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In this second installment of our iPhone Review Series, we compare the Apple iPhone to the Palm Treo 650 from the perspective of a former Treo 650 user, providing a look at how the two platforms compare, what the iPhone offers for current Treo users, and a few things it doesn't yet do.
Palm Treo vs. Apple iPhone
The Mac-friendly phone torch passes from Palm to Apple.
The Palm Treo has long been a popular smartphone for Mac users because of its bundled Palm Desktop for Mac sync support and its simple Mac-like interface. However, Palm has delivered very little in terms of hardware or software innovation for its Treo line over the last several years, and has recently moved to adopt Windows Mobile as a replacement to its own Palm OS for the Treo.
Palm's support for Mac users hasn't improved in years, and its new Windows Mobile Treos aren't supported at all. It should come as no surprise that Apple's own iPhone provides better support for Mac users than Palm's Treo. Here's a look at how the two platforms compare, what the iPhone offers for Treo users, and a few things it doesn't yet do.
A previous and more general review of the iPhone's features and limitations was presented in the article "Apple's iPhone: an initial (but in-depth) review."
Physical design and usability
The Palm Treo line is now five years old. It originated at Palm spinoff Handspring as the pairing of the original Visor PDA with a GSM phone module. Palm actually acquired Handspring specifically to move into the smartphone area with the Treo.
Palm's Treo remained attractive enough to maintain as much smartphone market share as all of Microsoft's Windows Mobile phone licensees combined, despite delivering very little progress in either hardware or software since 2004.
The Palm OS has remained stagnant, and its hardware features have only seen minimal bumps. Palm has also done nearly nothing to improve its HotSync software on the Mac. Apart from the Treo however, there are very few phones that make any effort at all to sync with the Mac. That left the Treo as the lessor of several evils for Mac users in search of a smartphone.
Frozen in time, the Treo seems to beg for a worthy competitor to simply bury it. Palm's decision to begin offering a Windows Mobile version of the Treo phone hardware seemed to concede defeat to Microsoft. However, Apple's new iPhone offers more of the features that attracted many users to the Palm Treo in the first place, making it a more likely heir to the Treo throne, particularly for Mac users.
The iPhone does lack the Palm's official software platform and certain other features that third parties can deliver even if Palm never ever releases another update; more on that later.
At the same time, the device itself feels creaky and cheap; it groans and flexes like a Dell laptop, as if built from plastic that was simply too thin. The unit itself is as thick as a full-sized laptop such as the Mac Book Pro. Its real size is disguised by rounded corners that make it fit comfortably in the hand but which don't make it any less bulky in the pocket.
The first day I saw the Treo 650, I was impressed with the quality of its camera and screen, satisfied with the familiar Palm OS, but somewhat disappointed with the rest of it. It's bulky, marginally integrated with desktop software, and generally felt stuck in the depressing post-dotcom rut that Palm never seemed to shake its way out of; the company has since layered into all of its products a burden of grief and despair that seems palpable. Palm simply exudes a desperation that reeks of death.
That morbid fog clouds the Palm experience for even the most optimistic of users. To get started, you push the red 'off' button. After more than a second of nothing happening, the screen lights up, but wait, it's not ready yet. The screen wakes and then locks, waiting for the user to push the center button to unlock it. If the two buttons aren't hit in sequence with enough of a pause before and after, the unit goes back to sleep.
That's the kind of poor experience that Windows users might tolerate, but which many Mac users would find infuriatingly inelegant and clumsy.
In contrast, the iPhone wakes with a press of either the top or front button, then invites the user to slide a lock across the screen with a finger swipe. This is quite impossible to do accidently, because the iPhone's screen only reacts to skin, and only reacts to a target that is finger sized.
The wake up sequence of each captures much of the overall difference between the Palm Treo and the iPhone: the former is a slow, quirky, and irritatingly frustrating, while the latter is elegantly thoughtful, responsive, and simply pleasant to use.
After replacing my Treo with the iPhone, I found myself double checking my pocket to make sure I had it with me. The iPhone has a similar weight, but consumes half the volume of the Treo. Its ultra thin design has an impressive and solid feel. The Treo is so bulky that it's an embarrassment to hold.
Both can be used with one hand, even to type out letters. The iPhone presents a much larger keyboard on the screen, and encourages the use of the pad of the thumb. The physical keys of the Treo are not only much smaller but also much closer together, forcing the user to type using the edge of a fingernail.
I assumed that the iPhone's touch screen would be harder to use, and simply be "better" only because it offered more screen real estate. I was wrong; its touch screen is far easier and more comfortable to type on than the tiny physical keys of the Treo. There is no numeric or special character mode invoked by typing modifier keys; the iPhone simply displays alternative keyboards with each of the characters you want to type.
With two hands, the typing experience on the Treo improves, but the iPhone's does as well. The Treo offers no corrections when typing, while the iPhone makes immediate error correction easy and natural.
While the Treo also has a touch screen, it reacts to everything, not just skin. That means it must be turned off before returning to a pocket, for fear that a brush might select and delete all the text on the screen. That can't happen on the iPhone.
At the same time, the Treo's screen does not react to finger touches as sensitively as the iPhone's. With the Treo, even trying to do basic number dialing via a finger on the touchscreen is unpleasant. It feels slow and inaccurate. The iPhone's screen also never requires the Palm's touch screen realignment; it just works.
Navigation through the Palm's main menu of applications also feels clumsy. I often subconsciously defaulted to using the physical buttons to launch apps rather than just tapping icons on the screen; it requires so much pressure to register a touch that it's simply clumsy to use the Palm's touchscreen for touch control. The iPhone rather dramatically gets rid of all physical buttons on the face of the device apart from the single home button, but the focus on the touchscreen is invisible because it actually works.
There is no little joystick to poke at and no menu buttons to press. Everything is controlled by touch. It isn't just buttons either; lists of contacts, CoverFlow albums, and photos react to a flick and stop with a touch. Scrolling, panning, and zooming respond intuitively and provide instant feedback that feels natural, not like an assembly of electronic hardware and computer software.
Neither the Palm nor the iPhone seems to favor the right or left hand, although the iPhone is ready to jump between a tall and horizontal aspect ratio whenever doing so makes more sense. The Treo can't really be held sideways at all, and makes no use of a landscape oriented display.
More information on the iPhone's input compared to the Palm and other smartphones was presented in the article "Using iPhone: Text and Data Entry vs T9, Graffiti, Thumb Keyboards."
Phone and Contact Management
It's certainly not hard to place calls on the Palm Treo, but it offers little in terms of innovation. Software that doesn't grow simply dies.
In Palm's case, nothing has been done to really improve the overall experience of the Palm since 2004, apart from deals to load third party ads and trialware and service plans such as Palm's deal with Verizon to force syncing of some data over the network rather than over a local desktop sync.
This stagnation in the Palm OS occurred as Palm thrashed about with plans to deliver a new Palm OS 6, then move its platform to Linux, then move it to Windows Mobile. It is strikingly similar Apple's directionless funk of the mid 90s, or Microsoft's nearly identical inability to deliver upon its Windows initiatives since 2001. Palm's plans are in such upheaval that it stopped caring about its customers.
Smartphones based on Windows Mobile and Symbian only seem interested in copying and replacing the Palm OS, and offer only incremental advances in technical superiority. It's therefore quite obvious to see how far Apple has leapt past the Palm OS when comparing the iPhone.
The ability and simplicity of answering a secondary call and then merging the two lines into a conference call is something that was obviously needed long ago. No mobile providers gave much thought to delivering it, however.
I never attempted to set up conference calling on my Treo; it was problematic enough to simply hang up on one line while maintaining a call on the other. Every time I tried, I'd end up hanging up on both. I ended up just leaving the secondary call running in the background until I finished both calls.
That was a problem for me as a consumer, but didn't matter to Palm nor Sprint, my service provider. If anything, my problem was simply making Sprint incrementally richer. Since my purchase of the Palm Treo was heavily subsidized by Sprint, why would it -- as the real customer -- seek to fix such an annoying problem for me, when it was in Sprint's best interests to leave me with a frustrating phone?
Sprint's solution, of course, was to offer me a new phone every two years to ensure I'd sign up for another contract extension. This pattern of "don't fix it, replace it" works well for service providers and for hardware makers, but leaves customers livid that nothing ever works, and that nobody involved in the mobile business has any reason to care about users.
Apart from Apple, that is. Since Apple has the brand power to sell hardware without a subsidy shell game illusion, it can market directly to the consumer, and offer us a phone that really solves problems.
Contacts sync properly on the Mac, including contact photos set on on either the desktop or the iPhone itself. Call management is as simple as hitting one of a few buttons with clear and obvious functions.
Spin through contacts rapidly, even when on a phone call. There's no search function in contacts to look up a specific caller by typing a few letters of their name. Instead, Apple has an alphabet listing that lets you jump to a specific starting letter. This takes some getting used to if you're used to searching for contacts.
For users familiar with looking up contacts by searches, the iPhone's lack of search is a puzzling omission. This is also complicated by its lack of a voice dialing feature. Making the best use of the iPhone requires adapting to what it does offer.
While I'd like to see both searching and voice dial features added, the iPhone does offer some alternative ways to use contacts that help make up for those missing bits. The first is a favorites list that serves as a quick lookup list; along with the recent list, these two offer a quick way to dial common numbers, although both lie hidden behind the Phone icon, making it a two page navigation to locate them.
The other contacts feature that's unique to the iPhone is that it syncs with Address Book's Groups. That makes it very compelling to organize contacts on the desktop, and benefit from a consistent system of organized contacts on the iPhone as well.
For example, I have Groups that include Health Care, Clients, Family, and Friends. When I think I need to call one of the health care professionals that helps keep me in one piece, I don't have to think about whether I've entered their names as "Dr." or not, or riddle my brain with a search for what name to search for. Instead, I can simply narrow down the hundreds of contacts on my phone with a tap on Groups and then Health Care, giving me a short list of contacts I can scan through by name.
It's almost as if the iPhone were designed with the needs of a busy person with a failing memory in mind. Steve Jobs, thank you for making a device that works for those of us with too much information locked up in our brain to be able to reliably pull any of it out without some help. Jobs must be well aware of what its like to have more information to manage than one person ought.
All of the smart software advantages of the iPhone are also advanced by its improvements in hardware. Its touch screen actually responds to light finger touches, unlike the Palm's pressure sensitive screen, which only works well when using a clumsy stylus.
Visual voicemail is another example of Apple solving one of those obvious problems that wasn't a problem for the service provider. Nothing is a more frustrating waste of time on a mobile phone than navigating through messages by listening to a series of saved voicemails to get to the call you're interested in hearing, then trying to step through it several times in order it to write down the details you were after.
This wasn't a problem for service providers, as my frustrating experience with voicemail only ensured I was spending more minutes of my plan trying to hear my messages. Apple solved this for consumers in order to have fancy features desirable to consumers to show off the iPhone. It's now just as easy to use voicemail as email.
Internet, Maps, and Widgets
Browsing the web on a Treo is painful to say the least. Its built in browser offers both a full-screen view that attempts to render webpages as intended, and an optimized version that tries to fit web pages to its smaller screen. Both are troublesome, as the web is largely still stuck in the clutches of full page screens optimized specifically for an Internet Explorer experience on a Windows PC.
The promise of the web to be a cross platform, open, accessible, and device neutral way to publish information was thwarted by efforts on the part of Netscape and later Microsoft to tie the web to their own proprietary platform. The result is that webpages simply don't translate well to mobile devices.
The iPhone gets around that problem by not being a mobile version of the web. Instead, it incorporates a full Safari Web Kit engine that renders web pages the same way as the desktop Safari browser. The only difference is in its navigation features, which allow the user to zoom in and out of webpages using the first mainstream release of a truly resolution independent display.
The iPhone's browser zooms into any webpage section with a double tap, and also allows the user to scale the display to any magnification desired with a finger pinch. The display instantaneously redraws text at the set scale in high resolution. It is a joy to use the iPhone's web browser.
There are many web plugin features missing on the iPhone, including Flash, Java, SVG, and any audio or video codecs not supported by the iPod. However, the failure of all these formats to gain any real traction make their omission less than problematic. Java rarely shows up in client side applets anymore, and the standard for audio playback on the web has gravitated towards MP3 and its MPEG-4 successor, AAC.
While web video has mostly standardized behind either Flash's proprietary On2 video codec delivered via a Flash applet (such as YouTube) or H.263/DivX video also commonly delivered via Flash (such as Google Video), Google partnered with Apple to deliver YouTube content via the new MPEG-4 H.264 codec. That new standard is supported in the iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV using hardware acceleration.
Adobe is also moving Flash to H.264 and away from its former On2 codec, in order to power a new generation of devices from Apple and others that can decode such video using specialized commodity video processing chips. That means that Flash support is not only unnecessary now, but will only become more compatible in the future as the industry unites behind common standards rather than those proprietary to a specific vendor, such as Microsoft's Windows Video codecs.
Palm certainly isn't leading the push toward standard video, and only offers the most basic support for standards based web browsing. That results in a painful web browsing experience common to most other smartphones.
In addition to the Safari web browser, Apple also includes specialized web data clients, including the Google YouTube viewer, a custom Google Maps client, and Weather and Stocks clients for viewing Yahoo's web services. All of these clients provide widget-like simplicity for looking up common information, and will likely be augmented by new services in the future. Apple has hinted at a Movies dashboard widget in Leopard based on Fandango services, which is likely to become the next widget for the iPhone as well.
Google Maps deserves its own article, but here, it simply offers another example of how the iPhone elegantly solves a problem that other mobiles didn't even recognize to be a problem. I downloaded a third party Google Maps client for the Treo, but found it impossible and clumsy to use. The iPhone's client not only looks great, but it actually works very well for looking up information.
It's a combination of a phonebook, a Google search, a direction mapping tool with step by step instructions, a freeway traffic indicator, and a street map and satellite images browser. It's a reason to buy an iPhone unto itself.
The main downside to the iPhone's rich Internet capabilities is its relatively slow EDGE data service, which is about twice as fast as ISDN. Wags like to describe it as "dial up speed," but that's only because too many technically incompetent fools seem able to maintain their jobs as journalists covering the tech world.
While EDGE is only about a quarter of the speed of an ideal 3G connection, it is very usable for maps and even, surprisingly, YouTube. That's because Apple has optimized its YouTube support (as well as its guidelines for mobile video) to support both EDGE style service and higher bandwidth service.
To really be blown away by the iPhone experience, you'll need a WiFi connection, something that relatively few other smartphones support. While a 3G iPhone would be nice to have, 3G service is currently a battery hog, even when only using it for voice calls. As is typically the case with Apple products, the iPhone makes use of the best options available, not the most attractive sounding technical bullet points.
Compared to the Treo, the iPhone makes ideal use of WiFi when available while also working acceptably when it has to fall back to EDGE service. The Treo struggles to work even with the fastest of data services, and simply can't do a fraction of what the iPhone can in terms of browsing the web, searching for maps, looking up common information, and, quite obviously, providing a rich experience for web audio and video.
One very clear missing feature of the iPhone is its inability to be used as a tethered Internet access point, also known as a Dial Up Networking service after Windows' DUN control panel. That means you can't connect an iPhone to your laptop and use its mobile data service to browse the web or check email. This appears to be a limitation imposed by AT&T, which doesn't seem to allow this for any of its phones.
While DUN features would come in very handy, the iPhone's own rich Internet service does help to offset this lacking feature somewhat. Users who need mobile data service on their laptop will have to obtain a wireless data card for it, because there's no included way to either tether the iPhone or configure it to share its EDGE connection via either Bluetooth or WiFi to a computer.
Posted in: Tech News
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