Digital Wanderer

Someone asked how we charged our gadgets. The answer isn't particularly interesting: we didn't. We didn't have any gadgets. A few cell phones, the navigator's GPS-enabled phone, and my iPhone — the only device that could, with some stretch, be called a gadget. And even then, only barely. I'll explain why below, especially since I've been meaning to for a while, and now there's a perfect excuse. What follows is a lot of fairly dry text. It'll probably only be useful to iPhone owners, or people thinking about buying one, well, and to fans of gadgets in general and smartphones in particular.

If you don't fall into any of those categories, you'd be better off reading about how a girl walks around Istanbul. In my story, I'm still quite a ways from Istanbul, and anyway, I wasn't even in the places she writes about.

If, for some strange reason, someone outside of those categories is still reading these lines, here is a brief rundown — what is an iPhone?

It's a phone by Apple whose main gimmick is its almost completely touch-based interface. The iPhone doesn't have many buttons, and they don't play a major role. Call me crazy, but it's been obvious to me for a long time that many devices in the future will go touch-only. It's simply inevitable, an absolute historical necessity, no matter what button-lovers say. Before I got the iPhone, I saw no reason to keep physical buttons around. Now I see one, but only one — in apps that require lightning-fast reactions to what's happening on screen, like games, you block the display with your fingers when tapping. But for most games, two to four auxiliary buttons would be enough, which could be unobtrusively placed on the side of the screen. The iPhone even has room for that, since the screen doesn't take up the entire surface.

Apple didn't take that path because all their products must carry an aura of "coolness", usually heavily at the expense of functionality, and sometimes even basic convenience. There are plenty of examples, so it's no trouble for me to list a few — I already gave one above.

Or take this, for example: the iPhone has a rather tricked-out web browser, Mobile Safari, which lets you open "real" webpages instead of their mobile versions. It's quite fast, renders everything well, and lets you beautifully and easily scroll, zoom in, and zoom out on the page.

But at the same time, there is absolutely no way to adjust the font size. You can zoom in on the text until it's readable — but then you'll have to endlessly scroll it left and right. Not the most fun activity, to be honest. Fortunately, most sites are designed with narrow columns, so you can somewhat read them on the iPhone, even if the letters aren't particularly large.

You might say I'm nitpicking, and that most people, unlike me, are perfectly fine reading tiny font. Okay, maybe so.

Then tell me this: why does a device that is, after all, marketed as a phone, lack the most basic features of a mobile phone?

For instance, you can't forward contacts via SMS. And I don't just mean as fancy VCARDs, but even just as plain text. Again, you could argue that it's not needed that often, and far from everyone uses it. Fine, I'll concede that too. But what I absolutely cannot wrap my head around is that you can't (or at least I don't know how to) forward sent and received text messages on this phone. At the same time (I know, everyone is sick to death of hearing this, but I'll repeat it anyway) there is no copy-paste function.

So, let's say someone texts me an address for a party. To forward it to other friends, I have to copy it down on a piece of paper! from the old SMS, open a new message, and type it out while reading from the paper. And all this on a supposedly "ultra-modern" and "revolutionary" $700 smartphone.

I suspect Apple operates like this in other areas as well.

When it comes to the iPhone itself, you could fashionably go on listing this kind of criticism forever — the whole internet is full of it. Like, "although it supports 3G, there are no video calls." "It has a fast processor, but the phone can't record video." Another huge bummer is the fact that the phone currently doesn't support Adobe Flash. Consequently, you can only watch videos from YouTube, albeit in high quality, because there is a hardware decoder for the H.264 codec that YouTube uses to serve video to the iPhone. Java, which is now in any dirt-cheap throwaway phone, is also missing. That's their policy for you.

Alright, now for the good stuff. Some of the iPhone's quirks mentioned above can be fixed — to do this, you have to go through the "jailbreak" process, which then lets you install unofficial apps written for us by kind hackers. Unfortunately, the apps written specifically for SMS are made by hackers who aren't just kind, but  also greedy — meaning, they cost money.

Let's say I'm willing to tolerate the SMS issues for now, but in other areas you really can't get by without installing homebrew software. Generally speaking, people on forums break millions of virtual lances in flame wars over "iPhone vs. other smartphones," while unwilling or unable to clearly define their positions. Ultimately, it ends up being "apples vs. oranges." I will write specifically about how I use the iPhone, and what personally works for me, and what doesn't.

Here it's very important to understand what the iPhone actually is. It's a device designed to be used in a strictly specific way — namely, always connected to unlimited internet. I'm a cheapskate, I begrudge the huge amount of money that I would have had to pay LMT in case of an official purchase. So my iPhone is hacked, it's from the UK and bought on ebay.co.uk for 400 GBP, or about 330 Ls. It was unlocked from the carrier using a proxy SIM card like TurboSIM for ten quid. Unfortunately, this hack method, which is also the only one so far for the fresh iPhone software versions currently on sale, is a bit janky. The device periodically loses the network, and might not find it again at all until you pop the SIM card into another phone. GPRS/3G doesn't work whatsoever (at least for me on LMT, haven't quite gotten around to testing it on tele2 yet). Not much joy in that, frankly.

All the standard apps and almost all the software from the official AppStore assume that the device has unlimited internet access. I don't have that, so by hook or by crook I have to find and install software that works on its own, offline. That's not always easy, and sometimes it's downright impossible.

On top of that, the iPhone is a Sync-type device, like the old Palms. This means a regular user  doesn't have access to the file system — you can't just take a file and copy it over just like that. You have to use the rather idiosyncratic and sluggish iTunes software, which has a mountain of quirks and isn't to everyone's liking. I, for one, am not a fan at all. Fortunately, jailbreaking solves this problem too.

Here we can briefly summarize. There's a simple thought I read somewhere that perfectly captures my impressions.

If you don't jailbreak it, the iPhone is practically not a smartphone. It just lacks far too many features that are found in competing platforms like Windows Mobile (Pocket PC) and Nokia (Symbian).

If you treat the iPhone as an advanced toy for casuals, i.e. regular users, then it's good. It's pretty — girls like it, you can touch it with your fingers, it plays YouTube videos, goes online, and you can even look at maps.

But dig a little deeper, and there are gigantic functional limitations everywhere, which can only be bypassed by installing mountains of third-party and official software together. In other words, the toy turns into a smartphone only after a jailbreak and some heavy filing down of the rough edges. Which is basically what Exler wrote about (recently) and  dolboeb (way back in the very beginning).