to buy these things without really thinking about whether or not it will actually be worthwhile to have. Apple fans always do. And true to form, Apple will treat its early adopters with usual contempt by bringing out a version 2 with all the features version 1 should have had in short order, and probably with a lower price tag. The thing is not even ready to ship for another 60 – 90 days. What’s wrong with it? Is it not finished? Are there manufacturing issues? Are Apple waiting to see how many people pre-order before they really commit to production? It doesn’t make sense to me.

I love Apple computers and I love OS X, but I hate what Apple the company has become, and the iPad appears to me to be nothing more than a giant ruse to make money. It’s easy to get carried along on the tidal wave of hype and spin, or to be seduced by the touchy feely goodness of the thing, but I won’t be rushing out to buy an iPad I’m afraid. I know that as soon as I get chance to touch one in the Apple store, I will want it, but that’s all it’ll be: a want, not a need. I don’t need an iPad. It doesn’t neatly solve any computing gaps in my life, and is therefore nothing more than a toy. I’ll stick with my trusty Packard Bell netbook. The battery may be crap, but I can forgive it that and carry a spare in the comfortable knowledge that I can do almost everything I would ever want to do with a computer on a device that is small and portable.

I resisted buying the first incarnation of the iPhone, due to the lack of 3G, which always seemed utterly bizarre in a “breakthrough communications device”. That, and the non-subsidised price ensured that my cash stayed firmly in my pocket. Both of these issues were resolved with the iPhone 3G, so I have relented and bought one, and after living with it for a few weeks, I think I’m in a position to write a review.

I think it’s important to remember that the iPhone is primarily a mobile phone, so I think it’s appropriate to judge it first of all on that basis. So, what do we need from a phone? Quick and easy dialling; an easy to use contacts list; portability; battery life; signal strength, and; call quality. Let’s see how it measures up on each of these points…

Quick and easy dialling
Most phones on the market have a series of number buttons, and making a call is no more complicated than pressing the buttons for the number you want and hitting the dial button. The iPhone has no buttons. To make a one-off call, we have to press the home button, slide the “button” to activate the screen, press the home button again if we’re not already at the home screen, tap the phone icon, tap the number pad icon if it’s not already selected and finally we can dial the number. It doesn’t take that long, but it’s not exactly quick and I can’t help but wonder how that might affect someone trying to call the emergency services when in dire need of emergency assistance.

I’m happy to trade off speed of dialling with all the additional features I get with iPhone, but not all users will feel the same.

Having said that, most calls will be to someone in your contact list, and the iPhone makes this nice and easy to do. You can also assign contacts as favourites, and these appear in their own shortcut list.

Easy to use contacts list
I can’t fault the contacts list at all. It’s easy to use, and allows you to store multiple numbers per contact, and all sorts of other useful information too. Adding and editing the data is easy on the iPhone, but as it syncs up with your computer, you can just add all your contacts there more quickly and then they will just appear on the iPhone. If you subscribe to Apple’s MobileMe service, they sync across all your computers and the iPhone.

You can add photos to contacts, much like you can with any modern handset, but I like the way these are also synced up and applied to emails as well as phone calls. I like the way you can also add custom fields of your own, and these are remembered so that you can use them across multiple contacts.

Grouping contacts and sending messages to groups is also possible, as is setting individual ring tones for each contact or groups of contacts.

Portability
The iPhone is lightweight, and surprisingly compact considering all the features it has, but there are certainly lighter and smaller handsets on the market. Given that most people will buy the iPhone partly because of the way it looks, I don’t think many prospective purchasers will spend too much time thinking about its portability.

It is worth thinking about how expensive the iPhone is, and how easily it could get damaged. It would be pretty easy for the iPhone to slip out of sweaty hands, hit the floor, and end up horribly scratched and disfigured. A case is essential! The one I have is a bit fiddly, and getting the iPhone extracted before the caller has hung up can be a bit of a challenge.

Battery life
This is a really important aspect of a mobile phone – after all, you can’t be very mobile if you have to plug it in all the time. Surely though, this won’t be a problem with an Apple product, not if their laptop battery performance is anything to go by anyway. So, how is the iPhone 3G battery life?

Crap.

There’s no other way to describe it. If you use the features of your iPhone regularly, you just won’t make it through the day without a charger and convenient power point. Mine is perpetually plugged in when I’m at home or in the office, and I’ve now taken to carrying a pay-as-you-go handset with me when I’m out and about, just in case the battery fails.

You can’t buy an extended battery. You can’t buy a second battery. You can’t even open the iPhone to get at the battery. When you consider that rechargeable batteries have a life span of around 500 full charges, I have to wonder if it will even last out my 18 month contract before it has to go to Apple to be replaced.

This is a very serious fault that needs addressing. I’m fed up with seeing the red battery icon.

Signal strength and call quality
I can’t fault either of these things. The phone is quite happy making reliable calls even on just 1 bar of service. Clarity of speech is excellent.
Now, it’s time to look at the iPhone’s additional features. Bearing in mind that Apple are trying to capture some of the corporate market, the iPhone 3G will be competing head to head with XDAs, Blackberrys and Smart Phones, so how does it hold up?

Connectivity
Pretty important for the internet and push email features of the iPhone 3G, and I have to say it is brilliant. It switches seamlessly between GPRS EDGE, 3G and WiFi, automically picking the fastest/cheapest connection within range. Internet browsing on 3G is perfectly acceptable, although you probably wouldn’t want to browse YouTube or any other high bandwidth sites.

National 3G coverage is pretty good and most major towns and cities have good 3G signals. There’s plenty of free WiFi around too, so getting online is never really a problem with the iPhone 3G.

Internet
The Safari browser on the iPhone is certainly the best browser I have ever used on a mobile device. You can open multiple windows, and easily zoom in on any part of the screen. The keyboard only appears when needed, and the iPhone neatly detects the orientation of the device in your hand and displays pages in portrait or landscape format accordingly.

That said, it does have limitations. You can only open 5 windows, and if you switch between the windows a lot, you will notice a rather odd bug where the window you switch to will load the content from the window you switched from, rather than showing the content you wanted to see. It’s bizarre and Apple need to sort it out.

There’s also no Flash support. Apple have been rapped by the ASA and forced to change their TV commercials as Flash is an important part of the Internet, and the iPhone 3G simply won’t display it.

Email and push functionality
The email client is excellent and supports all the major standards perfectly. When the iPhone first syncs with your computer, it will automatically import the email settings and set it all up for you – utterly painless. It makes most sense to use IMAP, Exchange or MobileMe with such a device so that your email syncs up. MobileMe is great, but there is an annual fee for the service, and it really warrants its own review. I think the big draw of the iPhone 3G, particularly for corporate users, will be the Exchange support.

For most users, the Exchange setup will be simple and painless, but for some, it will be difficult. I don’t think this is particularly a fault of the iPhone, it has more to do with Exchange and the plethora of different possible configurations. I couldn’t get my iPhone 3G to sync with my Exchange server as we use Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2003, which doesn’t have the right service pack for Exchange as standard. Once upgraded, it worked perfectly and now my email is pushed directly to my iPhone. (I have written a guide elsewhere on my blog on how to get connected with SBS. Do a search in the box above if you need help.)

In fact, everything now syncs perfectly. My work email and calendar syncs with Exchange. My home calendar, email and contacts all sync with MobileMe. I have everything I need in the palm of my hand and then replicated across my iMac, MacBook Pro and Windows laptop. Perfect!

Camera
Many people are concerned with having a great camera in their phone. If that’s the case, then you will be disappointed with the iPhone camera. The resolution is poor and taking photos is fiddly, particularly self portraits. On the Mac, iPhoto opens every time I connect my iPhone and tries to import my iPhone photos. This is a pain in the butt. Frankly, I don’t want to take photos on my phone. I have a camera.

Horses and courses of course, but I’m sure Apple could do better here. Surely a forward facing camera would be sensible on a 3G device? Have Apple missed an opportunity with video calling?

iPod
More and more phone handsets now have MP3 players built in. Again, I have an iPod for my music, and using my phone for music is not my first preference, but if you’re going to have a music player and phone together, this is the one you want. The iPhone has all the same features as the iPod touch, with a beautiful coverflow system for browsing your music by album cover. It works well, and I must confess that I have loaded some tunes on to listen to at the gym.

In fact, you can also load full movies onto your iPhone, and in the USA you can actually rent movies on the iTunes store. For some reason, in the UK you cannot yet do this, which is pretty poor.

The real problem is…

Memory
The iPhone has no memory card slot. Presumably this would have detracted from the smooth lines of the gadget, but this just smacks of form over function to me. I have the 8Gb version, mainly because I refused to pay the outrageous additional cost for one with slightly more memory. Flash RAM is cheap. Why not allow users to expand their device as they wish?

GPS
A very welcome addition to the second generation iPhone is GPS. This hooks up seamlessly with the Google maps application to show you exactly where you are anywhere in the world. The iPhone can also triangulate your rough position from cell towers if it can’t see any satellites. The application does provide step-by-step directions, but it does not actually direct you through each step like a vehicle sat nav system. It seems to me that it wouldn’t take much to add this, and then with the help of a car cradle, you could make better use of the GPS. No doubt this would also dramatically boost iPhone sales.

Office documents
The iPhone has viewers for all the main Office document types, but you cannot edit the files. This is a huge disappointment as every other smart phone, XDA, or PDA I’ve tried has had this capability. Apple could easily resolve this, and I’m very surprised that they have not provided a mobile version of their brilliant iWork office suite.

Files
I am rather staggered by the complete lack of any sort of file storage or browsing functionality on the iPhone. OS X, upon which the iPhone interface is built, has Finder – the best file broswing and searching system of any modern OS, and yet the iPhone has nothing. I can’t copy files over to the device and organise them, and Apple has missed a serious trick here. I still need to carry my USB flash drive around with me. Very annoying.

Applications
One of the great features of the iPhone 3G is the downloadable applications. Be warned though that the quality of the apps is wide and varied. Some are fantastic (Apple’s HoldEm poker game for instance), but there are many utterly rubbish third party apps, some of which cost money, so you need to pay attention to the application rating and reviews before splashing the cash. The Apps feature does add serious capability to the iPhone, and the SDK that Apple provides for developers is excellent, so expect to see better things from the App store in the future.

The applications highlight another limitation with the iPhone: that of multi-tasking. It doesn’t have any. You can only run one application at a time, which makes things like mobile MSN, iChat or Skype completely impractical. This is something they may solve with a future software update – I certainly hope so.

Interface
The touch screen interface really needs to be seen (and touched) to be believed. It is truly stunning. The keyboard in particular is worthy of mention. With the “buttons” on screen for the keyboard being very small, it is very easy (and common) to make typos. However, the iPhone is extremely clever at working out what you wanted to type and automatically correcting this for you. Unlike T9 predictive text messaging systems, it is reliable, accurate and rarely gets in the way, which allows you to type quickly and with confidence.

The iPhone also boasts two accelerometers (is that spelled right?) which detect movement, and this means you can play games like Super Monkey Ball by actually moving the iPhone around in your hands. I hope to see some more innovative use of these features in future Applications.

Summary
The iPhone is not perfect, and it is not far enough ahead of the competition to warrant their being excluded from consideration. It’s not for everybody. I can live with the niggles because the overall package is so good, but the battery life really riles me. I can’t understand why it is so poor. I would rather have a slightly thicker iPhone and a much longer battery life if such an option existed.

As an everyday work tool, the iPhone works well. Invariably, the average worker will have it plugged into their computer or car regularly through the day, and therefore the battery won’t be too much of a problem. In a purely social setting though, the iPhone doesn’t make as much sense. There are other handsets with Internet, better cameras and better battery life. Whether or not their better features will be enough to overcome the draw of the iPhone’s sheer beauty and desirability is another question.

If the battery was good, I would score the iPhone 9 out of 10, with the dropped point for the lack of Office software and file browsing. With the shoddy battery, I can only give it a 7 out of 10, and I think I might have been better waiting for the 3rd generation.