In Search Of The Perfect Mobile Device

With the release of the iPhone, I’ve been considering my options for mobile devices to try to figure out if any of them is ideal for me. The iPhone isn’t — I’ll talk more about that in a later post — and unfortunately it seems like nothing else either. This post, and probably others to follow, is as much for my own benefit as it is a way to publicly record my thoughts in the vain hope that someday, someone might make a device that works well for people like me.

Thanks to my work with Julie at The Gadgeteer and my own fetish for handhelds and PDAs, I have been able to try a number of different things. My current phone/PDA is a HTC TyTn which is arguably one of the best Windows Mobile phones available right now. I’ve used the Treo 650 and also have a Palm TX. I have a couple of Nokia N-Series phones, but unfortunately they’re tri-band so I’d have to switch away from AT&T if I wanted one of those for everyday use.

The options boil down to five smart device platforms:

• Windows Mobile Pocket PC
• Palm OS
• Symbian
• iPhone
• Blackberry

There is a sixth option, which is to use a separate device such as a PDA or ultra-portable PC which is tethered to a phone by Bluetooth when necessary. I’d prefer not to do that, since I already carry too much crap around with me.

Let’s start with the iPhone, because it’s on everyone’s mind right now. First of all I have to say that Apple did an amazing job on the iPhone design and user interface; nothing else I’ve tried comes close. But for me, it falls short in a few key areas.

One of the iPhone’s biggest drawbacks, from my perspective, is the lack of 3G support. Of course, opinions on this will vary based on network coverage. But here in Birmingham, AT&T’s 3G network is pretty solid throughout the city and more populated suburbs, while the EDGE network can get very congested and slow. Theoretically, EDGE can do over 200 kbps; in practice, around here, it’s more like 20 kbps most of the time. For a device where one of the major features is browsing the real web, this really hurts.

The lack of add-on applications is also a big disadvantage of the iPhone, as far as I am concerned. I understand that there are reasons why Apple made that decision for the launch, and I hope that it will change in the coming months, perhaps with the release of Leopard and its development tools. The problem right now is that while the iPhone is very good at what it does do, it doesn’t do enough on its own yet. Web applications are not an acceptable substitute, because inasmuch as EDGE is slow, so are they.

And yes, I do want to do more with the iPhone than it does out of the box. I’d like SSH for server maintenance — one less thing I would need a laptop and a WiFi connection for. VNC would be nice too, or better yet, proper Windows and Apple remote desktop support. I need a text editor or word processor, so that I can whip out a folding Bluetooth keyboard and write. I’d love an e-book reader, so that I don’t need to carry a separate one if I’m going to be waiting around somewhere. Instant messaging is a must, preferably with multiple networks but I’d be happy enough with a mobile version of iChat. Streaming audio and video would be cool too, since the iPhone is also an iPod.

On the “pro” side of the ledger, the iPhone has excellent support for Mac syncing and a great web browser, both of which can be troublesome on other platforms. These may be what make me choose an iPhone in the end, although I doubt that will happen until after Leopard is released (which seems the obvious time to announce an iPhone SDK).

Next time, I’ll talk about my current platform, Windows Mobile. And by “talk”, I probably mean “complain”…

Tagged as: iPhone, Mobile Phone, Palm, PDA, Windows Mobile