Goodbye iPhone, Hello (Again) BlackBerry

I am now a reverse switcher - I switched from a BlackBerry to an iPhone about six months ago, and now am switching back again. Why? Basically it comes down to the fact that the iPhone is really good at the stuff I do 10% of the time, but pretty poor at the stuff I do 90% of the time. This is not to bash the iPhone. It has been a transformative device in the wireless industry, and forced everyone else to up their game. It has shuffled the power structure between device makers, service providers, developers, and the broader ecosystem. But such a sophisticated device is a very personal choice and people have very different priorities for something they use and carry around with them almost every waking hour. My phone is provided by and for work, and I primarily use it for work purposes, and for that I find a BlackBerry much, much more efficient. Now after having a BlackBerry Bold for a week, I realize how much I was fighting with the iPhone the whole time trying to get it to do what I wanted, at the speed I wanted.

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Back to the Future with iPhone Typing

Reading a review of Documents To Go, a Microsoft Office-compatible document creater/reader app for the iPhone (as well as many other PDAs/smartphones) made me think of the old “laptops” that first appeared in the early 80’s. When typing on the iPhone in landscape mode you only get a few lines of text remaining visible, and Documents To Go exacerbates this further with additional menu bars that take up more vertical real estate (though they can be invisible-ized when not needed).

Here’s a screenshot from the MacWorld review. As you can see, there are only 3 lines of text visible (perhaps 5 with the menu bar off):

Here’s what the old Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 looked like, perhaps the world’s first true laptop computer from 1983:

Two and a half decades later and we’re back where we started…

If you’re just typing a quick message then such a letterboxed view is perhaps acceptable, but for working properly on a multi-page Word doc it’s just horrible. I would sometimes use my old Palm Tungsten T3 (which had one of the larger Palm screens) along with a fold-up keyboard, and it actually wasn’t too bad. But that’s my minimum for a tolerable experience when writing anything even moderately lengthy.

I have to admit that I find myself less and less enamored of the forced compromise that the iPhone creates between keyboard and content by placing both on the same screen. I don’t find any of the permutations satisfactory for what I need. Obviously I’m in a minority however, as most people love their iPhones according to one recent very small-scale survey.

The iPhone is a Subscription

The NYT’s Bits Blog spells out how the pricing for the iPhone basically turns it into a subscription, at least for people who want to upgrade their phone regularly. With the new prices and GS model announced Monday, there are now three tiers, as described by Bits:

• The $199-every-two-years plan. That gives you the base model of the most current phone hardware every two years. You have to suffer a year of jealousy when others have the newest phone and you don’t. There is a similar $299-every-two-years plan for the higher capacity phone.
• The $399-every-year plan (with an introductory rate of $199 the first year only). For four times the effective annual cost, you get the base model as soon as it comes out. Premium users may gravitate to the $499-a-year plan ($299 to start out) to be sure of having the very best model.
• The new $99-every-two-years plan, if you want to have last year’s model and keep it for two years. As I wrote Monday, this may go down to a $0-every-two-years plan next year.

Given that the average consumer gets a new cellphone every 18 months, this isn’t really different from what’s been going on for years, it’s just that the price-point is far higher. But it’s not out of line for other smartphones, and if anything Apple has been pushing prices down in the category — for launch prices at least. BlackBerry and Palm both had to launch the Storm and Pre, respectively, at the $200 pricepoint, or they wouldn’t stand a chance against the iPhone.

The difference is that in the past launch prices quickly dropped, sometimes to free, whereas Apple keeps them consistent throughout the life of a product generation. So while it puts pressure on competitors for their launch prices, it also opens the door for them to drop their prices over time, perhaps significantly undercutting the iPhone.

[And for the record, I sympathize with a commenter on the Bits Blog post that it’s unfortunate that so many see resource-intensive products like cellphones as disposable on such a frequent basis. Granted, they get beat up a lot being handheld and portable, but upgrading is by far the most common reason. I have to plea guilty as charged here too, though I generally hang on to a phone for more like 3 years (my Sony Ericsson has a cracked screen, but otherwise I still use it).]

So Not an iPhone: Olivetti Valentine Typewriter

I’ve wanted one of these classics, designed by Ettore Sottsass and Perry King in the late 60’s, since I was in design school 20 years ago. By chance I found one on Craigs List the other day for a great price locally. There’s a lot that can go wrong with them, so I’ve been wary about buying them on eBay, where they come up quite frequently (though usually for much more).

This one is a Valentine S, and it’s in pretty good shape. The rubber straps that attach the case are in OK shape, these are a common failure point as the rubber dries out, cracks and breaks. The case is a little scuffed up, and the top of the typewriter itself is a bit scratched from going in/out of the case. Otherwise it’s cosmetically pretty decent. It doesn’t work right now, I’d have to get it serviced, but I’m not planning on doing any actual typing…

I will scan the instruction manual also, as it’s very cute.

Smartphone Platforms Max'd Out

Over at O’Reilly Raven Zachary is speculating on what Palm’s announcement will be in January, and whether they will finally ship their Linux-based OS or jump in with one of the existing major platforms, which would just leave them with either Android or Windows Mobile as I can’t see Apple letting them have the iPhone OS…

Palm used to be a dominant platform with a vibrant developer community. It had mojo. Today, only iPhone and Android have mojo. Windows Mobile is still very popular, but it doesn’t have nearly the buzz or, from what I see clients asking for, the development interest. So there two dominant platforms and one secondary one. Two secondary ones if you count Palm’s ancient OS, but I don’t think that’s a fair comparison to Windows Mobile. So call it two and a half.

We see the same kind of pattern elsewhere. In PC OS’s there are 2-3 platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) and no room for any others. In social networking there are 2-3 platforms (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn) and while there’s lots of start-up activity at this point it’s hard to see how any will succeed in anything beyond a niche capacity; people just don’t want to have to invest effort in more than a couple of social networks, and app developers and advertisers will be focused on the ones with the most traffic. In gaming platforms there are 3 (Xbox, Playstation, Wii now making Nintendo a full-fledged member again). Developers don’t have the resources to work on more than 2 or 3, often not even more than 1. Customers tend to gravitate toward safer bets in dynamic categories, which reinforces the hegemony of the major players.

If you’re not in that top 2 or 3, it’s a better bet to swallow your pride and jump in with them rather than try to go it alone. (Note that this is primarily in a category that relies a lot on network effects — if you are in a business of products that are relatively independent then this argument doesn’t necessarily hold up.)

What will Palm do? They are in a pickle, with a lot of legacy apps to support, and a choice of staying with their former arch enemy (Windows Mobile) or going with a jury-still-out OS (Android). Unless they are able to pull off some Rosetta Stone miracle that unifies several OS’s smoothly, I can’t see a new Palm OS working out for them. If they’d got it out several years ago it could have worked, but today, no.

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