What the Pre got right (#iPhone)

I just read a comparison of the Nexus One versus the iPhone — “Nexus One from an iPhone Developer’s Perspective” by Jeff LaMarche. In it he takes the final parting shot:

But, if the iPhone is not an option for one reason or another, the Nexus One is definitely a most adequate phone. I’d gladly recommend it over any currently available Blackberry, Windows Mobile, or Palm smartphone.

Ouch. While I am an iPhone owner (and bought my wife a 2G model several years ago), I tried very hard to get on the Pre bandwagon. In the first few months of the Pre’s availability, I bought several units and returned all because they had been previously used and returned, and all had the same problem, which I documented on Twitter & Twitpic, trying in vain to score a non-broken unit from any Palm employee listening. Here’s what my phone looked like (note — picture taken on an iPhone):

After making four attempts (at four different locations, including two different Sprint stores and two different Best Buys), all of which resulted in me receiving previously returned units that the Sprint/BB employees swore were new, despite the units’ screens being covered in fingerprints, I finally gave up and got an iPhone 3GS.

Here’s why I tried so hard.

WebOS rocks. It just rocks. I am an Apple fanboy to the core [pun unintended], but I have to say that WebOS/Pre made the iPhone look stodgy by comparison. I liked the hardware and the software but ultimately had problems with hardware build quality. Sigh. I’m personally not a fan of physical keyboards, so that was not a factor (I would do away with it if I had my druthers) … though I do have to admit, having more screen real estate to see what you are typing in an email is a bit of an advantage. But only a minor advantage for me since I do long emails on a laptop and just short stuff on a phone.

My opinion on the hardware is a personal look & feel thing. I like Pre better than iPhone, but since it is purely objective, I’ll keep it separate & short. The hardware looked and felt sleek — like a polished stone as opposed to chrome and glass. Like the difference between this:

and this:

I also liked the form factor better than iPhone — slightly smaller, slightly thicker, more rounded and less credit-card-like. Not necessarily better, just different and more along my tastes. Too bad the build quality wasn’t there.

More importantly, why the software is so good (and why Motorola should just buy Palm already):

  • The scrolling was phenomenal. You know how, in mobile Safari and iPhone’s maps application, when you scroll off the screen you get a grey checkerboard pattern that gets filled in moments later? That’s basically demand-rendering and/or -fetching of data: the phone doesn’t do work that it doesn’t need to do (nice and efficient) and instead fetches and renders only stuff that the user tries to access (demands), but this necessarily exposes the user to the underlying compute mechanism. Exposing the raw beams of the infrastructure, if you will. By contrast, I did not notice any grey checkerboarding on the Pre except when I really pushed it, like going several screens away in maps. It just felt more natural, more polished. It probably ate more battery doing this, but I think the trade-off for the user experience was worth it.
  • “Multitasking” … yes, I know that this is a controversial issue, compounded by the fact that iPhone OS is indeed a preemptive multitasking OS. But the iPhone UI is necessarily a one-app-at-a-time UI, for better or for worse (goes back to Jef Raskin’s information appliance). My only complaints when using my wife’s iPhone were that I couldn’t keep Pandora playing in the background, or if I hit a slow-to-load webpage, I couldn’t go do something else while it loaded. Since getting my own iPhone, I also notice that if you want to use it as a Skype phone (e.g. when overseas), you have to keep Skype running in the front, otherwise you receive no calls. Multitasking avoids these issues, at the cost of battery life. Again, a good trade-off in my book, but only if the UI is intuitive for non-computer types. WebOS’s implementation (cards) is infinitely better than Android’s approach (which requires a third-party task manager to work properly #alphaware). However, now that I have seen the iPad announcement and [think I] get what it’s all about, I believe that compromising UI simplicity to satisfy computer geeks like myself is the wrong approach. Still, I think perhaps there is room somewhere between the WebOS approach and the iPhone approach.
  • Related to the multitasking/card approach: switching between apps is much faster than on iPhone. This is not a load-time thing, it is a UI thing. Forcing the user to remove his/her finger from the screen, push the hardware “home” button, and then move back to the screen to navigate through one or more pages of apps to find the desired app to run … that’s inefficient, and it forces the user to deal with the hardware device as a hardware device. I usually only use a half dozen things/apps, so when I was using the card approach, I could get where I wanted to go in a few finger swipes. More importantly, I did not have to move my attention from screen to home button and back. Of course, I’m always irritated when I have to go back & forth between keyboard and mouse, so this is one of my pet peeves — I feel I lose a minute or so of my train of thought whenever I have to change gears, so I try to change gears as infrequently as possible. Thus, I hate it when UIs force me to change gears to perform trivial (and frequent) tasks.
  • Compared to the iPhone, WebOS’s notifications system is more intuitive, informative, and simultaneously non-invasive (how can that be?). Little overlays stack up from the bottom of the screen, giving you the bare essentials of info, and they can be swiped away individually. Receive more than one notification from iPhone, and they get smashed into less-than-useful screen junk — you still have to go into each application to figure out what you missed.
  • Touchstone. What’s not to like? You place the phone on its little stand, it charges inductively, and updates are via wireless. Makes the plug-the-cable approach look ridiculous by comparison.
  • The Pre’s font is gorgeous and sleek and makes iPhone’s look like a prim grandmother. Sorry, I know Helvetica-bashing is commonplace and almost too easy, but it has to be said. I found Pre’s font much easier to read and more immersive — meaning I wanted to look at it. I am just guessing here, but I think they went to great lengths to devise a new font that would look attractive and be easily read at low pixel counts. They succeeded.

I had an extremely positive experience with the Pre’s software. I think the WebOS team hit this one out of the park as far as user experience (mine, at least). Sadly, Palm has never really been known for delivering high-quality hardware, and the Pre was no exception there. The basic hardware form is exactly what I wanted, but it was doomed by its manufacturing issues (no, the thing should not slide sideways like an Oreo cookie) and the executive decision to use flimsy materials. Given Motorola’s history making awesome hardware but having no home-grown software to speak of, I have to agree with Om Malik.