I’ve turned to the “dark side” (literally, I got the black one)…
My trusty AT&T Tilt, a.k.a. HTC Kaiser, was finally showing signs of it’s age. I could go on a diatribe pointing out its inadequacies compared to the current lot of phones on the market, but I just couldn’t do that to a phone that survived several, let’s just call them ‘base jumps’, from my lap when getting out of my truck. It was also the device that revived my interest in C# and mobile phone programming. Ah yes, we had some good times in a geeky sort of way. But alas, technology changes at a blistering pace which means a few months after you have the newest, there’s always something else that tops it.
That’s the predicament that I was in. I had just really got into the Windows Mobile scene and BAM!, the original iPhone was just being released. At first it didn’t really interest me, even though it was the newest and shiniest phone hardware out there. I remember being intrigued by the multi-touch display, but otherwise it just seemed like another mobile OS. So I ignored it for a good long time. Since its release, I had only ever handled an iPhone once, and that was for about 2 minutes. I didn’t really see what the big deal was. The original iPhone seemed to be severely lacking compared to the features of Windows Mobile, and at the time they did. The iPhone plaform was closed, people were writing browser-based apps in order to extend the functionality (inluding copy/paste, WTF?), and other than being a shiny piece of kit, there was nothing that would really pull you away if you had the same smartphone functionality in your current phone.
Then came the Android OS and Android-based phones. Android is basically the gift from the Google gods for anyone who prays at the alter of “teh Googlez”. What Google did was take the mobile platform and fully integrate web services with the mobile handset. They also did a few things very right with the Android platform itself. They made it a completely open source mobile platform and utilized a very prolific programming language, Java. This opened up mobile computing to a large portion of the programming world, needing only to learn new APIs instead of new programming languages. As much as I wish I could hop on the Android bus, my carrier doesn’t provide any Android phones. I did try running Android on my Tilt, but that was a rather slow and unpleasant experience.
So I was left with the dilemma of do I get another Windows Mobile device or something completely different? There are quite a few nice Windows Mobile phones out right now, my choice specifically would be the HTC Touch Pro 2. But the Windows Mobile platform seems a bit stale. Until they can completely revamp their touchscreen capabilities, it’s just doesn’t feel like a contender. Windows Mobile 7 sounds promising, but it’s still a while away. That leaves me with two options: Blackberry or iPhone? Well, I’ve had several Blackberrys in the past, however none of them were very, hmmm…exciting to me. Yeah some of the new ones have beautiful screens, but the platform (hardware and software) just don’t provide a lot of possibilities compared to the iPhone. However the Blackberry is pretty much the defacto standard for business use, and that’s what I use my phone for a bulk of the time. The deciding question becomes, “do I want to work or play more on my new phone?”
Using the most rigorous of thought processes that lasted about 0.3 seconds, I came to the conclusion: PLAY!!!
I got my iPhone 3GS two weeks ago and I’ve loved every second of it. I’m so glad I waited two hardware revisions and several OS updates. They’ve worked out a lot of the issues consumers complained about, while upgrading the hardware and adding a ton of long-overdue features. The iPhone is now a mature mobile computing platform. It may not be the fastest or have all the features of other platforms (Androids cloud), but there are tons of 3rd party apps that extend the functionality. I personally don’t like the idea of being locked to the App Store and iTunes, but you have to take the bad with the good (well, not always *cough* jailbreak *cough*).
Hopefully I’ll get the motivation for learning to speak the language of the iPhone (Objective-C), but it seems like there’s already a bunch of theme customization apps, so I’ll just have to figure out some other type of program to write for it 