As I've mentioned in prior posts, I'm not very happy with AT&T as a carrier, and I'm starting to think the charm, ease of use, and feature richness of the iPhone are qualities the competition is aggressively trying to match. As my contract with AT&T ends in a month, I have the option of leaving AT&T for another phone on another carrier, an option I intend to seriously consider.
I have not been bitten by the Android bug, but the Pre has caught my eye. I've seen other write-ups on the web comparing the iPhone to the Pre, each focusing on a subset of the fifteen items listed below. As a potential Pre buyer, I've done some due diligence, and would like to present my own opinion on the matter.
Of course, I need to consider the near-term changes in the market. Sprint's exclusivity with Pre ends at the end of this year, and AT&T's iPhone monopoly is slated to end in 2010. Rumors of what will happen after exclusivity abound. A GSM Pre has been seen recently in Europe, with it the expectation of a US model, leaving only the question would it be on T-Mobile or AT&T? A Verizon iPhone rumor has persisted for a while, but until Verizon magically conjures a nation-wide compatible GSM network or Apple coughs up a CDMA iPhone, I don't see that happening in 2010.
Before I get to it, I want to fess up to the lack of an apples-to-apples comparison in this post. I've owned an iPhone for nearly two years, and actively develop for it. My iPhone experiences are from using the iPhone as her engineers intended. The Pre experiences are enhanced by an emulator that is faster than a real phone but diminished by the lack the tactile feel of the real device.
The only actual Pre I've used was for a few minutes. It is owned by a lady friend of mine who is tall, blonde, and has a sexy accent, a halo which may give the Pre a bump. I shall strive to be objective.
Multitasking - Pre has it, iPhone doesn't. Well, not exactly. Jailbreak an iPhone and you can background tasks. Some Apple applications are given the privilege of running in the background. Other apps rely on Push Notifications to alert the user that something has happened, but that something can only be done in the cloud not on the device itself. Clearly, the iPhone has the ability, but it is intentionally not enabled.
Palm enables multitasking to give users the ability to do several things at once. Apple disables it to ensure the phone doesn't become sluggish with a dozen apps constantly chewing CPU time and network bandwidth, even when you think the phone is locked and idle. Which is the right answer?
I'm looking forward to using backgrounded applications on the Pre, but I think Apple has struck a good balance with Push Notifications. Push fails to solve problems like an ssh client that must maintain the connection back to the connected server, but most other applications work fine with Push, but without silently consuming precious battery and bandwidth.
Result: iPhone
Web / Browser - Webkit vs. webkit? Are you serious? Show me someone who cares, and I'll show you a mobile web developer. My use of the browser itself on either platforms was not noticeably better or worse than the other.
Result: Tie
Applications - Apple has a one year head-start on Palm, and developers were all over themselves stamping out apps for any and everything from comparing home prices to porting classic games to making fart sounds. Unsurprisingly, the iPhone wins here for the huge app catalog, but it is only a matter of time before the Pre catches up.
When it comes to built-in applications, I'm leaning Pre for some of the little things. Apple's Mail only keeps the latest 200 messages per mailbox on the phone and doesn't consolidate inboxes into one view. For anyone with multiple mailboxes to manage or business guys who get a lot of mail, Mail on the iPhone is frustrating.
Syncing with online contact databases such as LinkedIn and Facebook is fast and easy on the Pre, making it all to easy to keep all your data in the cloud. The Pre has a Palm Profile as well, which appears to be backed up to your Palm-hosted Palm Profile.
While the Pre adds some much needed functionality over the iPhone in the basic apps, they missed out on some very simple items, like linking other contacts to the Spouse entry, rather than making them a simple text field. The automatic de-duplication of contacts is well done, but for the few it misses, a drag-n-drop interface would have been nice.
Result: Pre
Camera - Neither camera will be a replacement for a decent point-n-shoot, and certainly not for my Nikon D300. The auto-gain on the iPhone is decent, but the Palm adds an LED flash. There are not many situations where a flash is needed over a good auto-gain, but it only takes one instance to realize just how nice it is to have. And I've been in that situation with the iPhone.
Result: Pre
Keyboard - Ten seconds after my friend let me play with her Pre, I remembered how much I loved the real keyboard on my old Treo, and how hard it is to accurately type on the iPhone's virtual keyboard. That said, the iPhone does a good job of knowing what I meant to type and correcting my text. It is to the point that I "type with the Force," tapping my iPhone screen without regard for what it really says, figuring once the autocorrect is done I'll go back and proofread the message.
In contrast, the Pre's keyboard slides out from under the phone. This puts the top half of the case just above the top line of keys. If you have fat fingers, that bit of the case may get in the way. My fingers are on the big side, but not quite enough to be a problem. Still, given a choice between the Pre or upcoming Pixi keyboards, I'm betting I'll prefer the Pixi for the openness.
Result: Pre
Battery - Data phones don't just pound mobile phone towers, they devour batteries. Ars has a report of one luckless traveller who's Pre battery didn't suffer well his airport ordeal, not that anyone would consider the latest iPhone a paragon of battery life in the same situation. 3G data on both platforms is simply power-intensive. So is watching videos and playing games.
The Pre battery is user replaceable, making it possible to carry a spare or use a fat, long life battery (up to 3800 mAh vs stock 1150 mAh). The iPhone has a special surrounding case that is simply charging one battery with another. While it works, it feels inelegant to me. I give this one to Pre for flexibility.
Result: Pre
Copy/Paste - With 3.0, iPhone finally has copy/paste. The Pre had it from the start, but where the iPhone can copy from most any application, and gives you a context menu to select copy, cut or paste to perform the operation in one touch, the Pre is limited to copying text you can edit, and requires navigating through the application's menu. So, you can copy a URL from the Pre browser, but nothing from the page. The Pre lets you copy any text you type into a mail message, but nothing from an e-mail sent to you, even if you try to respond to it.
The iPhone has always allowed you to save an image from the web browser by holding a touch on the image for a couple seconds. The Pre has no way to do this.
Result: iPhone with a bullet
Cloud - Without judgement about the Pre's applications (I did not download any of them to install on the emulator), the overwhelming majority of them require connections to the Internet to function. Some data must be cached locally, but without a cloud to contact, the Pre has rather limited functionality. Perhaps when more applications are released, this will change, but I tend to doubt it in the short run. The Pre applications are built from HTML, CSS and JavaScript, lending themselves to run like Facebook applications: off someone's application server. It doesn't have to work this way, but it is the model that web programmers are accustomed to, and until the Pre gets native apps, it is the model you can expect.
Result: iPhone
Physical Aspects - This is a toss-up, a matter of personal preference. The iPhone has a solid feel and excellent screen. The original iPhone screen has held up well for me, but the 3G models have reports of the coating wearing off. Of course, eventually the battery fails and the whole unit has to be replaced.
The Pre also has great screen, is about the same size, and nearly identical in weight. The slideout keyboard is easy to get to on a new unit, but it is a part that seems doomed to failure as the phone ages. The Pre is simply too new to tell how well it will wear over time, but I have not seen any reports of poor craftsmanship yet. We do know we can swap the battery.
Result: Tie
Connectivity - Both have Bluetooth, both have 802.11g WiFi, both use a 3G network. I haven't even looked at speed rating tests online because the real speed of the device on any give day will depend heavily on where the phone is, the congestion of the mobile network and load on the server its contacting -- factors that will dominate any last mile network connection.
Prior to the Pre's launch, there were rumors of the phone including support for Sprint's 4G WiMAX network. That did not come to pass, but if it had I would have given this category to the Pre, even with the low penetration of WiMAX.
Result: Tie
Memory - My friend Walt sees the iPhone as an iPod that happens to have phone built into it, and that is a valid point. It can only be the device's iPodness that drives the larger memory sizes on the latest iPhones. No reasonable person will buy over 8 GB of applications off the iTunes App Store, nor fill it with so many contacts nor download enough e-mail to exhaust the phone's internal storage. Only music and movies can possibly bust the bank.
That makes the Pre's sole available memory size of 8GB perfectly reasonable, until you start to load it up with movies and media. My existing iPhone is an 8GB model. It serves me well enough, but I'd put more on it if I had more space. An SD card expansion port like the Treo's would have been a nice add-on for both.
Result: iPhone
Carrier / Plans - Pre wins big here. AT&T's plans cost more and get you less. On the low end, the AT&T 450 minute plan is $10 more than the Sprint plan, but Sprint includes unlimited texting compared to no texting from AT&T. At the high "everything, unlimited" end, the AT&T plan is $50 more for the same service.
AT&T has had a number of dings against them about their 3G coverage and call drop rates lately. It is an image issue that AT&T is going to have to deal with as the expected end of exclusivity next year approaches, or they will lose subscribers in large numbers.
In contrast, a cursory search for Sprint signal issues did not reveal much. Maybe it is because Sprint is still losing customers, with the happy result their network isn't overloaded. A nice bonus, Sprint has recently entered some underground DC Metro stations, breaking Verizon's iron grip on subway riders.
Result: Pre
User Interface - The Pre's "cards" interface gives me pleasant flashbacks to Hypercard on the original Macintosh. Navigating on the Pre has a learning curve that is easy to conquer. Starting new applications is effortless, navigating between apps is reasonably quick and easy. So easy that after using the Pre for a while, I find myself clearing out cards for fear of leaving too much running. Incoming mail and messages show an icon on the bottom of the Pre's screen, while the iPhone creates a pop-up. For this feature, I prefer the Pre's unobtrusive method.
On the iPhone side, the interface is fluid and simple, and the apps are reviewed to ensure they measure up to the expected experience that Apple intends. The instances of an app not acting the way I think it should are rare. Am i trained by the phone or is it truly intuitive? Does it matter if the end experience is "It Just Works?"
Result: Tie
GSM vs CDMA - The argument I see here is in regards to international roaming. CDMA isn't (widely) available overseas, but GSM is. You'd think this would tip the category to the iPhone, but since you can't unlock the iPhone without the jailbreaking software, you're held hostage overseas to AT&T's fantastically expensive international roaming rates. With most other GSM phones, you can get an unlock code from your carrier and buy a PAYG SIM at any mobile phone store or airport kiosk when you land.
In both cases, I'd get a cheap, unlocked GSM phone, and pick up a PAYG SIM. Both phones would be relegated to over-engineered PDA, if they came with me at all.
Result: Tie
Wireless Charger - Gee wiz, inductive charging. It's nifty, but how is it better than a cradle? The touchstone needs a power cable, so you're not removing a cable from the desktop. It connects to a USB port, so you're not freeing up a USB port, either. I'm at a loss here. Why is it good?
Result: Tie
There you have it. The two are pretty equally matched, in my mind. The Pre's slight win over the iPhone with a win-loss-tie record of 5-4-6 is as razor thin a win as is possible. Disagree with me on one item and you'll have a dead heat or an equally razor thin advantage to the iPhone.
Next up: My own thoughts on the iPhone vs Pre, beyond the categories.