It has almost been 4 weeks since I gained possession of an iPhone and replaced my SonyEricsson G700 (running Symbian UIQ3) with it. All I can say is that I’m very satisfied with it and the only irritating thing is that it’s quite slow; that’s what the iPhone 4 is for!
Yes, you can say that with the switch to the iOS platform (on iPhone 3G), I had lost multitasking capabilities, but honestly, I find the multitasking on the Symbian OS unnecessary and cumbersome as the phone is slow and running multitasks zaps its battery really fast. More often than now, I find myself having to run task manager to ‘end tasks’ which is unacceptable from an end-user’s point of view.
Prior to the smartphone era, I have been a user of Palm PDAs and have fully adapted to and appreciated the concept of unitasking on a mobile device. Quitting an app means quitting it, not backgrounding it. Honestly, there’s hardly any reason for running multiple applications simultaneously as the screen is too tiny for multiple windows.
With battery life as the prime consideration, I believe that it is a good thing that Apple didn’t allow multitasking in the first place. This forced developers into a mindset that their applications must be designed in an efficient and resilient way, whereby a user is prone to shutdown and startup the application at a moment’s notice. State-saving is forced upon the developer to make his application more user-friendly. If not for such discipline, you’ll end up with a whole pile of messy and slow Microsoft CE/Mobile applications which behave awkwardly most of the time.
Of course, developers cried out for a way for their apps to stay connected to the Internet and Apple responded with Push Notifications, and I believe this is the most widely adopted API, surpassing even multitasking APIs. Had Apple introduced multitasking before Push Notifications, the developer uptake would be a magnitude lower. Why use something limited when you can use Multitasking? With everyone onboard a battery efficient notification delivery system, there’s a certain discipline and progression when selecting APIs for apps to adopt.
Take Blackberry for example. Push notifications were only added as an after-thought and as a result, not many released apps took advantage of it as development effort has already been invested into more battery intensive methods—app backgrounding.
Another decision I’m glad that Apple made was to disallow full unrestricted app backgrounding, i.e. full multitasking. It will be a disaster and battery life will be a huge issue. Even now, certain applications that make use of location data, like Maps, take up slightly more battery when running. Imagine these applications run in the background unnoticed…
In the words of Steve Jobs, “In multitasking, if you see a task manager… they blew it”.
On the other hand, there are indeed a few areas that the iOS deserve some improvements but they are not deal-breakers in anyway. The first is a notification manager; for this, they can steal a page from the Android book. This would allow a user to look at the history or notifications and should they wish, revisit a notification they’d dismissed in a hurry.
The second feature would be to allow proximity based Wireless (Wifi or Bluetooth) Syncing. Of course, it’ll be only right for them to limit the sync to certain items such as Address Book, Calendars, Bookmarks, History and Backup. Other larger items such as media files would still be best served by cable.
The third would be a physical LED indicator that pulsates only when there are unread notifications waiting, something similar to the one found on the Blackberry. This way, I won’t have to wastefully turn on the screen, just to see if there are any SMSes or missed calls waiting. When the battery is low, let it pulsate in another colour such as red.
Apart from that, I can’t think of further improvements required to make it better. Of course, longer battery life and iTunes Music & Movie Store in Singapore would be awesome.
