iPhone 3G Ad vs. iPhone 3G Real World (Speed test)

I love this video. I don't own the iPhone 3G but I do have a first-gen iPhone and while it's very slick and has loads of "ooooo, aahhh" factor - it can really be lame functionally.

The above video pits the iPhone 3G advertisement against the iPhone 3G in the real world trying to do the exact same stuff and it remindes me of how I feel sometimes using my iPhone. As soon as the real world video gets to the second task things go downhill. The advertisement finishes out all of it's tasks while the real world phone is still on task 2. I remember this exact same thing when the first iPhone came out. Apple used a video of the iPhone loading the NYT home page which showed a loading time that was far less than 1/2 the time it really takes to load on the EDGE network of AT&T. Critisim of that speed difference was not so solid because it was conceivable that they were running it on a WiFi connection in the commercial. This time, however, the whole point of the iPhone 3G is that it's on a faster wireless network than the original iPhone - so why is their 3G speed in the video more than 2x faster than in reality?

Basically they are selling something that doesn't exist. They've made a device that's ahead of the game, in a way. The phone COULD be what it is in the commercial but it can't be because of the reality of our present day network speeds. Therefore, there is no iPhone that works as smoothly or as quickly as the one in the commercials. I guess you could say the same thing about a Carls Jr. commercial showing us big, juicy burgers while in reality they are flat and brown but a hamburger doesn't cost $200 and come with a 2 year contract with a side of an early termination fee if the dazzle wears off. At least after you eat your burger you're only out $4 and you aren't obligated to go back.

There are other things, though, that they don't show in the commercial - normal phone things - that suck about the iPhone. They are right in the video - you DO have to wait a lot with this device. Apple came out with that ad as if to say, "look at how efficiently and how quickly you can communicate and find information with our device". It's too bad that's a friggin' lie.

Right from the start, it's impossible to operate the iPhone without giving it your full attention while phones with actual buttons you can at least start to do certain things without having to be looking at the device. Even to answer a call you HAVE to look at it to make sure your thumb is in just the right spot on the screen. With my old Motorola Q I could answer calls blind. Finding contacts is all kinds of hell. While they added a search feature to the contacts you still have to FIND IT before you can use it and in the process you'll probably pass right by the contact you mean to search for. The unintelligent decision to put the search box at the top of your contacts list (right above "A") means that you have to flip through your contact list first before you can use it (unlike the intelligent way they built search into the Safari app). So they provided a search feature that you have to search for. With almost every phone you can open your address book, begin typing the name of the contact you are looking for (without having to select "search") and then the list of contacts filters to what you are typing. Not with the iPhone. First you have to get to that search box, tap on it, wait for the keyboard to load and then you can start typing. The filtering process lags the keyboard too making then an even less user-friendly experience. The point of gadgets today is supposed to be that we don't have to spend as much time fiddling with them. It's almost as if the iPhone LOVES making you spend your time fiddling with it.

Another great example is deleting contacts. You can't do this from the contacts list, nor from the main screen of an individual contact. You've got to hit "edit" once in the contact and then scroll down to the bottom of the screen and finally you have a huge red delete button. So from the main contacts list you have to tap the contact, then tap edit then look through the entire contact full of info (could be as much as two or more screens worth of stuff) and then finally you can delete it. Email management was similar in that you couldn't do any bulk message management in the original device (the one that was out for a year). You had to delete messages one at a time. So they added in the option now to select multiple messages to delete at once which is great but it really should have been a standard feature. We are talking about standard email management tools that have existed for more than a decade.

One final, amazingly simple, idea that would help this device out is breadcrumbs. You've seen them on websites for years. As you dig into sections of a site, the site's menu system provides you with a "breadcrumb" list of links so you can easily jump back to any point where you made a decision on where you wanted to go. That makes it so that if you went in through 3 or 4 menu decisions you don't have to click back as many times to get to where you were. Apply that concept to the email application, the iPod application and any configuration/settings screens on the iPhone and you'd have gold. Presently for every menu entry you select you slide over to a new screen. If you go somewhere from there you slide into yet another screen and now, to get back to where you were two screens ago, you have to backtrack through the second screen you were on. With a screen the size of the iPhone's, I think there's room to take up a 1/4" of it with a breadcrumb menu system.

So remember, the iPhone is pretty, flashy and trendy but looks aren't everything. If you use your phone to make a lot of calls or to manage emails then the iPhone is a bad choice in my opinion. If you what you want to do with your phone is primarily browse the Internet over a WiFi connection, listen to music (the iPod) and on occasion make a phone call then this is the device for you. Basically every other feature on the iPhone is available to other similarly equipped "super" phones so don't go get an iPhone just because it has a GPS enabled Google Maps application. Don't think that you will be using the "real" Internet unless you are used to using a dial-up connection from 1998 because you'll be instantly frustrated with how long it takes to load web pages on this thing (unless you're on WiFi). Don't get it because of the app store - there are many software developers making applications for Windows Mobile based devices that are more powerful than what you'll find in the app store (partially thanks to Apple not allowing developers to really take advantage of the iPhone by blocking them from using any of the system's core functions).

I know it's tempting. I was tempted and I got one but now that I know the iPhone's shortcomings so well I kinda wish I hadn't.

[Gizmodo]