The new world of iPhones, that totally isn’t worth the switch from my Nokia N95

It was right when the madness started. Back in the days, in april 2008, the first iPhone made it’s appearance on the austrian smartphone market – and I was in urgent need of a mobile phone upgrade. But there was another player out there: The Nokia N95. And while the iPhone was brand new and shiny and all Apple, I totally considered it a piece of first-generation-device-junk.

The point of no return

I mean, come on, that thingy didn’t even have copy & paste. Plus, this maddox-blogpost read like a warm and comforting voice of reason above all the “I need an iPhone – it’s so new, and shiny, and it’s an iPhone, so I need one!”-craze that was going on. So there I was, in the midst of an intrapersonal struggle: The graphics designer in me went full-on iPhone-crazy. He liked the shinyness. The buttonlessness. The being-an-apple-device-ness.

But he was not alone to decide. Opposing his hypish enthusiasm was my inner geek, who loathed all things shiny. Who dismissed all things buttonless. Who questioned all things apple-ish. It was a long, exhausting fight. The Nokia N95 also looked great. And it had, definitely, tons of features rendering the first iPhone a laughable toy for people naive enough to be paying test subjects in the introduction of an untested technology. So, naturally, my geekish side had the upper hand, and I got myself a glorious Nokia N95 8GB.

Hello, my new friend

And, boy, did it serve me well. For the past three years I didn’t miss a feature. For three years my “clumsy” Nokia could do everything any other, revolutionary, new, shiny smart phone could do. The iPhone 3G added GPS – my Nokia already had that. iPhones went all crazy for their accelerometer, I never even used the one my Nokia – naturally – also had. People started to mock my Nokia beauty, but they couldn’t get to me. The last laugh was on me, for the N95 was a workhorse and it did whatever I would tell it to do. Plus, it was indestructible.

I dropped it from various heights, exposed it to rain and humidity and sunlight and winterish freeziness and what-have-you. The N95 was totally unimpressed with every danger I exposed it to, while smartphones left and right had all kinds of firmware problems, update trouble, connectivity issues, broken screens and general “of course it breaks easily, it’s supposed to be new and shiny, not robust”-nessish glitches. Plus, the Nokia actually had that much overrated thing formerly known as battery life, which for modern day smartphones translates to battery countdown, and is nothing but embarassing. Of course one could deactivate GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi, turn the brightness way down and thus extend the battery life to up to a whole day – while her fancy new device was stripped of all the features she had bought it for in the first place.

The way of life, plus your appearance in front of clients

But things have changed. Now, I am a self-employed graphics designer specializing in user experience design and, amidst other funky machines, mobile devices. While that certainly didn’t lessen my trust in, and happyiness with, the N95, it did become kind of an image-issue. At customer meetings it just felt weird to be talking about usage paradigms and usability patterns for those high-tech-devices, and in the next second throw clumsy N95 on the table. It kind of like felt as if I were a Maserati dealer driving a ’98 Volvo.

So something had to change. And after much consideration and opinion-switching and comparing and those thingies I decided to get the iPhone 4. And I would love to tell you that I have never looked back. But, as a matter of fact, I already miss the clumsiness of my beloved Nokia.

Do as we demand or, you know, screw you!

At least the N95 required nothing but a SIM card to be inserted and boom – one was able to use the phone he bought. Well, of course, you may think. Not so much with the iPhone. Please insert a SIM card. Now, please connect to iTunes. What the hell? Why do I have to connect my phone to iTunes? I kind of understand the link between iTunes and the music on the iPhone. It inter-promotes both technologies and makes things much easier to handle for apple. But why, in the frickin’ name of whatever-god-you-pray-to, can’t I even make a call without linking a device to a completely unrelated software on some other device that has got nothing to do with making phone calls whatsoever?

That’s stupid.

It’s brand attention, and we will make you have it

A couple days ago, when I would be walking around Vienna with my good old Nokia, I would be able to walk, watch traffic and write texts at the same time. It was easy, because I knew where those keys were and how often I had to press them to get whatever character I wanted. Damn, sometimes I could write a text without ever looking at the device. Which is a great advantage in a lot of situations, like walking around town, or subtle note taking in a meeting, or what-have-you-kind-of-situation where it would be helpful if one could pay attention to something else than only the device in their hand.

Which is quite simply straightforward impossible with the iPhone. Not only does one need to switch to different keyboard views, but there’s about absolutely no realistic chance to ever get the muscle memory required to type a message without watching your every single step.

That’s annoying.

Please do not leave home without some cable

Plus, a subtitle: Because cables are totally cool accessories to carry around.

Sometimes I visit my parents in the countryside over the weekend. I used to charge my phone prior to leaving. Then, when I got back three days later, I would charge it again, and life was good. Now, whenever I leave my apartment, I have to make sure that the iPhone is somewhat charged. I can, literally, watch the battery status go down percent by percent when I’m actually using the device for anything else but showing off how beautiful it is (which, and that’s not up for discussion, it absolutely is). Battery life is non existant, and I don’t care if your damn battery life expectation tables claim differently, Steve. Your tables lie.

That’s really annoying.

Your technology is useless to us, even in our own device

I am a picture-taker. I like to snap photos. And it’s great when the phone can do that, because one doesn’t need to carry around a camera. With my N95 I used to make a quick snapshot and then grab it from my Mac via Bluetooth. That process of transferring any file on the phone to wherever I wish on my laptop, or vice versa, took a total of about 0.3 seconds. It was seamless and worked every single time. No extra equipment was necessary and I could do that even in the deepest cave with no reception whatsoever. As long as both devices had battery life left I would be able to toss files around between them like school children are throwing stones at each other.

Now, the iPhone has bluetooth, too. Of course it does, it’s fancy and new and so very shiny. Just there’s a difference to every other bluetooth-device on earth: Apple doesn’t allow data to be sent to, or retrieved from, an iDevice via bluetooth – which renders the battery-sucking technology utterly and completely frickin’ useless, save for the connection of a wireless headset, which makes you look like an idiot (bluetooth-headset-idiot-lookingalike-ness totally iPhone-unrelated, just sayin’). The only way to get a file to the iPhone is through a network connection.

Isn’t that great? I have two devices, placed right frickin’ next to each other. There’s a file on device a, and I would very much enjoy to transfer said file to device b. Naturally, I prefer to use the most low-profile connection mode, which happens to be bluetooth in this case (I’m ignoring infrared out of sheer disgust). But we’re living in the 21st century. And 21st century people are all fancy and stuff. So how do we go about that file transfer thingy? We establish a network connection on device a. Then we establish a network connection on device b. Next thing we use some kind of software on device a to get the file out, and another piece of software on device b to get the file.

It’s like living next door to your girlfriend, but her father Steve demands you take the bus to town and then get back with the train every time you want to visit her – because, fuck you!

That’s just impolite.

The outlook – my dark, sheepish future

Of course, now there is no way back. I will not give up. I will not be defeated by some piece of technological apple thing. My will is strong, and so are my nerves. Bring it on iPhone!