As judged by anecdotes, as well as by going through the various demo videos (yes, this means I haven’t held one in my hand, so my knowledge is limited):

Things I’m jealous of:

• Much nicer e-mail client. It’s (obviously) Gmail-specific, but it comes with so much functionality I sorely miss on the terribly limited iPhone OS’s Mail.
• Better spelling suggestions/correction. Multiple choices presented in a horizontal band as you type.
• Speed and specs. The UI looks much smoother than iPhone OS 3.1 does on my (admittedly now-aging) iPhone 3G. In large part, I’m sure, due to four times the RAM (512 MB vs. 128), and a much faster CPU (the Cortex A8-like, ARMv7-based Snapdragon at 1 GHz, rather than Apple’s custom ARMv6-based chip at 412 MHz). Speaking of specs, a honorary mention goes to the far higher resolution — 854×480 vs. 480×320, which should provide benefits in the long run.
• Background applications. This is one area where I’m curious to see what direction Apple is heading in.
• Notifications. Not shown much in the demos, but supposedly decent. iPhone OS handles them absolutely terribly. One alert on top of another and you’ve got yourself a user-hostile mess.

Things I’m not so jealous of:

• Inferior browser in-page navigation. It’s not just that Android’s default-shipping browser lacks multi-touch zoom; it’s much more importantly that, as the demo video illustrates so nicely¹, double-tap-to-zoom picks a seemingly random area (in this particular case, a portion of the picture) to zoom in on, quite unlike Safari on iPhone OS, which would have shown the entire picture, left to right. Pictures is one thing, paragraphs is another; it appears Safari is much smart about figuring out what you want to focus on.² This may seem like a minor point, but is in fact a huge win in user experience for iPhone OS.
• Ugly text rendering. The fonts look like Linux. Oh, right. Googl eneeds to invest some R&D money here.
• Inconsistent UI. In the demo videos, this is most noticeable with toolbars — or, more generally speaking, the layout of controls within the apps: each of the shown apps appears to have its own idea of where to place the buttons, and what size, shading, background color, etc. they ought to be. It’s far from bad, but it’s hardly good either. iPhone OS, despite having multiple variants of control styles, gives a clear impression of existing overall design guidelines.

Android has been developing at a rapid pace, which puts some wonderful pressure on Apple to hopefully make a nice leap with iPhone OS 4 and beyond, but it’s nowhere near the point where I’d even consider switching.

1. How could someone produce such a video and not notice how little sense this behavior makes? ↩
2. This works so well, in fact, that I miss that functionality on any desktop browser. ↩

A few first impressions:

• Two usability goofs so far. iTunes asks me to register (optionally), but wants my iPhone’s phone number at a point when I don’t actually have it yet. Not a big deal, but somewhat odd nonetheless. And second, also related to the phone number: it is first presented as a weird pop-up message that’s apparently neither an SMS, nor a voicemail, nor anything else I could find. By the time I had my address book open to put the number in, the screen went dark, but upon pressing the home button, the message goes away. I searched back and forth throughout the UI for the number, particularly in Settings → Phone, where it initially did not appear. Then, after a few minutes, it did.
• Not unexpectedly, Google Earth delivered the biggest wow effect thus far. I typed the first few letters of a friend’s address into the search field, and because my contacts had already been synced, it recognized the friend’s location and zoomed in there.
• Setting up my workplace VPN mostly went fine, except DNS resolution doesn’t appear to work (this is probably our setup’s fault, though), and, perhaps related, I can’t access our Exchange-based mail server. “Cannot Get Mail: The connection to the server failed.” is not, by the way, a very useful error message. How do I debug this? I can use Remote Desktop Lite to access that very machine’s RDP server, so I assume that means the machine is generally reachable… Fixed now. Still, the error message should have been more helpful.
• AIM and Skype are actually decent apps. With every Skype test call, I get some random skips. The big issue, however (and 3.0 will largely resolve that) is that you’re essentially offline as soon as you leave the app…
• Remote is nice, but even nicer would be to use my iPhone as a speaker, i.e. simply access a remote library but control and play it on the iPhone. Or… can I do that?
• Location tracking works almost creepily well.
• There’s something crazy-cool the way Safari renders websites just about perfectly the way you’d expect from a desktop OS, only smaller.
• Boy, this feels futuristic.

Pick your most ridiculous bit:

• That it’s essentially for Twitter posts drafts (140 characters and you need drafts of that?),
• that it’s $3.99 (wait, I’m not getting any money to use this?),
• that its screencast is really more of an absurdly self-mocking promotion video,
• or that John Gruber has an objectoerotic crush on it? (I kid.)

Whichever it is, Birdhouse is getting rave reviews all over the place, and hey: with the attention to detail they put into it, it deserves no less.

Now why didn’t I get to beta-test this? Grr.

For some, this has to be the best news of the month so far¹: “within a week or so”, Apple will send iPhone developers a new version of the SDK agreement that will no longer put API usage under NDA. From open discussion (and exchange of code) to books being published to open source software being put out of legal limbo, this should resolve many entirely unnecessary (from the developers’ perspective) hindrances.

What I find interesting is how Apple describes this as a change of mind, rather than something they had intended all along:

We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software.

And:

Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.

Whether individual developers had a stake in this decision, or whether is was rather influenced by higher-profile companies (or perhaps largely by recent cancellations of books) will perhaps never be clear. Nonetheless, it confirms Matt Gemmell: “Apple is listening”. Perhaps they sometimes do so too late, but at least they do at all.

Now let’s hope some progress can be made on the arbitrary rejection front.

1. Especially considering the month just started today. ↩

Please, please let these screenshots be not fake. (via fscklog)

‘There’s no Nike+ app for it!’ has been one of the few remaining counter-arguments of me buying an iPhone. My late iPod nano has left me with a remaining, unusable (on its own) Nike+ set of pedometer and receiver, and I sure wouldn’t mind being able to use those again. At the same time, replacing my mediocre¹ Sony Ericsson T610 with a more powerful substitute might make sense, especially when that substitute can also serve as my new portable music player. Who doesn’t like convergence, when it’s done really well?

Each day, I spend close to an hour commuting in the train (25-ish minutes back and forth), during which I currently have no Internet connection. Now, if I could spend some of that time more usefully, other than reading unread tweets or solving Sudoku, that might be nice indeed.

Issues with the App Store aren’t the only kind of thing that scare me. It’s hard to believe, but this device would actually be a step back in Bluetooth support compared to my T610. Puzzling, because Apple arguably pioneered Bluetooth support on personal computers, offering a useful solution years before Windows XP finally did with Service Pack 2. Then, in 2007, it quietly dropped Address Book Bluetooth support (such as for sending text messages right to the currently open contact) with OS X 10.5², and shipped the iPhone with only supporting headsets. No A2DP, no file transfer, no modem tethering… I was hoping these were simply features they’d ship after higher priorities have been resolved, but even with the 2.1 previews, we have no improvement. No cabled tethering either, unless you count the unsupported, currently unavailable NetShare app, which is merely a SOCKS 5 proxy, thus hardly offering a full solution.

On the bright side, we have a user interface that doesn’t try to scale down the traditional personal computer desktop to a small screen variant. Many of the controls have clearly been conceived from scratch, which is in stark contrast to most other smartphone UIs.

And then, finally, we have T-Mobile’s rates. I have yet to see a single comparison where any other provider in Germany comes out cheaper (the ones I’ve seen need to go back to arithmetics 101, it seems), but there’s a difference between being competitive and being affordable. You see, before last summer, I didn’t have a cellphone for years. And I kind of liked it that way. Or, shall we say, I didn’t miss it — most of the time. There are those moments where you’re unexpectedly and randomly stuck someplace, sometime, and if you could make just this one phone call, it would fix it all. And with the job, of course, I get called quite a bit more. But overall, I’m not even sure I average one call a week.

So you can perhaps tell I’m not exactly the most likely target audience for this product. I’d use the iPod aspect daily. Same goes, probably, for e-mail and other lightweight Internet-bound apps. And the PIM aspects — calendar, contacts, notes. But as for all things cellular, whether audio or text, I’m just not much of a user.

And so I’m in this unusual situation where what I’d really like to have is unlimited (or a very high limit of) data, but very low limits of calls and messages. Shame I’m in such a minority.

Why not the iPod touch, you ask? Because I’d be back to square zero regarding Internet connectivity in the train. (A 3G ExpressCard plus an iPod nano would be a more feasible alternative to that.)

1. Yes, I know what they say: gift, horse, mouse, yaddayadda. Now that the battery and charging cable have been replaced, it does the basic job fine! ↩
2. Although, at the same time, they did add A2DP support. ↩