iPhone Looks More Appealing

Faster «3G» net­work­ing is a nice bonus, but that’s not what’s get­ting my atten­tion. What’s tip­ping me toward the iPhone is that, even though Apple is hold­ing the reins tight­ly, third-par­ty appli­ca­tions are pos­si­ble and a few of my must-haves are already here. Also, word is the new iPhone has much bet­ter sound qual­i­ty than the orig­i­nal. Reports that the orig­i­nal iPhone was not real­ly a great phone did give me pause.

In order to put third-par­ty apps on an iPhone before the new release, it’s true that I could have got­ten one jail­bro­ken, but I did­n’t see the ben­e­fit. Were any of the «out­law» appli­ca­tions ones I want­ed? Not many. I have a list of things I want to do with a hand­held device. I know that I have to com­pro­mise with any con­ver­gence device, but I’d like to have sev­er­al of the following:

• Wire­less keyboard
• Word proces­sor
• Mon­ey-track­ing soft­ware like Pock­et Quick­en, prefer­ably that will sync with the desktop
• SSH client
• eBook read­er that reads a DRM for­mat, prefer­ably the files from ereader.com
• Pass­word vault, prefer­ably one that syncs with a desk­top version
• Time track­ing, for keep­ing track of projects and client billing
• Running/health/athletic log, sim­i­lar to Ath­letix for Palm

Of these, the key­board may nev­er hap­pen. I’m opti­mistic about the word proces­sor, as Microsoft has hint­ed they may release Office for the iPhone. An even bet­ter option would be DataViz’s Doc­u­ments to Go but their hints about a release for the iPhone have been much more vague and non­com­mit­tal. I think the last they said on the sub­ject was, «we’re look­ing into it.» That’s a shame, because DataViz has been pants­ing Microsoft on Microsoft­’s own plat­form con­sis­tent­ly. DTG is the best thing in hand­held office soft­ware. BlueNo­mad’s Word­Smith is a some­what bet­ter stand­alone writ­ing tool, but its doc­u­ment syn­chro­niza­tion leaves some­thing to be desired, its han­dling of com­pli­cat­ed Word doc­u­ments isn’t as good as DTG (and does­n’t read Microsoft­’s new .docx files either), and it does­n’t come with a spread­sheet and all that oth­er good stuff. But in any case, none of it runs on the iPhone, so it’s a wait and see game.

Cata­mount soft­ware, which has been writ­ing and releas­ing hand­held soft­ware since the New­ton, has Pock­et­Money, and Splash­Da­ta has tak­en their pop­u­lar Splash­Money and brought it to the iPhone. Intu­it mean­while, offers Pock­et Quick­en as a Web-based app to run in the iPhone’s Safari brows­er. I’m skep­ti­cal about mov­ing all my finan­cial data to a soft­ware com­pa­ny’s servers, so I’m more like­ly to aban­don my years of hand­held Pock­et Quick­en in favor of Splash­Data’s or Cata­moun­t’s offerings.

Call me crazy for want­i­ng an SSH client on my phone, but hav­ing pSSH on the Treo has been very help­ful from time to time when I’ve had to restart a crashed web­serv­er for a client who has called me when I’m nowhere near a com­put­er. There’s noth­ing like appear­ing to be able to fix any­thing, any­time, from any­where. Right now the only SSH app for the iPhone requires a jail­bro­ken iPhone, but there are web-based SSH clients designed for the iPhone that might do the job in a pinch.

eReader.com announced Thurs­day at 5pm the release of eRead­er Pro for the iPhone. That’s the soft­ware I use on the Palm, and all the books I’ve bought on eRead­er, includ­ing my Mer­ri­am-Web­ster Unabridged Dic­tio­nary, will work with it. That’s the way it ought­ta be. It looks like the cur­rent release is not as full-fea­tured as the release for oth­er plat­forms, but it’s there and it’s avail­able now. I’ve been say­ing that the iPhone or iPod Touch is a nat­ur­al for eBook read­ing. With one of these, I could read an eBook on my iPhone while rid­ing the F‑Line

For pass­word stor­age, there’s eWal­let from Ili­um and SplashID from Splash­Da­ta. Here DataViz may be miss­ing the boat. I use their Pass­words Plus on the Palm and on my Mac OS X desk­top machine. I’d think an iPhone release would be… maybe not a walk in the park, but no more than a brisk jog. eWal­let is an appli­ca­tion I tried on Palm, but in the end went with Pass­words Plus because it syn­chro­nizes with my desk­top. SplashID may have the advantage.

This leaves time track­ing and health/athletic log­ging. It looks like there are too many choic­es for health and ath­let­ic log­ging to eval­u­ate, but that is, of course, good news. I can pick what I like at my leisure.

I’m of two minds about time track­ing and billing. It’s been a peren­ni­al frus­tra­tion for me. On the New­ton there was Iambic TimeRe­porter, which was darn good. It stood entire­ly alone as a self-con­tained track­ing, billing, and invoic­ing appli­ca­tion. It would gen­er­ate invoic­es that could be print­ed (if you had a print­er with an infrared port) or faxed (if you had a modem). There was no need to trans­fer data to the desk­top, although there was a util­i­ty to down­load the TimeRe­porter data for archiv­ing or import into some oth­er pack­age. TimeRe­porter has been port­ed to oth­er plat­forms and it has gone steadi­ly down­hill. The cur­rent ver­sion of TimeRe­porter won’t even work with­out a desk­top appli­ca­tion that runs only on Win­dows. You can’t print or fax from it, and the user inter­face is far more cramped and far less use­ful than its ances­tor on the Newton.

Late­ly, I’ve only been using TimeRe­porter (rebrand­ed as All­Time and not bun­dled with desk­top soft­ware) for track­ing my art projects. It’s use­ful, when pric­ing a piece of art­work, to know how much time went into it. My client billing I’ve been writ­ing on paper and then typ­ing into the invoice tem­plate I have in Word.

There seems to be one (count it) prod­uct like this for the iPhone: Lion­Clock for Projects. As iPhone apps go, it’s expen­sive: $30 for the «lite» ver­sion, $80 for the «plus» ver­sion which han­dles an unlim­it­ed num­ber of projects instead of cut­ting you off at fifty as the «lite» ver­sion does. Lion­Clock­’s inter­face looks clean and straight­for­ward, and though I don’t see it trans­fer­ring data to the desk­top, it does gen­er­ate invoic­es right in the pro­gram, and will email said invoic­es out, com­plete with a Pay­Pal link so that one’s cus­tomers can pay as soon as they receive the invoice. This sounds like it’s mov­ing in the right direc­tion. And though I was a lit­tle sur­prised to see the $30 and $80 price tags in the Apple iPhone App Store among all the rest of the two- and three-dol­lar pro­grams, it should be point­ed out that Iambic All­Time is $40 and before TimeRe­porter dis­ap­peared, it was (I think) around $150.

All in all, the iPhone has addressed a good por­tion of its ear­li­er short­com­ings. The word proces­sor remains miss­ing, but beyond that my main hes­i­ta­tion is that it does­n’t have quite enough mem­o­ry to replace an iPod. The iPod Touch, at 32GB, is almost there, but the 16GB iPhone feels a lit­tle cramped, espe­cial­ly when I’m going to want to fill the darn thing with appli­ca­tions, files and the like. Nev­er­the­less, I was get­ting by with my 4GB iPod Nano before it was stolen, it was just an annoy­ance to sort through and fig­ure out which albums I’d want to lis­ten to that day.

Final­ly, Apple’s Address Book and iPhone Address Book should com­mu­ni­cate well. Miss­ing Sync does a bet­ter-than-should-be-expect­ed job of nego­ti­at­ing the Apple Address Book with Palm’s Con­tacts, but it’s still imper­fect. Palm’s con­tact data­base does­n’t have a space for mid­dle names, for exam­ple. I have a cou­ple of friends who go by their mid­dle names, and so I put a first ini­tial in the first name field, the mid­dle name in the mid­dle name field, sync, and find that the mid­dle name—the name by which I know my friend—has not been car­ried over to the Palm. Maybe a small quib­ble, but there are a num­ber like that and I look for­ward to the day when I have to deal only with the short­com­ings of one address book application.

The iPhone, then, is posi­tion­ing itself to real­ly do the work of three hand­held devices: phone, hand­held com­put­er, and dig­i­tal music play­er. That’s a pret­ty dra­mat­ic leap for­ward for a prod­uct whose adver­tis­ing tells us only that it is faster and cheap­er than last year’s model.