Nokia N800 and Sharp Zaurus kick iPhone's butt

Written by Hash

Monday, 13 August 2007 07:05

All this hype about the iPhone makes me chuckle.

Sharp Zaurus and Nokia N800 Nokia's N800 Internet Tablet, the successor to the N770, launched early this year, is a far superior device as things stand today, and the Sharp Zaurus SL-C3x00 series has offered serious computing power and a VGA display in the palm of your hand since 2005.

The iPhone is far behind both these devices in power and flexibility, and is full of show-stopping misfeatures.

Hold The Phone

The first thing that puts me off the iPhone right away is the fact that it's a phone.

I really really do not want my cellphone to be integrated with my PDA, MP3 player, and camera, for a number of reasons...

The most important thing I look for in a phone, other than Bluetooth and Internet capabilites, is battery life. I could use a color screen, MP3 player and camera sucking up my phone's battery life like I could use a hole in the head. Color screen: $100. MP3 Player: $100. Camera: $150. Being unable to receive urgent calls and SMSes because you clicked a bunch of photos or listened to some music: Priceless.

Moreover, cellphone tech, camera tech, and processor tech all evolve at different rates, and hold different priorities and different levels of upgrade inertia for any user. Bundling all these devices together makes it impossible to upgrade each individually as needed.

I want my handheld computer to be powerful and hackable, and I want my cellphone separate - a simple, bluetooth capable phone, with a B&W screen if possible, and great battery life. My trusty handset for over 4 years, the Nokia 6310i is perfect in this regard. For 3G, the Nokia 2865 is pretty nice, though it does have a color screen and much poorer battery peformance than the much older 6310i.

The iPhone, being a phone, has other drawbacks besides feeping creaturism, including the lame-ass subscription linked business model. The N800 is $400, no strings attached. Link to a phone via Bluetooth when you need it. What the hell is Bluetooth for anyway if you're going to build all devices into one case?

Also, if I buy an iPhone, what do I do with my existing phones?

And another thing. This is 2007. Why would I want to be stuck with GPRS Internet access, when 3G is so much faster. What is Apple thinking?

Apple SOS

I'm a big fan of Apple. My first laptop was an Apple PowerBook Duo 230, and I love my current MacBook (which, interestingly, also incorporates the 'Duo' name, in its Core2Duo processor), but I must admit that despite being insanely brilliant very often, Apple is also puzzlingly capable of ignoring very serious issues and making totally bone-headed strategy decisions on occasion. The iPhone is an example.

Despite the undeniable fact that the iPhone features a groundbreaking user interface and other innovations that will likely revolutionize the mobile devices market, it is equally undeniable that the first generation iPhone is just an expensive toy in comparison to other devices that have been on the market for several years.

Where Apple really needed to bring to market a strong, powerful pocket or wearable computer to compete with the likes of the N800, and certainly has the tech smarts to do that, it has instead come up, two years after the N770 and more than five years after the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500, with a flashy and stylish but basically closed and extremely limited device.

There are major usability show-stoppers in the current generation of the iPhone software, including the lack of a system clipboard, no text selection support at all in fact, no file upload support in Safari, no spam filtering in the Mail app, no flexibility in quoting messages in replies, and no possibility of installing text-mode mail apps, which are actually still a lot more practical to use on small devices, even the Zaurus and the N800, than pretty much all currently available GUI mail apps.

Apple's marketing hyperbole for the iPhone doesn't let inconvenient facts get in its way. "The most advanced web browser ever on a portable device"? I routinely run the full desktop version of Galeon on my Zaurus SL-C3100. Safari, even the desktop version, is certainly many years behind Galeon in features and reliability. The versions of Opera that come pre-installed on the Zaurus and the N800 are no slackers either.

And yeah, newsflash for Apple: 320 pixels wide isn't the "way web pages were designed to be seen". Even the N800's 800 pixel-width screen isn't wide enough to contain many modern websites without a horizontal scrollbar making an appearance. 320 pixel width surfing with Safari, zooming in and out all the time, can't be a comfortable Internet experience at all. Opera on the N800, on the other hand, does provide a reasonably natural web experience.

Closed For Business

The worst aspect of the iPhone is that it's a closed platform. Sure, you can develop web apps for it, but these would need to be hosted and run on servers on the net, and you'd need to be online to access them. These are hardly applications on the iPhone, but just regular web applications optimized for Safari on iPhone. I suppose you could create some simple apps which would run on the iPhone without Internet access, by writing them entirely in JavaScript, but I sure wouldn't want to.

So we won't be seeing a wealth of real 3rd party apps on the iPhone, which makes it far less useful than even a simple Palm Pilot. I hear some folks have hacked up a Terminal app in which one can run a port of ssh, so the iPhone isn't a total paperweight. But until there's a proper development toolchain available for OSX on ARM, even porting Unix command line apps to run in the Terminal is impossible. So it's an iPod, a phone, a camera, and a dinky-toy web browser. But it's not a computing platform with any power or flexibility.

I'm really curious to know if the iPhone also features the insane "Hanging disconnect" problem that has plagued OS X for over 8 years. This is a very serious problem, which effectively makes it impossible to use a dialup, GPRS or 3G Internet connection with OS X (unless you're willing to reboot frequently to fix a hanging disconnect, not really a practical option), and Apple hasn't bothered to do anything about it for 6 years!

When weird bugs need to be dealt with in OS X, it is at least possible to dig down to the command line and tweak things. With a closed device like iPhone, even this won't be possible.

Stuff like this makes me wary of the iPhone. I will probably get one for development use, but despite all the flash I think it has a snowball's chance in hell of becoming my portable device of choice in the near future, given all that it cannot do, when compared to the N800 and the SL-C3200, and given that it's a basically proprietary, closed platform.

Nokia Is The New Apple

So, the iPhone being just a sexy but rather limited toy, where can we get some real digital satisfaction?

Well, there's always the awesome Sharp Zaurus SL-C3200, with its 640x480 screen, Linux built in, 6GB hard disk, very usable built-in keyboard, and flourishing user community. I love this machine. Unfortunately, Sharp decided to discontinue the Zaurus line this year. Bummer. It was really shaping up very nicely.

On the other hand, they were apparently still manufacturing them past their declared discontinuation date, and there's a sizable user community that would hate to see the Zaurus die, so maybe there's some hope for the future of the Zaurus. For now, they're still quite easily available online.

It's somewhat annoying to hear the fuss being made over the iPhone's screen, and that of the OpenMoko Neo1973, given that the SL-C3100 had an amazing hi-res 640x480 screen years ago, and Sharp actually marketed the first PDA with a 640x480 screen, the Zaurus ICRUISE, way back in 1999! The first Linux-based Zaurus, with an integrated qwerty thumb keyboard, the SL-5000D, was released in 2002.

The OpenMoko Neo1973 is again a phone, and currently far from usable out of the box. And while it's a commendable effort, I do have serious reservations about the commercial viability of the OpenMoko project, which I'll post about some other time.

Fortunately, one company does seem to have its finger firmly on the pulse of the market. Nokia.

The Nokia N800 was released early this year, and provides all the goodies - an amazing 800x480 screen, Linux inside, excellent power management (puts the Zaurus and all other Linux platforms to shame), dual SD card slots, integrated Bluetooth and WiFi, stereo speakers, VoIP, a webcam, an FM radio, out-of-box usability to rival that of OS X, the most consistent user interface I've ever seen on any Linux computer, big or small... and no phone!

The way it was meant to be.

Nokia++

But wait, it gets better.

The Zaurus comes with a built-in user interface based on Trolltech's Qtopia platform for handheld devices. There's currently no perl library available to develop graphical apps for this environment, so I can't easily hack up graphical perl apps to run on the Zaurus. And yes, I'm too damn lazy to code in anything other than perl.

Running X on the Zaurus alongside the native Qtopia is possible, but slow. It's also possible to run X as the primary graphical environment on the Zaurus, which would likely be faster, but the hoops one must jump through to do this even put me off, and I'm not easily dissuaded from doing whatever it takes to whip a device into shape for my use.

The N800, on the other hand, runs X natively out of the box. This means I can whip up graphical GTK perl apps using Glade, and they will run unmodified on the N800. I installed some of my apps on the N800, and they run quite snappily. I'm not using the Hildon interface widgets, but just the native GTK ones, so my apps don't look like native N800 apps do, but that's just a cosmetic detail.

What's important is I can quickly and easily whip up graphical apps to run on the N800, using the same tools I already use to create graphical apps for desktop Unix and Windows environments, with no need for emulation or major customization. I did need to install a full Debian arm distribution on the N800, but that's easy enough.

Usability-wise, even the old Nokia Communicators were excellent portable computers, but only for users who don't want to hack on their devices. Nevertheless, they were some of the very first really usable pocket-sized Internet capable computers. With the switch to Linux with the N770, and their support of the open Maemo environment, Nokia keeps us hacker-types happy, just as Apple did with OS X.

I do believe this is really critical in the market, as hackers and early adopters not only influence lots of buying decisions, they also add immense value to your platform. A closed platform just prevents them from doing that, while also frustrating them, causing them to bad-mouth your device. Not a good idea.

Apple seems to have very poor institutional memory about precisely what worked in the past, and what didn't. Keeping the iPhone closed is the precise opposite of what made OS X such a success. Nokia seems to understand, better than Apple, OpenMoko or Sharp, how to combine a hard-nosed commercial sensibility with open source development.

Apple has a great OS and great computers, but Nokia wins the first serious round in the handheld computing arena, hands down.