Practical Review of the Galaxy Nexus

After about a week of use, my brand new Galaxy Nexus (GSM version) turned out to be a bit less than great, certainly not as good as most reviews (including the great one on The Verge by Joshua Topolsky) pitched it to be.

FYI, I have been using an iPhone 4 for the last seven months. It’s far from perfect in my opinion, but it’s not bad.
Now, about ICS and Galaxy Nexus:

GOOD:

• Text selection and Cut/Copy/Paste is finally solved. It simply works well (but see below).
• Built-in keyboard is very good. If you install SwiftKey, that’s even better: it’s actually amazingly clever in its predictions.The only thing where the iPhone keyboard is still better is in correcting missing spaces, like “inthe” to “in the”. The iPhone can correct even “intge” to “in the”, as it should be. In words suggestion, I find both ICS built-in keyboard and SwiftKey better than the iPhone’s.
• The color notification LED is a godsend. I missed it so much when I left the BlackBerry. Most apps support it well: purple for Yahoo Mail, blue for Facebook, red for TouchDown, green for Whatsapp, white for SMS.
• The portable hotspot works great. MUCH better than on the iPhone: in the same place, over 200KB/s for the Galaxy Nexus, never over 40KB/s for the iPhone 4. Maybe it’s because the iPhone 4 is not HSPA+, but I doubt it: with SpeedTest, the iPhone 4 by itself (i.e. not when “hotspotting”) easily got 2Mb/s on the same table in the same room, which should translate to around 250KB/s.
• Battery life is great, even with everything turned on (BT, WiFi, 3G). One day easily. Cannot tell the difference from the iPhone 4 (with everything turned on too).
• Settings are simpler and better organised than before.
• Home screen folders are nice. Copied from the iPhone but nice. Do ut des.
• The proximity sensor works well. No risk of hanging up with your cheek. Much better than on (my) iPhone 4, where it was terrible.
• The “Top Hits” when searching for contacts is there. It’s not highlighted in any way though, so you might wonder whether Google forgot it or not. They didn’t.

BAD:

• When selecting text, a bar suddenly appears at the top of the screen. All the rest of the screen below the bar scrolls down brutally and unintuitively, including the text you are selecting: it feels like having a rug pulled from under your feet. Sometimes the selection is lost or the wrong text selected.
• No undo.
• On the iPhone it’s easy to control the audio that is playing: double press on the home button and swipe right on the bottom row. It works with whatever is playing, whether it’s music, podcasts or Audible. It’s not as convenient as the physical start/stop button most BlackBerries have, but it’s a gesture that after some training can be completed without watching. In ICS there is no general audio control: you have to always go back in the playing application or its widget, unless the application supports a “stay on top of the lock screen” feature. BeyondPod does, Audible does not. This is a disaster if you listen to audio on the go. Also, the headphones controls seem to be application-dependent: Audible does not respond to them, BeyondPod does start/stop only but no volume. This is really a disaster.
• The damned speaker clicking noise is very real, on speaker and headphones. Come on Google, really?? Let’s hope it’s a software bug and not a hardware one.
• Loudspeaker volume is weaker than the iPhone’s, which is much weaker than my old 9780′s. Listening to podcasts or Audible with no headphones is annoying. Waiting for @Supercurio to come to the rescue.
• Scrolling is still a bit jerky, both in the home screens and in the native browser. Not as bad as, for example, on the Galaxy S, but it is. Don’t ask me why. The iPhone is not. This is really a letdown, especially after Josh’s review.
• The screen is nice and very high resolution. However, if you hoped the pixels disappeared completely like on the retina display of the iPhone 4/4S, think again: you can still see the pixels, especially on solid red and white. I don’t know if this is due to the pentile nature of the screen or its resolution is simply not high enough, but the bottom line is: you can still see the pixels, albeit small.
• The massive screen is nice when watching video (not that I do that often), but it’s very, very difficult to comfortably reach all of its corners with one hand, to drag down the notification bar, to reach the soft keys on the bottom. It’s virtually impossible to do so if you have to grip the phone firmly in your one hand. The best compromise for me seems to be four inches: this is really too big. I agree with Marco Arment’s view on this.
• The icons on the notification bar are tiny, even the built-in ones. I mean really tiny, especially third-parties ones. They are also black and white (or I should say gray), which is a shame: you can’t understand at a glance what information is waiting for you behind the bar. Icons like Battery Indicator (hopefully because not yet optimised for ICS) are almost impossible to read.
• Vibration is weak.
• Most apps really suck compared to their iPhone counterparts. TripAdvisor for all. Bleah! I know, this has nothing to do with ICS specifically, but still, expect to be treated as a second class citizen by most apps producers. I don’t know and honestly don’t care what the reason is, the sad reality today is that most Android apps are ugly, and it’s even more evident on a chiseled OS like ICS.
• When deleting SMS, the big, screen-wide delete button is on the bottom, right above the back arrow button (which is used to cancel): it’s easy to press one for the other. It’s so idiotic to put two buttons of exactly opposed action so close to each other, I can’t believe it. Why Mathias Duarte, why?
• No physical button(s) on the front makes it difficult to feel the right orientation of the phone by touch, for example to turn it on in the darkness: which one is the side with the on/off button?
• The system-wide search is much more difficult to use than on the iPhone. Here, to reach the top of the screen for the search bar is so uncomfortable I end up almost never using it. It should be on the bottom or, even better, it should be freely placeable on the screen. Who the hell used this phone in Google during testing, only people with giant hands? Where is the one-handed use Andy Rubin is alleged to be a fan of?
• Last but not least: still no shifted touch landing areas like iOS.
  Let me explain. In iOS, when you tap a button on the screen, the actual glass area that, if touched, presses down the button is not exactly on top of the button’s pixels. It’s slightly shifted. For example, if the button is on the top of the screen (say a Back button) the active touch area for that button is shifted down a bit. It’s easy to try: lock screen rotation of your iPhone or iPad with the up side up; turn the iPhone or iPad upside down, and touch that same Back button. You will see that touch accuracy suddenly turns to crap. It feels all wrong. Except it isn’t: iOS is expecting your touches to land from south relative to the button (i.e. from the home button), but your fingers are actually landing from north of the button (i.e. from the speaker).
  Well, in ICS the landing area is exactly on top of the target. It’s probably not intuitive, but that feels less natural than iOS’ approach. Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple had a patent on this…

Cannot Login with phpMyAdmin on Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Great tip on how to correctly login with phpMyAdmin on your mac.
Via sourceforge, thanks to oscarcal.

If you’re getting “#2002 Cannot log in to the MySQL server” when logging in to phpMyAdmin on Mac OS X, edit phpmyadmin/config.inc.php and change:

 $cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'localhost';

to:

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = '127.0.0.1';

This seems to be necessary even if you have localhost correctly setup in your /etc/hosts file.

How to Add a Watermark to Images Using a Synology DS 110 (Updated)

This is an update to the original post. I added more details and fixed a couple of bugs, and made it so that it should now be easier to create and install the script, without need for Vi.

1) Login with telnet (I know, you should really use SSH, but I haven’t gotten around to that yet so I can’t give advice there). You must login as root, not simply as administrator. That is login:root, password:same password as admin.

2) All the following script lines should be simply copied and pasted (even with comments) directly in the telnet window, all of them in one go. All the file paths are absolute, so it doesn’t matter in which directory you are when you paste. Everything will be created and “installed” automatically. It works fine from the system telnet in the Terminal.app in OS X, I don’t know in other terminals. If not, you will need to use Vi to create the script file.

### 1) create backup copy of the original convert
cp /lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert /lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert.bak

### 2) rename original convert file and setup new symlinks
echo 'mv /lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert /lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert.original-binary' > /root/convert--new-link.sh
chmod 744 /root/convert--new-link.sh
/root/convert--new-link.sh

### 3) create convert script
echo '#!/bin/sh
# Execute the original convert for each image
/lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert.original-binary -verbose "$@" >> /root/log.txt
echo "---------------------------" >> /root/log.txt
# loop through all the argument until last one
for last; do true; done
# only add watermark to certain size thumbs, with transparency at 25%
if [ $5 == 640x640 ] || [ $5 == 800x800 ]; then
    eval /usr/syno/bin/composite -verbose -dissolve 25% -gravity southeast /root/watermark \"$last\" \"$last\" >> /root/log.txt
    echo "---------------------------" >> /root/log.txt
fi ' > /lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert
chmod 755 /lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert

### 4) create script to restore convert file
echo 'mv /lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert.original-binary   /lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert' > /root/convert--restore-default-link.sh
chmod 744 /root/convert--restore-default-link.sh

### 5) setup convenient symlinks
ln -fs /usr/syno/bin/composite                /root/composite
ln -fs /lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert       /root/myconvert
ln -fs /etc/rsyncd.conf                       /root/rsyncd.conf
ln -fs /usr/syno/bin/                         /root/sb
ln -fs /usr/syno/etc.defaults/                /root/se
ln -fs /lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/              /root/sl
ln -fs /usr/syno/etc.defaults/thumb.conf      /root/thumb.conf
ln -fs /volume1/photo/watermark/watermark.gif /root/watermark
ln -fs /volume1/photo/watermark               /root/watermark_album

3) You need to create the watermark image file separately. It does not have to be a .gif, thankfully composite is clever enough to handle the image format automatically. The watermark image file then needs to be saved anywhere the /root/watermark link points to. In my case:

/volume1/photo/watermark/watermark.gif

Image with watermark on the bottom right

4) This should do it, if there are issues let me know. If you want to remove everything and go back to the default configuration this is the “uninstall” script. Copy and paste it in the terminal window just like above:

### remove everything
/root/convert--restore-default-link.sh
rm /root/convert--restore-default-link.sh
rm /root/convert--new-link.sh
rm /root/composite
rm /root/myconvert
rm /root/rsyncd.conf
rm /root/sb
rm /root/se
rm /root/sl
rm /root/thumb.conf
rm /root/watermark
rm /root/watermark_album

Autocomplete Command Line from History in OS X Terminal

Useful tip to save keystrokes on the command line:

http://straylink.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/command-line-history-autocomplete-in-os-x

# make bash autocomplete with up arrow/down arrow
bind '"\e[A":history-search-backward'
bind '"\e[B":history-search-forward'

Just keep in mind that .profile is called .bash_profile in 10.6, that’s the one you want to edit.

How to Add a Watermark to Images Using a Synology DS 110

UPDATE 2: It is now fixed also for version 3.1-1613. The update deserved a brand new post. This post below should be considered obsolete and ignored.

UPDATE: Looks like this doesn’t work anymore in firmware version 3.1-1613 that came out on April 11th.

Very concisely (I might add more explanations later):

1) You must login as root, not simply as administrator

2) Optional – Symbolic links just for convenience:

SynologyDS110> pwd
/root
SynologyDS110> ll
drwxr-xr-x    5 root     root          4096 Dec 25 00:02 .
drwxr-xr-x   20 root     root          4096 Dec 24 22:57 ..
drwx------    3 root     root          4096 Nov 29 00:19 .cache
drwx------    3 root     root          4096 Nov 29 00:19 .config
drwx------    3 root     root          4096 Nov 29 00:19 .local
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root           396 Sep  4  2003 .profile
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            23 Dec  8 17:42 composite -> /usr/syno/bin/composite
-rw-rw-rw-    1 root     root          6638 Dec 24 23:53 log.txt
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            35 Dec 24 22:48 myconvert -> /lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert.sh
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            16 Dec  8 17:14 rsyncd.conf -> /etc/rsyncd.conf
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root           513 Nov 29 00:28 rsyncd.conf.mod
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            14 Dec  8 17:09 sb -> /usr/syno/bin/
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            23 Dec  8 17:09 se -> /usr/syno/etc.defaults/
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            25 Dec  8 17:11 sl -> /lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            33 Dec  8 17:13 thumb.conf -> /usr/syno/etc.defaults/thumb.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 Dec 25 00:02 watermark -> /volume1/photo/watermark/watermark.gif
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            24 Dec  8 17:39 watermark_album -> /volume1/photo/watermark

3) Create this text file

/lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert.sh

and leave it empty for now.
Change the following sym link (with “ln -fs …”) from:

/usr/syno/bin/convert -> /lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert

to:

/usr/syno/bin/convert -> /lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert.sh

4) Rename

/lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert

to

/lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert.original-binary

(or any other meaningful name you like)

Note:

/lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert.original-binary

will be called from convert.sh, so if you change its name you must update it accordingly in the code below

5) Copy this code in convert.sh (could be more elegant but it works):

#!/bin/sh

# Execute the original convert for each image
/lib/hddapp/usr/syno/bin/convert.original-binary -verbose "$@" >> /root/log.txt
echo "---------------------------" >> /root/log.txt

# loop through all the argument until last one
for last; do true; done

# only add watermark to certain size thumbs
if [ $5 == 640x640 ] || [ $5 == 800x800 ]; then
    eval /usr/syno/bin/composite -verbose -dissolve 25% -gravity southeast /root/watermark \"$last\" \"$last\" >> /root/log.txt
    echo "---------------------------" >> /root/log.txt
fi

6) Your watermark file needs to be anywhere the /root/watermark link points to. In my case (see highlighted line in point 2 above):

/volume1/photo/watermark/watermark.gif

Actions, Reactions, Consequences in a Startup Growing Up

The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free

Don’t forget the comments.

How to Install in Mac OS X a USB Printer Connected to a Vodafone Station

UPDATE: in 10.6, the CUPS user interface has been updated, but the process is the same.

It’s easy to find abundant, multilingual, official and non-official instructions on how to configure the Vodafone Station to use a USB printer and how to then install that printer in Windows, just google it.

What’s hard to find, on the other hand, is any description on how to install that same printer in Mac OS X (10.5.8 for me). Googling in English, Italian or Spanish did not help, nor did playing around in the Print & Fax applet.

This article in Italian by 1e2.it, however, talks a bit about how to do it in Linux and, even if not addressing Mac OS X directly, it offers the right hint: use CUPS.

First, I strongly suggest you download the latest version of Gutenprint, which includes a lot of very useful printer drivers. In any case make sure you have your printer’s driver installed. By the way, if you have the HP LaserJet 1022 like me definitely use Gutenprint; also, you might still find this page useful even if it’s old (thank God we have macosxhints.com).

From your browser go to localhost:631 and the web interface of CUPS will show up (curious how the web interface is more explanatory than System Preferences’ Add Printer applet…).
Follow the on-screen instructions on how to add a new printer and everything should work.

Below you’ll find the screen shots of what I did; clearly you need to replace the name of the printer and the IP address accordingly, but you get the idea.

1. Click on the Add Printer button and fill in the required info

2. Select IPP (http) printing protocol

3. Enter the correct device URI. Note that the port is by default 631 and the

4. Select the printer's brand

5. Select the correct driver

Click on Add Printer, show Mac OS X who’s the boss and voila!
Somebody at this point recommends to click “save” on the Vodafone Station printer setup page (Advanced >> USB Applications >> Print Server). I don’t know what that’s supposed to do. For me it worked without doing that.

In the beginning was the command line… then came the iPhone

Even though I’m selling my iPhone, I still believe it is a revolutionary product and I know I will go back to it someday. Why is it so significant? It comes down to the wonderful touch screen and the UI designed to be used with fingers.

In the BlackBerry Pearl, if you want to go to your contacts, press the right convenience key (or whichever convenience key you assigned to Contacts). If you want to go to Calendar, press the left convenience key (or whichever convenience key you assigned to Calendar). You didn’t know you could chose which application to assign to convenience keys? Shame on you.

To change typing language (in OS 4.5) type Shift+Space or Alt+Enter, depending which one you set from the Language options.

Now try Alt+Back: it shows you the list of running applications. Pretty cool uh?

Now go in the built-in browser. It’s not great but it’s good enough for your needs, right? Ok, kind of, but try this: press Q to toggle the title bar, to save some space; press E to go to the top of the page, C to go to the bottom; U scrolls up a page, M down a page; G opens your bookmarks, A bookmarks the current page; Z togles between column and page view. There are more keyboard shortcuts but you get the idea…

Now go to Opera Mini if you have it (if you don’t, get it; it’s a much more powerful browser, works great and it’s free). Does M go down one page? Nope, you need B for that. Does G open bookmarks? Nope, it zooms out; for bookmarks you need Q + T. What about toggling the title bar? That’s double type on A.

In Calendar: G creates a new event.

In Google Maps: G goes up one line.

In Mail: G opens the selected item.

Some of the above actions can be carried out via the menu but not all, keyboard shortcuts are–so to speak–key here. Sometimes there are different key combinations to do the same thing and sometimes the same key combination does different things.  It’s on you to memorise all of them.

This means two things:

1. There is no standard for key combinations on the Pearl.
2. The user needs to remember a lot of different and unintuitive key combinations to take full advantage of the phone.

Does this remind you of anything? This sounds a lot like what users had to go through before the advent of the first GUI computers. They had to remember which keys they needed to do anything (Vi, Emacs? Lotus123, Wordperfect? More?). The more you remembered, the higer up in “guruness” you were.  When GUIs showed up, you could avoid key combinations and do everything with windows, icons and mouse. And–guess what–the best GUI was made by a company called Apple.

On the iPhone, the UI is telling the user what he or she can do in every moment by showing the right icons and buttons and by letting the user interact in the most natural way, just like in the real world: with fingers.

So Apple kind of did it again. Drawing a parallel with the old command line vs. GUI argument and stretching it a bit, we can assimilate most existing phones to character-based user interfaces, and the iPhone to GUI computers, where instead of a mouse you have your finger:

• Just like a Unix guru is much more productive using command line tools and character-based text editors to do most of his work, people used to the BlackBerry or Nokia or whatever platform they are used to can be much faster in using the phone than an iPhone user, because they remember all the right key combinations and use them with incredible ease.
• Just like for desktop computers, advanced users might always prefer more difficult but faster ways to interact with the smartphone of choice, i.e. choosing key combinations over touching a button on the screen.
• Just like the first GUI computers, the iPhone is amazingly promising in what it can do and how easily it lets you do it. Much more intuitively than almost any other current generation phone.
• Just like the first GUI computers, the iPhone is an immature product under several aspects (see my other posts below) and will need time to improve, but you can bet your ass it will.
• Just like current GUI computers dominate the present, platforms like the iPhone will dominate the future. Maybe with a keyboard like the T-Mobile G1 or without like the iPhone, but what appears inevitable is that our fingers are the next mouse and (multi)touch phones are the next desktop Macs and PCs.

No more iPhone

Since 2.1 didn’t fix much of what I needed and added nothing notable, I’m selling my iPhone. I am going for an E71, try it for a few days and if that doesn’t satisfy me I’ll go for a Bold. That at least I already know most of the pros and cons of.

Nokia is making it very difficult to buy the E71 though. They cancelled my first order for a credit card issue without telling me anything, so I waited 8 days in vain before I found out. Their store (online and off) takes no Amex and my Visa is not Italian (that’s why they didn’t like it the first time). I’m in the process of finding a workaround, in the meanwhile I live with my 8100. It’s not a bad living after all.

The iPhone 3G user experience: what 2.1 must fix today to catch up with the BlackBerry

Update: version 2.1 is coming out on Friday, but from what we can already see on the iPod touch there are no new features. We’ll see…

The UI in Mac OS X has always been famous for being “out of the way” and letting the user focus on what counts: being productive. It lets you get the job done without wasting time on the interaction with the operating system.

The BlackBerry Pearl (and all its siblings Curve, 8800, Bold, etc. which basically share the same UI and/or design philosophy) also has a very transparent OS. It does things as expected, it behaves consistently, it has a simple physical interface (menu button, back button, 5-ways rolling ball, plus of course the keyboard). Some users will undoubtedly call it “limited” instead of simple, but to be fair the only place where the user bangs its head against its limits is web browsing (even with the really amazing Opera Mini). Virtually everything else is faster to get to and (once you get the hang of it) comes more natural on the Pearl than on the iPhone. Your fingers travel less. Less steps to do things. Basic functionality always there and consistent. Probably the most important: the back button moves you back a screen just as in a web browser.

The iPhone has its famous and revolutionary multi-touch interface that although very promising is showing all its immaturity in firmware release 2.0.2, especially if you come from the ultra fine-tuned user experience you have on the BlackBerry. All this can be fixed of course, but it requires Apple to clear their head first, come up with good interface guidelines and say “this is the way we do things on the iPhone”. Then do it: the built-in apps today behave too often in different ways.

Two things 2.0.2 does wrong that 2.1 must fix

Stateful App Switching

Perfect conservation of the state of an app when switching to another one is a basic feature every modern BB and Nokia phone has. I haven’t used Windows phones is a while but I bet they also have it. If the user has to repeat some steps every time he or she has to quickly check something in another app they will get very quickly frustrated. From this point of view I hated the SonyEricsson P910i UIQ interface and I’m sure those of you who used it know what I mean. The Pearl reaches the goal 100%, at least as far as the built-in apps go, and Nokia reaches it 110% considering that apps not only are completely stateful, but they can also really run in the background. You can download a podcast while Shozu uploads a photo to Flickr and you write an sms (by the way, the battery life of most Nokia N and E series is better that that of the iPhone 3G so don’t give me that excuse for this iPhone limitation… granted, it is most likely that because the iPhone has this huge screen it has to save juice somewhere else; we’ll see how Nokia and Rim’s touch screen phones battery life compares to the iPhone 3G).

Back to app switching. Here’s an example of how the Pearl behaves, not useful per se but it gives the idea. On the Pearl you can be in the Messages app, call up the address book by selecting “View Contact”, switch to the Address Book app and view the same contact. Now you can switch instantly back and forth between Messages and Address Book, both showing the same view on the same contact. But there’s more: if you have a menu open in a BB app, you can switch out of said app, back into it and find the same menu still open with the same item still selected. Talking about stateful app switching! This is even better that what everybody has come to expect when cmd-tabbing or alt-tabbing between applications in MAC OS X and Windows.

On the iPhone however, app switching is flaky. If you go to Inbox, compose a new message and tap the round “+” icon on the right of the To: field, you get Contacts sliding up. This is meant to allow you to select the recipient from your contacts list, which is fine. Now, in 2.0.2 if you then go to the home screen and reopen Mail, the app will crash, so let’s forget this for a second and assume this is a bug that will be fixed in 2.1. Let’s focus on this instead: if you open Contacts before you reopen Mail and then reopen Mail, Mail will not crash, but you will find it has gone back to folder view. Why is that? The point seems to be that if you open Contacts from the home screen, it will “steal back” the contacts screen that Mail just opened, so that when you do switch back to Mail it will show you the folder view, thus avoiding the bug that causes the crash in 2.0.2. This is true for Maps as well, and probably of all the other apps that can show contacts.

This is an example of the non-stateful behaviour that the iPhone is regularly slapping on the face of the user. There are some apps that behave quite well. iPod is probably the best, as it conserves its state in almost every circumstance, failing only to remember to keep the “Configure” slide-up panel open. Maps is also quite good: apart from the aforementioned contacts issue, it just does not remember the keyboard state, so if you switch out with the keyboard open, the keyboard will close automatically. It saves what you have typed however, so it’s no big deal. Contacts is one of the worst, as it always revert back to the main screen and doesn’t remember where you were in the list when you switched out of it. Calendar also needs improvements, as it always goes out of edit mode when switching out of it.

From what I read online, third party iPhone applications have the task of saving their state on their shoulders, which is a shame because developers might decide they don’t care about saving the state of their app and this will ruin the user experience. In my very limited experience (Twitterrific, WordPress, Shazam, Remote and a couple of games) the switch is not fully stateful, for example Twitterrific does not save a new tweet being written and some games restart from scratch every time you switch out then back into them.

Screen navigation

Apple have to absolutely fix the “back to previous screen” web-browser like metaphor, which gets broken too often when composing a message (SMS or email). Once again, some apps work fine: in Photos, when you choose to send a photo as email attachment and change your mind, you go back to Photos; same in YouTube, when you want to send an email with a link to a video, but then cancel it. Others, like Contacts, will teleport to Mail or SMS as soon as you tap on the “new message” button.

Put in perspective this is obviously not a big deal. It does not make the iPhone impossible to use. If you compare it to other platforms however, this makes the user experience much worse. The Pearl feels much more natural and consistent, as do comparable Nokia phones like the E71 for example, which for some people (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/08/22.html) is a superior phone.

Even more, and possibly worse, this is not the user experience we have come to expect from Apple. What is this non-attention to details? Where is the “every-pixel-must-be-perfect” attitude? It might be that they had to push the thing out the door last year and didn’t have time to plan everything up front, or that they are focusing on other features, but if they want to steal users from the BlackBerry tribe Apple better offer an impeccable user experience, at least comparable to BB OS 4.5/4.6 in terms of convenience, speed and consistency. And functionality.

What 2.1 must add

Which brings us to the email client: where the iPhone really crumbles when compared to BlackBerry, especially now that BB OS 4.5 supports HTML email. Small things like “Mark Prior Opened” (marks all emails before a certain date as read) and “Delete Prior” (deletes all emails before a certain date) are not used often but make you save so much time when you need them.

The key feature that is missing however is email search. For people with lots and lots of emails, search is such a basic feature that Rim can sleep safe until it the iPhone does not have it. Of course what would be really ideal is Spotlight for the iPhone…

What would be nice 2.1 fixed

Auto-Brightness. In my experience it needs to operate across a wider range. I want minimum brightness if in total darkness and a bright screen if outside in the sun. It seems you can have one or the other, but not both.

Also, please make Safari “Back” action be quicker. Opera Mini snaps instantly to the previous page with no reload and even the built-in BlackBerry browser is faster than Safari. Safari reloads the page and does not (always) remember where you were: it often goes back to the top, which is very annoying especially on long pages.

What would be nice to have in the future

This is clearly a potentially infinite list and very much dependent on personal tastes and experience. My top personal desiderata are the following, obviously not in order of importance (see last point):

1. Direct access to all the radios (WiFi, BT, GPS, GSM) and Flight mode from the home screen. Going through Settings is painfully slow. This might be easily fixed by a third party app.
2. A good built-in today screen.
3. The ability to attach multiple photos to an email. Today it’s not possible.
4. New gestures. Multitouch could do so much more, especially for advanced users. Remember the full screen swipe on the Palm OS that called up Graffiti help? Why not use that gesture for an advanced HUD on the iPhone? Safari could give you more page navigation options (End, PgUp, PgDn, in-place address bar), Mail some useful actions (how about “Mark Prior Opened” and “Delete Prior”?), Home useful customisable shortcuts (for example to the radio settings above).
   Also, right swipe to go back to previous screen would be great, as I say in my previous post below.
5. Horizontally scrollable button bars. I would love if button bars could have more buttons and scroll horizontally like the home screen does. Currently a lateral swipe on the bars does nothing so why not? Safari could have more buttons (for navigation, “open in new page”, etc. ), iPod could get rid of the “More” bottom tab, etc.
6. Spell checker. New in BB OS 4.5, it is more useful than it seems at first. It avoids sending emails with sneaky spelling errors, and helps hide the fact the email was written on a mobile device, making it look more professional.
7. The Pearl has enough settings to satisfy almost everybody’s taste. The iPhone… meh. Better organised and more powerful settings would help, especially to reduce data traffic in Mail and Safari, and maybe organised in a per-app fashion, like on the BlackBerry, for faster access.
8. I don’t use Tasks much but it’s undeniable they are an important PDA feature.
9. Something silly nobody has ever asked for: cut and paste.