iPhone vs. Helio

So, I’ve been reading a lot of “iPhone is tiiiired, the Helio Ocean is wiiiiired“. I guess it’s only natural that the hype over a vapourous product was way too much and there’s backlash, but I think people are really picking on silly things. Aside from the price (for which there are now rumors that there will be a subsidy) the thing I see most complained about is their making it an Edge phone instead of EV-DO. First of all, EV-DO is significantly more expensive monthly cost and it doesn’t have nearly the coverage that Edge has at this point. Second, Apple can always add EV-DO to it’s line when EV-DO pricing is more reasonable for the average consumer and it’s coverage is more comprehensive.

That economist article at the same time blasts the iPhone for it’s lack of EV-DO and then suggests that WiFi doesn’t do anything either. Wi-fi is quite ubiquitous these days and provides extrememly high connection speeds. It certainly isn’t everywhere, but it is in a lot of places and coupled with Edge, I believe provides excellent connectivity options. It’d be nice to have EV-DO, but even if I had the capability, I doubt I’d be up for shelling out $60 extra bucks a month for the service and I doubt that a lot of other iPhone buyers would either.

Now the Helio Ocean also seems like an excellent phone, don’t get me wrong. If EV-DO is a requirement than it’s definitely the way to go. Also, if you can’t live without a physical keyboard, then there’s the decision right there. But other than that, it is nearly twice as thick as the iPhone (.86″ vs the iPhone’s .46″). The Helio’s screen is a not at all inspiring at 2.4″ with a 320×240 resolution, which is worse than my Treo’s. The iPhone’s by comparison is 3.5″ and 320×480. If you are planning on using your data plan to surf the web and watch your videos, you better believe that 320×240 is not conducive to a lot screen watching, I almost tore my eyes out watching a few episodes of BSG on my treo (who’s screen, remember, is bigger than the Ocean’s). Couple that with the iPhone’s ability to easily zoom in and out of web pages so that you can see them as you would on your normal monitor and not require the web browser to try and reformat everything to fit on your tiny screen is going to make it significantly more usable than the Ocean’s.

I’ve seen over and over that people think that beautiful packaging and interface means that it can’t actually be functional. This baffles the hell out of me, the iPod saved the mp3 player market not just because it’s packaging was great, but because Apple was able to design a fantastic user interface that made everything about it easy to use and understand. I don’t know if you’ve had to use a cellular telephone recently, but it turns out that their interfaces suck. I mean it’s so bad that when I discovered my treo had a button on the top to make it easy to silence, I couldn’t believe how awesome that was - I thought that was the second coming. Seriously, a button to make it not ring was the greatest innovation I’ve seen recently in phone interface.

The thing I noticed about the Ocean that I thought was very cool was the GPS tagging of photos taken. That’s super neat with a lot of possibilities down the road. I hope more vendors (of phones and digital cameras alike) cop to this notion and start adding that in.

But overall, I don’t really understand how people are genuinely believing that the iPhone is already over. No one has matched any of it’s usability features yet, that I’ve seen. The jury’s out on how well the virtual keyboard will work, although I think that it’s possible that having a virtual input area opens the phone up to many interesting possibility like context sensitive input screens. For gaming maybe that means a different virtual controller, maybe somewhere along the line you can get a graphiti input area, etc… that could be very interesting indeed. The iTunes compatibility is huge, and I’d guess that there’d probably be some iPhoto connectivity as well. The multi-touch screen just opens up a lot of possibilities.

I’d guess a lot of those articles are there just as link bait. I’m not saying that you have to worship the iPhone, but you have to at least realize that as a phone it really is different than anything else out there. I’m just saying.

Apr 18th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: apple