Why Are Smartphones So Dumb?

I can’t say that I’m thrilled about my Treo 680. The best thing I can say about it, I think, is that it’s not as bad as all the oth­er options out there. But a cou­ple of days ago the screen got cracked and so all the think­ing I’ve been doing about how to replace it has sud­den­ly become no longer the­o­ret­i­cal. It’s time for a new phone.

Trou­ble is, I have very high expec­ta­tions of a hand­held com­put­ing device. I got start­ed with an Apple New­ton, and despite all the legit­i­mate crit­i­cisms of that device (as well as a bad rep­u­ta­tion that’s large­ly unearned) it set the bar very high. The New­ton was not just an elec­tron­ic phone book and cal­en­dar, it was a hand­held com­put­ing plat­form with a host of appli­ca­tions devel­oped for it. I found it very handy to car­ry around a device with a word proces­sor, spread­sheet, email, web brows­er, ebook read­er, a time tracking/billing sys­tem for my con­sult­ing, and a few games. The thing that Apple did­n’t get right with the old New­ton was data syn­chro­niza­tion. Get­ting it to talk to my desk­top PC was nev­er seam­less. Once the plat­form was can­celed by Apple, new soft­ware and enhance­ments became few­er and far­ther between, while soft­ware on oth­er plat­forms kept on pro­gress­ing, intro­duc­ing incom­pat­i­bil­i­ties and mak­ing stay­ing with the New­ton more dif­fi­cult despite all its capabilities.

I won’t chron­i­cle the list of hand­held and portable devices I’ve had since my first New­ton, but at each stage there was a real sense of com­pro­mise, that I was set­tling for a device that was not as com­plete as it could have been. I’ve set­tled on the Palm plat­form for sev­er­al years now, as it has allowed me to use my hand­held devices as a word proces­sor, spread­sheet, email device and to track time and billing of my clients. My only com­plaint with the devices has been that the screens are a bit on the small size. Many don’t believe that a small device can be use­ful for such things, but I’ve had much more suc­cess writ­ing reports, doc­u­men­ta­tion, blog entries and even short sto­ries on my Palm. The plat­form is sim­ple and ele­gant and allows me to get to work right away and with­out dis­trac­tion. I’ve spent a lot of hours in cafés typ­ing on a portable key­board or writ­ing with a PDA sty­lus, being much more pro­duc­tive than I’ve been with a desk­top or lap­top computer.

I see the ques­tion fre­quent­ly, either direct­ed at me or at a pro­posed light­weight device: why not just get a lap­top? Well, I have a lap­top and it’s nowhere near as con­ve­nient as the light­weight suite of appli­ca­tions I had on the Palm or the New­ton. Not only were these devices «instant-on» devices, soft­ware appli­ca­tions would load and be ready to use with­in a sec­ond or two at most. These peo­ple invari­ably point out that lap­tops have «sleep» or «stand­by» modes, but even start­ing up from one of those modes will take as much as five or ten sec­onds, and launch­ing an appli­ca­tion still takes just as long as it does on a desk­top com­put­er. I just tried start­ing Microsoft Word on my 1.07 GHz G4 iBook, and it took 15 sec­onds. That’s not too bad, espe­cial­ly for an old­er, slow­er proces­sor. Launch­ing Doc­u­ments to Go on my Treo (which I can still do despite the cracked screen) shows Docs to Go to be one of the larg­er, more bloat­ed soft­ware pack­ages I’ve used: it takes almost two sec­onds to start.

That’s what the «why don’t you just get a lap­top» crowd does­n’t get when they laugh off old prod­ucts like the New­ton or new pro­pos­als like Palm’s defunct Foleo. Lap­tops are big, bulky, heavy, awk­ward, slow machines with tremen­dous­ly bloat­ed soft­ware. I want some­thing light­weight, mean, and lean. I know it’s pos­si­ble, because I’ve used these devices. The only prob­lem with the devices that work great is that tech­nol­o­gy has passed them by. The Palm OS, for exam­ple, is stretched to the max­i­mum run­ning a tele­phone in the Treo. It does­n’t mul­ti­task well enough to han­dle high-speed com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Palm does­n’t look like they’re ever going to get it togeth­er to ever com­plete the next ver­sion of the OS that they’ve been promis­ing for the last six years. Palm recent­ly let us know that we would­n’t see their new ver­sion until at least Octo­ber of 2008.

So despite the invest­ment I have in time, ener­gy and soft­ware in the Palm plat­form,  I’m unhap­py enough with my Tre­o’s per­for­mance and unsuit­abil­i­ty to the tasks that I got used to doing with old­er Palm devices (read­ing eBooks, writ­ing, track­ing my time for billing clients) that I don’t want to replace my Treo with anoth­er Treo.

This pos­es the trou­bling ques­tion: what else is there? There are Win­dows Mobile devices out there with the soft­ware sup­port and form fac­tor I’m look­ing for, but I’m prej­u­diced against it: I’ve used enough of the Win­dows CE lin­eage enough times not to want to try again. It’s always been a hope­ful start with Microsoft­’s hand­held plat­forms, as they always look good on paper and always have peo­ple say­ing, «this ver­sion isn’t like the last ver­sion, they’ve fixed this, that or the oth­er thing.» When I’ve got­ten my hands on them, they’ve all been poor­ly designed and dif­fi­cult to use. It may take only a sec­ond for the appli­ca­tion I want to load, but get­ting at the appli­ca­tion eats up anoth­er fif­teen or twen­ty sec­onds, even when I’ve known how to find it. Microsoft­’s design phi­los­o­phy seems to be: make easy things dif­fi­cult so that we look smarter than every­one else. The last Pock­et­PC I used had built-in WiFi that I was nev­er able to turn on. I found instruc­tions on the Inter­net but they were so con­vo­lut­ed I gave up. There was no way to con­fig­ure «net­work­ing», it was all hid­den in some­thing called «loca­tions» and no mat­ter what I did, it want­ed a phone num­ber for con­nect­ing to the Inter­net. Again, there was noth­ing called «con­nec­tiv­i­ty» or «con­nec­tions» or «LAN» or any­thing that might be asso­ci­at­ed with hook­ing up to a wire­less net­work. It was poor­ly designed, bad­ly con­ceived and after a few weeks of try­ing I gave up and gave the device away. I’ve set up net­work­ing with Win­dows, Mac­in­tosh, Lin­ux, BSD, AIX and OS/2, and I’ve got­ten New­ton and Pal­mOS devices hooked up to the Inter­net. I’m sor­ry, if after two weeks and exten­sive googling, a guy like me can’t find the net­work con­fig­u­ra­tion (nev­er mind how to con­fig­ure it, I could­n’t find the place to do the con­fig­u­ra­tion!) then you’ve failed basic soft­ware design. With expe­ri­ences like this, no mat­ter how good the Win­dows Mobile devices look on paper, I have trou­ble bring­ing myself to lay down hard-earned mon­ey on one.

Black­ber­ries are a non-starter. Third-par­ty soft­ware for the Black­ber­ry is scarce and does­n’t include any real good word proces­sors or eBook read­ers. The screen is small enough to not be any improve­ment on the Treo anyhow.

I’ve been con­sid­er­ing Nokias for a num­ber of rea­sons. Nokias have always had the best sound qual­i­ty to my ear; some peo­ple think that they sound tin­ny, but with my high-fre­quen­cy hear­ing loss the boost in the upper range is wel­comed. Nokia seems to under­stand that some­one buy­ing a phone mar­ket­ed as a «smart­phone» might want to actu­al­ly use the device for some­thing oth­er than mak­ing calls. They’ve bun­dled some of their phones with a ver­sion of Doc­u­ments To Go, just like Palm devices. Their e90 line flips open like a clamshell, reveal­ing a QWERTY key­board and an extra-widescreen dis­play. The e61i seems to be a con­tender but for Sym­bian’s com­plete balka­niza­tion of their plat­form. No soft­ware writ­ten for one Sym­bian device will work with anoth­er. So while it appears at first glance that there is a wide range of soft­ware avail­able for them, when it comes to find­ing soft­ware for a spe­cif­ic phone the field gets sparse fast. My prob­lem with the e61i is that it will make a lousy eBook read­er. There’s good read­er soft­ware avail­able, but not for any com­mer­cial­ly avail­able books. Sor­ry, I don’t want to lim­it my read­ing to the clas­sics. In fact, the clas­sics are the books I’m more like­ly to want to read on paper. It’s new stuff that I want on my handheld.

eRead­er did make a ver­sion for Sym­bian, but only for four mod­els of phone that were dis­con­tin­ued six or sev­en years ago. This does not encour­age me for the future of hand­held computing.

Maybe this just means con­ver­gence has­n’t real­ly got­ten where I want it to yet and I should go back to hav­ing a sep­a­rate hand­held and phone, and I should let each do their thing. The prob­lem with that is that their func­tions depend on one anoth­er. Do I want to have a great plat­form for writ­ing emails that has no built-in con­nec­tion to the Inter­net? I don’t think so. I did that for years, con­nect­ing through my cell­phone over Blue­tooth. It’s a clever enough solu­tion, but the bot­tle­necks with Blue­tooth slow even a fast con­nec­tion to a crawl. No, I want my portable Web and email device to be con­nect­ed, and since WiFi isn’t every­where yet, that means a cel­lu­lar connection.

Well, email and web in a phone, you say. Why not try the iPhone? Well, I like the iPhone, but I have some seri­ous reser­va­tions about it. Those reser­va­tions amount to: Apple does­n’t want third par­ties writ­ing soft­ware for the iPhone, and Apple does­n’t want to write new soft­ware for the iPhone. Apple appears per­fect­ly hap­py with the iPhone real­ly not being much of a smart­phone. Sure, it’s got email and Web brows­ing, and it’s all tight­ly inte­grat­ed with the address book and cal­en­dar, so far all is as it should be. But they are not allow­ing devel­op­ers to write iPhone appli­ca­tions that do the things that I like to do with a hand­held com­put­er: no capa­bil­i­ty for read­ing eBooks (Apple says audio­books ought to be good enough), and if Apple keeps going the way they have, there will nev­er be a word proces­sor for the iPhone, nev­er be time-track­ing or billing soft­ware so that I can clock myself in and out when I’m on site with a client, nev­er be Pock­et Quick­en for the iPhone, nev­er be add-on soft­ware for the address and cal­en­dar apps to facil­i­tate orga­ni­za­tion­al meth­ods like GTD or 7 Habits, nev­er be an encrypt­ed pass­word-stor­age appli­ca­tion to keep my PINs in, nev­er be an Ath­letix for the iPhone for me to keep track of my exer­cise plans and progress. Apple’s idea of pro­vid­ing a soft­ware devel­op­ment kit? AJAX. So I can have any of the above, as long as I find a web­site that pro­vides those appli­ca­tions online.

There are two draw­backs to soft­ware that runs on some­one else’s serv­er: one is pri­va­cy. I don’t want to keep my pass­word vault on some­one else’s machine. Sec­ond is the depen­dence on con­nec­tiv­i­ty. If I go out of cell­phone range, that means right away I lose access to those appli­ca­tions I count on. Fur­ther­more, if a soft­ware ven­dor goes bel­ly-up and shuts down their servers, I lose the appli­ca­tion that I paid for. This is not a reli­able mod­el for mis­sion-crit­i­cal apps.

Still, for some­one like me, maybe the iPhone isn’t such a bad thing. With some excep­tions, I could write or install soft­ware to inter­face with the iPhone, and I could run those appli­ca­tions on my own serv­er. But that real­ly isn’t how I want to spend my time. I want to fork over mon­ey to soft­ware devel­op­ers and let them do the work. I should­n’t have to rein­vent the time track­er in order to bill my clients.

If I get the iPhone, then I’m look­ing at buy­ing a Palm device to go with it. If I’m going to do that, I may as well just get a plain phone — what­ev­er the phone com­pa­ny will give me for free or cheap — and sup­ple­ment it with a Palm device. Apple, for shame! This is no smartphone.

So now I’m think­ing I should buy an AT&T 8525 and just take real good care of it so that if Win­dows Mobile is still as bad as it used to be, I can take advan­tage of the store’s return pol­i­cy. The 8525 looks like it is sup­posed to do what I want it to: I can get eRead­er for it and read on that nice big screen it has, I can use the slide-out key­board for SMS text mes­sag­ing, Iambic makes Agen­dus for Pock­et­PC, Splash­Da­ta can store my pass­words, and while I under­stand Pock­et Word and Pock­et Excel are dis­ap­point­ing com­pared to Doc­u­ments To Go, I’m sure I could make do. If I could­n’t DataViz makes Doc­u­ments To Go for Win­dows Mobile as well. Mark­Space makes Miss­ing Sync for Win­dows Mobile so I should­n’t have to wor­ry too much about sync­ing with my Mac. Pock­et Quick­en and Bill­Rate should fin­ish the pack­age up.

As I said, it all looks good on paper, but look­ing at the device I feel like I’m look­ing at Lucy from Peanuts hold­ing the foot­ball and telling me that this time she won’t yank it away before I can kick. Too many times I’ve been down this par­tic­u­lar road. But maybe that is what a 30-day return pol­i­cy is for.

Final­ly, regard­less of the choice I make this time, I find it rather dis­ap­point­ing that we haven’t come any far­ther than this tech­no­log­i­cal­ly. Most of the fea­tures and soft­ware I want on a hand­held device today were on hand­held devices over a decade ago. Why should they be so hard to assem­ble today? I’m not going to pine for the New­ton here; I still have my New­ton and I could use it. There are clear advance­ments that have been made; I just wish that we had­n’t tak­en so many steps back at the same time.