As all should know, since my previous post I managed to finish off all the missing bits and get a decent initial support for Android in the LCL. But of course we are not stopping there, so I started exploring the iPhone. I haven't yet done any programming, but I already found a lot of interesting thing. Many good things, but also many bad things.
So let's start with the good things:
I was expecting something similar to Android, just more expensive, but while the user interface is remarkably similar, I must say that Apple has an extremely good taste for designing things. Everything in the iPhone is just beautiful. Each small detail seams well though out to look good, while in Android everything exists in a similar shape, it just looks OK in Android while it look great in the iPhone. Sure that some manufacturer like HTC and Sony Ericsson changes radically the user interface and even UI widgetset look, but in all cases they don't come close to looking as good as the iPhone.
The available RAM in the iPhone is pretty excellent. The iPhone 4 comes with 512MB of RAM of which aprox. 300MB are free for user applications. That's a huge amount in comparison to Android devices where you might even have 300MB or RAM, but the system is already eating 250MB =( The iPhone is also free of all that crapware which manufacturers like to fill the scarce ROM memory of Android phones, and the iPhone has a huge common memory for both media files and applications, which makes it able to run bigger apps without problems.
Now some things which are different:
The start screen is nearly identical with horizontal scrolling except that the iPhone home screen is much less configurable. You cannot place those nice widgetset to turn on/off mobile network or WiFi on a single click. The iPhone is also not very intuitive to use at times, with only icons and no perceived way for me to find out what an icon does except by guessing or testing, while in Android text labels are used much more often. There are no hints either.
And now the bad:
Frankly I am appalled that I have never heard of the evil side of the iPhone before. Why is nobody commenting that?? Am I the only one deeply bothered by this!? For me this was so terrible that I will never buy an iPhone again, for sure my next smartphone will be Android again. The iPhone is just the most restricted device, the most DRM filled, the most anti-freedom, the most monopolist, the most anti file owning device I have seen in my life. Let's start with the basic. On Android you put a SDCard in the phone and then you connect it with a USB cable to the computer and voilà! It opens as a mass media device with zero drivers installation in *any* operating system. Windows, Linux, Mac, works just as great in all! Then you can copy your music there, copy APK packages, you can copy your personal documents, you can copy source code, I don't know, you can do whatever you want! Sadly Android doesn't come with a File Browser but you can easily install the "OI File Browser" and then with it you see all your files on the phone and manage them. You can install any app to read your files. You can use the phone as a pen drive, you can create a new application to open, view and modify any file extension in the world and share that application. You can share your files. That's freedom! That's general computing! The freedom that any computer should offer.
And the iPhone!? Where are the file managers? I haven't yet found a single one which will show my photos, movies and music. WTF!?!? There are some file managers which require installing extra programs in the desktop and essentially are a sort of hack around the limitations imposed by Apple. Is music just a product you consume from bigshot producers? Can you even run you own music there? Where is my freedom to run my MP3 which I generated myself from a CD I bought in Paraguay? Those guys are not in the iTunes Mr. Jobs and I don't want to restrict myself to your iWorld. Cloud storage as an extra option, OK, but ban file owning, copying and sharing!? That's the evil dream of any monopolist. I don't want to be part of that evil iWorld, I want a general computer. But that's what the iPhone certainly does not want to be.
So, well, let's say you are conformed with the iPhone having zero file owning capabilities. What's next? It only docks to your computer via the iTunes after installing a plethora of drivers and does not work at all in Linux. You cannot freely install applications which you wrote yourself without joining the Apple Developer Program and go through a complicated process. In Android you can write apps and share them easily without any of this non-sense.
And to make it worse: Apple is monopolistic. It banned 3rd party browsers. Where is the freedom? I don't want to be stuck with Safari. I already like Opera Mobile, but they banned it. Sure there is Opera Mini, but Mobile is much more what I want.
So here we are: A superb phone, the best looking GUI and design I have ever seen. Excellent quality of the touch screen. All ruined by monopolistic, anti-freedom non-sense! All ruined by a company which wants to ban people from owning files.
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho
