iPhone (what else...)

[sadako]

cyberface said:

off_again said:

Just found this:

http://www.dialaphone.co.uk/blog/?p=751

Bitter? Nah, surely not....

Worth a read for the sheer brilliance of stating the bleeding obvious and missing the point.

And clearly he's pissed at not being able to sell the iPhone

This particularly tickled me...

blog said said:

11. No Internet Explore or Firefox, you have to use Safari – I’ve never used Safari but I’ve heard that Firefox is better.

Sorry but with comments like that, I stopped reading, filed under 'not to be taken seriously'

The iPhone is weak in a lot of areas, but as a mobile web browser it's one of the best!

The best mobile browser i've used so far is Netfront on my 6680. Annoyingly the company that make it are not going to do a version for s60v3 so it won't work on my n95. I'll try the iPhone browser when someone at work buys one but I'm not a fan of browsers doing the "keyhole" action with two way scrolling rather than arranging the page so it works on the screen, better if you can switch between the two.

[CommanderJameson]

sadako said:

cyberface said:

off_again said:

Just found this:

http://www.dialaphone.co.uk/blog/?p=751

Bitter? Nah, surely not....

Worth a read for the sheer brilliance of stating the bleeding obvious and missing the point.

And clearly he's pissed at not being able to sell the iPhone

This particularly tickled me...

blog said said:

11. No Internet Explore or Firefox, you have to use Safari – I’ve never used Safari but I’ve heard that Firefox is better.

Sorry but with comments like that, I stopped reading, filed under 'not to be taken seriously'

The iPhone is weak in a lot of areas, but as a mobile web browser it's one of the best!

The best mobile browser i've used so far is Netfront on my 6680. Annoyingly the company that make it are not going to do a version for s60v3 so it won't work on my n95. I'll try the iPhone browser when someone at work buys one but I'm not a fan of browsers doing the "keyhole" action with two way scrolling rather than arranging the page so it works on the screen, better if you can switch between the two.

You're going to be pleasantly surprised by the browser on the iPhone, then...

[Blue Meanie]

Opera on the archos does the whole smart screen thing. You can view either as a full page width, or as a slidy screen. The good thing is that it acts as a normal browser would licking things, etc. The newer archos 605 also allows streaming media, such as youtube, etc, which is cool.

[cyberface]

The pinch zoom is the big thing about the iPhone browser. It shows the page in full mode (normally illegible with lots of small text) and you don't have to scroll around - you just zoom in on the bit you want by using two fingers to pinch / unpinch.

Difficult to describe but utterly intuitive to everyone I've shown.

[page3]

cyberface said:

The pinch zoom is the big thing about the iPhone browser. It shows the page in full mode (normally illegible with lots of small text) and you don't have to scroll around - you just zoom in on the bit you want by using two fingers to pinch / unpinch.

Difficult to describe but utterly intuitive to everyone I've shown.

Also, the anti-aliased rendering makes small sizes readable. Best mobile browser I've ever used by a large margin. Pity no Flash support though.

[cyberface]

page3 said:

cyberface said:

The pinch zoom is the big thing about the iPhone browser. It shows the page in full mode (normally illegible with lots of small text) and you don't have to scroll around - you just zoom in on the bit you want by using two fingers to pinch / unpinch.

Difficult to describe but utterly intuitive to everyone I've shown.

Also, the anti-aliased rendering makes small sizes readable. Best mobile browser I've ever used by a large margin. Pity no Flash support though.

Apple have come out with the corporate bullshit about Flash being proprietary and Apple are all about open systems, so use AJAX and Web 2.0 etc. yadda yadda.

However I reckon it's got a lot more to do with getting in with Google, who correspondingly are eschewing Flash. The YouTube re-coding of videos from flash plugins to the 'new' h.264 has something to do with this IMO.

Also most of the flash websites are using the technology to deliver video rather than animated vector graphics, which was its original remit. Flash is not only stupidly CPU-intensive for simple tasks, but also proprietary to Adobe. Given the dog-slow and CPU-hogging OS X version of Flash that Adobe trot out, can you imagine Jobs letting his iPhone's web experience be dictated by Adobe's code??? I don't think so. This aspect is politics, pure and simple (plus my opinion that Flash is the wrong technology for the job in most cases)...

[Noger]

The Google-Apple thing is interesting. I was looking at my Gmail IMAP setup last night, and noticed the bit in the Google help about the iPhone. They were practicaly begging for forgiveness that the Gmail "wizard" set up POP by default and didn't give the IMAP option - and said they were urgently working on a fix. And it isn't even their product !

Also notice Google Maps Mobile, a much touted app on the iPhone, updates are coming pretty fast.

[cyberface]

Noger said:

The Google-Apple thing is interesting. I was looking at my Gmail IMAP setup last night, and noticed the bit in the Google help about the iPhone. They were practicaly begging for forgiveness that the Gmail "wizard" set up POP by default and didn't give the IMAP option - and said they were urgently working on a fix. And it isn't even their product !

Also notice Google Maps Mobile, a much touted app on the iPhone, updates are coming pretty fast.

Yes, it's very interesting. Google does software as online services. Apple does pretty hardware and a solid, reliable OS (let's forget Leopard for the moment ). Microsoft have been aggressive towards Google (ref: Ballmer and the chair-throwing 'destroy Google' incident).

Equally Microsoft are the epitome of closed source. Apple (with Darwin at least) are some way into open source, and are very much pushing for open standards in all their products (whether you believe the hype or not, the majority of protocols and APIs are open standards and documented, no sekrit APIs with Apple really) - as are Google, who (apart from their web ranking engine) sponsor open-source code efforts on their 'Google Code' website.

Apple and Google working together (which they appear to be, tacitly) would make a rather heavyweight competitor to Microsoft. If Google get their office document production apps working 100% on web browsers and for all intents and purposes as good as a native app (I remain to be convinced that this approach would work for productivity apps like Excel and Access) - and then make sure it works perfectly on Safari but is annoying on Windows IE....

The big question becomes then, if all your documents are stored on Google boxes somewhere, and Google have changed their corporate motto from 'don't be evil' to 'don't do evil' - a fundamental semantic change - then are they the 'good guys' any more?

Interesting times up ahead though. Google haven't got any incentive other than marketshare to work co-operatively with MS, their business models are too different. Apple though... still have a business if Google Apps take off everywhere.

[off_again]

Safari on the iPhone is a cracking browser and works incredibly well. I have Opera on my S60 Nokia and its not a patch on Safari. In fact, I often resort to WAP when using Opera as the download and rendering of pages takes an age! The current N95 is about 1.5 to 2 times quicker than the E70 that I have, but Safari is still quicker in my opinion. The standard Nokia browser is good, but a common issue on E60/70/50 phones is the constant 'phone out of memory' error on even the smallest of pages - and you can forget multi-page browsing!

One little feature which blew me away is the PDF viewer! Ok. its a small thing, but I set my wife up for her email using the iPhone. She loves being able to get her email and view it, but frequently gets PDF invoices etc. Noticed the attachment on an email and touched it. Bang, PDF viewer with correct scaling and full zoom in and out. Instant viewing! Again, on my Nokia I have push email and Adobe PDF viewer for S60. I have to trigger the attachment to download and then go back to the email to open it. If its a PDF file then you are looking at around 30 to 45 seconds to load the application, never mind actually view it. The controls are awful and the display is abismal. Scrolling around a simple PDF is painful, anything complex is just not worth bothering with.....

Its a small thing, but currently blown away with this.... :hehe;

and I am easily impressed

[Leithen]

off_again said:

Safari on the iPhone is a cracking browser and works incredibly well. I have Opera on my S60 Nokia and its not a patch on Safari. In fact, I often resort to WAP when using Opera as the download and rendering of pages takes an age! The current N95 is about 1.5 to 2 times quicker than the E70 that I have, but Safari is still quicker in my opinion. The standard Nokia browser is good, but a common issue on E60/70/50 phones is the constant 'phone out of memory' error on even the smallest of pages - and you can forget multi-page browsing!

One little feature which blew me away is the PDF viewer! Ok. its a small thing, but I set my wife up for her email using the iPhone. She loves being able to get her email and view it, but frequently gets PDF invoices etc. Noticed the attachment on an email and touched it. Bang, PDF viewer with correct scaling and full zoom in and out. Instant viewing! Again, on my Nokia I have push email and Adobe PDF viewer for S60. I have to trigger the attachment to download and then go back to the email to open it. If its a PDF file then you are looking at around 30 to 45 seconds to load the application, never mind actually view it. The controls are awful and the display is abismal. Scrolling around a simple PDF is painful, anything complex is just not worth bothering with.....

Its a small thing, but currently blown away with this.... :hehe;

and I am easily impressed

Same thing yesterday with an attached word document - bam, easy to read and instant - not what I was expecting