Having seen how poorly copy/paste works on many other smartphones, I understand the reluctance to commit, but as the hardware powering each generation of iPhone gets better, I find myself imagining how background processing might work. Most apps simply don't need to run in the background, ever, and doing so could not possibly cause anything but trouble. But while Peggle has no purpose in the background, Pandora is made for background processing. Facebook may work well enough with Push Notifications, but Skype will only be truly useful when it can continue to run while you switch away to look things up, as AT&T reminds us we can do with normal voice calls.
I'm not sure whether each app should have to justify running in the background before it is available for sale, but I suspect Apple would insist on that level of control, as a protection for their millions of neophyte users who will blame Apple when their battery life drops, never realizing it's the 3-D game they've forgotten they're running doing the battery draining. Whether Apple insists on a flag or not, one thing is certain: any app that wants to continue running in the background will have to prompt to ask the permission of users, as apps that want to use Push Notifications do now. Given that user opt-in, I hope Apple would be generous with which apps it allow to run in the background, and that app developers would be required to handle things gracefully when they're disallowed background processing.
I don't use an iPhone because I want my phone to be as complicated as my desktop, despite the cries of blog commenters insisting that running dozens of apps at once is a basic human right. Apple never loses sight of the users not savvy enough to promote their views on tech websites, but even those people are influenced by the geeks in their lives enough to know that they're missing something when MLB At Bat audio quits every time they check their mail.
Camera Quality: The difference between three megapixels and five megapixels is vanishingly small, especially given that the majority of iPhone photos seem to be sent via SMS or email, which by default resizes them to even lower resolution. The lack of a flash, on the other hand, makes the iPhone useless for many poor lighting solutions. Automatic flash operation would require no app changes, since apps should be relying on Apple APIs for photo acquisition, but manual flash operation would require tweaks to apps like Camera Genius. Worthwhile, I think, and might as well raise the megapixel count while they're at it. Most people won't notice.
Article comments
1 - Phillip Winn
Neither company sells their phones through Amazon, so I picked a couple of devices that share an operating system instead.
2 - deee
I've had a WM device an iphone and now an htc hero. The last one is my preferred (i don't see any issue in the touch screen in comparison with the iphone...)
I think also that for now Android is superior for many reasons in addition to yours.
As you i hope that Apple will raise the competition
3 - Phillip Winn
deee, Aside from AT&T vs T-Mobile, or simple philosophical differences, it's *really* hard to make any case for Nexus One being a better device overall than iPhone. The fact that many people believe Nexus One is an improvement over Droid says much about both devices, I think.
I think an article listing the ways in which iPhone beats Nexus One would take considerably more than three pages!
ANyway, I'll probably write more articles like this one, listing the ways in which Apple should learn from their competitors, but I think the list might be shorter for HTC Hero even than this. The Hero uses the same resolution as iPhone (which is fine, I don't see a *need* for higher resolution yet), and actually feels slightly slower overall, but it's a very nice phone, much closer to the iPhone than many other Android devices.
Thanks for your comment!
4 - Ken
I had a 3G iPhone for years. Switched to a droid x for 14 days. Had to go to our corporate AT&T network. I cannot say how far ahead the droid x and android platform is over the iPhone 4. Frankly I am going to try and Ditch the apple as it is as far behind the droid as the iPhone was to flip phones. U feel like I'm using a stone freaking tablet, it's too small fragile no kickass speech recognition u name it. If the droid x had a sum card for international I would nor have gotten the iPhone.