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	<title>The iPhone Blog &#187; cloud</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/tag/cloud/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.theiphoneblog.com</link>
	<description>For people who dare to Phone Different.</description>
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		<title>Android vs. iPhone: Which Does a Better Job Syncing to the Cloud?</title>
		<link>http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/10/17/android-vs-iphone-which-does-a-better-job-syncing-to-the-cloud/</link>
		<comments>http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/10/17/android-vs-iphone-which-does-a-better-job-syncing-to-the-cloud/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:55:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dieter Bohn</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Editorial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[android]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[contacts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gmail]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[iphone vs android]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mobileme]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[setup]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.theiphoneblog.com/?p=4999</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[

The Reviews of the Android G1 Phone on T-Mobile are out and the verdicts are generally as follows: Partly Cloudy1, but forecasting big things to come.  We&#8217;re not going to try to hit every point just yet, but there&#8217;s one point where this &#8220;Sidekick for Grownups&#8221; has what appears to be a real advantage [...]<p>This is a story by <a href="http://theiphoneblog.com">the iPhone Blog</a>.  This feed is sponsored by <a href="http://store.theiphoneblog.com">The iPhone Blog Store</a>.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/10/17/android-vs-iphone-which-does-a-better-job-syncing-to-the-cloud/">Android vs. iPhone: Which Does a Better Job Syncing to the Cloud?</a></p>
]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="aligncenter" src="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/images/stories/2008/10/iphone-android-ufc.png" border="0" alt="iphone_android_ufc.png" width="380" height="325" /></p>

<p>The <a href="http://androidcentral.com/2008/10/t-mobile-g1-reviews-galore/">Reviews of the Android G1 Phone</a> on T-Mobile are out and the verdicts are generally as follows: <em>Partly Cloudy<sup>1</sup>, but forecasting big things to come</em>.  We&#8217;re not going to try to hit every point just yet, but there&#8217;s one point where this &#8220;Sidekick for Grownups&#8221; has what appears to be a real advantage over everybody else: dead-simple cloud setup.</p>

<p>So compared to the iPhone, just how good is the setup on the G1?  The answer is: Depends on whether or not you&#8217;re a Gmail type of person.</p>

<p>Yeah, &#8220;depends&#8221; isn&#8217;t exactly a clear answer, so follow us after the break for a bit more on whether the G1 is PIM Push Paradise compared to MobileMe&#8217;s Mechanized Movement of information.</p>

<p>(<sup>1</sup><em>Sorry, could help myself with that pun</em>)</p>

<p><span id="more-4999"></span></p>

<h2>Android vs. iPhone for Gmail Users</h2>

<h3>Gmail and the G1</h3>

<p><img src="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/images/stories/2008/10/picture-6.png" border="0" alt="Picture 6.png" width="147" height="65" align="right" /></p>

<p>With the G1, you simply punch in your Google credentials and wait a few and <em>boom</em>, you have push Gmail, Push Contacts, and Push Calendar.  If you&#8217;re already a Gmail lover, this is pretty much la creme de la creme.  The Gmail client on the G1 is getting very high marks, works just like Gmail on the web, and is generally tops.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, the other two parts of Gmail&#8217;s Sync &#8212; Contacts and Calendar &#8212; aren&#8217;t as hot.  <a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/16/t-mobile-g1-review-part-2-software-and-wrap-up/">Engadet notes</a> that what Google does to your contacts is a crime: it mucks them up by first being difficult to work with on their web-based contact manager <em>and</em> mucks them up double-time by automatically adding email addresses of people you&#8217;ve sent mail to more than a couple times.</p>

<p>The result (and I know this from personal Google Contacts Syncing experience) is your address book pretty much becomes a hellacious mess.  Your only options are to either be eternally vigilant about the state of your contacts or to just let the darn thing go and hope that you can search through it fairly quickly.</p>

<p>The calendar app on the G1 is also getting mixed reviews, as folks are finding it better for viewing than they are for data entry.  In this sense, it&#8217;s not all that different than the iPhone.</p>

<h3>Gmail and the iPhone</h3>

<p><img src="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/images/stories/2008/10/01481879-842c-46a8-abb5-22bde2dc02a8.jpg" border="0" alt="01481879-842C-46A8-ABB5-22BDE2DC02A8.jpg" width="153" height="282" align="right" /></p>

<p>We&#8217;ll start this with a caveat &#8212; we&#8217;re not going to count Google&#8217;s excellent iPhone-centric web interfaces here, just the native stuff.  Although I still think that the G1 won&#8217;t stop <a href="http://phonedifferent.com/2008/01/googles_iphone_fixation.html">Google&#8217;s iPhone fixation</a> and that means continued iPhone support and improvements, we want to compare (ahem) apples to apples.</p>

<p>Up until the introduction of the G1, the best mobile email client for Gmail has been the iPhone &#8212; bar none.  Gmail&#8217;s famously wonky IMAP rarely gives the iPhone fits (<a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/09/29/got-fetch-popimap-email-broken-in-iphone-21/">though it certainly does happen from time to time</a>) and the iPhone&#8217;s rather clever method of only loading a folder when you enter it (and only loading the most recent 25 at that) mean that it <a href="http://www.wmexperts.com/articles/gmail_adds_tweaks_to_imap.html">doesn&#8217;t suffer from the tragic &#8220;All Mail&#8221; problem</a>).  In all &#8212; Gmail on the iPhone is great.</p>

<p>Except, that is, if you&#8217;re looking for push email.</p>

<p>Pushing Gmail to the iPhone is basically an invitation to suffering because there are only three email systems that push email to the iPhone: Yahoo!, MobileMe and Exchange.  If you want your Gmail pushed, you need to forward a copy of all messages to a Yahoo!, MobileMe or Exchange account and then set that up on your iPhone.  There are then nasty hacks to get your &#8220;from&#8221; address right, but still no good way to deal with folders/labels.</p>

<p>Now &#8212; contacts and calendars are also a world of fun.  If your stuff lives in Google, you are going to need to find solutions to sync them to your desktop.  Once that happens, however, you&#8217;re golden as you can set up MobileMe on both PC and Mac to push the info out to your smartphone.  It&#8217;s not an ideal, direct-push solution, but it works pretty well for most people.</p>

<p>On a Mac, you can sync the address book directly to Google (with the above-mentioned pain) and for Calendar you need to use something like the excellent <a href="http://spanningsync.com/">Spanning Sync</a> software for calendars.</p>

<p>On a PC, check out <a href="http://oggsync.com/">OggSync</a> for calendars.  For Contacts iTunes itself will let you sync to Google.</p>

<p>In both cases, where you really need to start is at our how-to article &#8220;<strong><a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/07/07/switching-to-iphone-how-to-move-your-contacts-calendar-and-email-to-the-iphone-wait-a-thon/"> Switching to iPhone: How To Move Your Contacts, Calendar, Email, Bookmarks, and Photos to the iPhone</a></strong>&#8220;</p>

<p>So as you can see by the length of this section, if your data lives in Gmail, the G1 is a lot better.</p>

<h3>Advantage: G1</h3>

<h2>Android vs. iPhone for MobileMe or Exchange Users</h2>

<h3>MobileMe or Exchange and the G1</h3>

<p><img src="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/images/stories/2008/10/picture-71.png" border="0" alt="Picture 7.png" width="175" height="154" align="right" /></p>

<p>Okay, we&#8217;ve said it before and we&#8217;ll say it again: one huge advantage the iPhone has is that while Google loves the iPhone and provides a huge number services for it, the G1 gets nothing in return from Apple. So, in a way, <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/09/25/iphone-vs-android-top-5-wins-and-losses/">every iPhone user gets the best of both worlds</a> (<em>four worlds</em> if we count Exchange and Yahoo!). That&#8217;s a pretty compelling competitive advantage. </p>

<p>So, if your data lives in MobileMe or Exchange/Outlook and you want to get it onto the G1, things are going to be dicey for awhile.  There is no default sync client out yet, though <a href="http://theregoesdave.com/2008/09/24/funambol-enables-contact-syncing-for-g1-and-android-phones/">3rd parties like Funambol are creating ways to sync</a> In the short term, here are your options of you don&#8217;t want to just switching everything over to Gmail:</p>

<p>With email you have two choices:</p>

<ol>
<li>Forward to Gmail for Push, but use Android&#8217;s IMAP email program (yes, it&#8217;s separate from the other email client) to send.  You may also be able to use the G1&#8217;s Gmail program to send if the Gmail program works with Gmail&#8217;s &#8220;Send As&#8221; feature (we don&#8217;t know yet).</li>
<li>Just settle for Android&#8217;s IMAP email program for both receiving and sending.  In this case, you&#8217;re giving up push email.</li>
</ol>

<p>So that&#8217;s not ideal.  For contacts and calendar, you&#8217;re actually going to be in the same boat that iPhone users are in with regard to Gmail &#8212; namely finding a way to sync your desktop information up to Google so you can sync it down to the G1.</p>

<h3>MobileMe or Exchange and the iPhone</h3>

<p><img src="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/images/stories/2008/10/iphone-20-activesync.jpg" border="0" alt="iphone_20_activesync.jpg" width="175" height="141" align="right" /></p>

<p>Despite the well-known early issues with MobileMe, everything&#8217;s pretty-well shaken out now.  You enter in your sync information, you wait a tic, and <em>boom</em>, everything from Email to Contacts to Calendar is sync&#8217;d and pushing.</p>

<p>Now, setting up either MobileMe or Exchange on the iPhone isn&#8217;t as simple as the one-time process on the G1, but it&#8217;s still pretty straightforward.  Once again, TiPb has your back:</p>

<ol>
<li><a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/07/13/walkthrough-exchange-activesync-on-your-iphone-20/">How to Set up Exchange ActiveSync on the iPhone</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/07/11/mini-review-mobileme/">How to set up MobileMe on the iPhone</a>.</li>
</ol>

<h3>Advantage: iPhone</h3>

<h2>Android vs. iPhone for Everybody Else</h2>

<p>What, no push email solution for you?  Love Yahoo?  Love Hotmail?  What&#8217;s the over/under in this competition?</p>

<h3>Everybody else and the G1</h3>

<p>Basically your best options for email are the ones we laid out for MobileMe or Exchange and the G1: Use the G1&#8217;s sub-par IMAP email client or forward stuff to Gmail.  To sync the other stuff, find a way to sync it from your desktop to Google as described above in the Gmail and the iPhone section.</p>

<p>Here&#8217;s the notable thing with the G1, though: since it&#8217;s a completely open platform, there&#8217;s <em>no</em> reason that Yahoo or Microsoft or, well, or <em>anybody</em> couldn&#8217;t create push and sync solutions for the Android Platform.  It&#8217;s entirely feasible that Yahoo could create a version of Yahoo Go! for Android that would seamlessly sync your email, contacts, and calendar the G1.  It hasn&#8217;t happened yet, but don&#8217;t be surprised when it does. (Though we won&#8217;t hold our breath waiting for Apple to develop a MobileMe solution for the G1&#8230;)</p>

<h3>Everybody else and the iPhone</h3>

<p>Here the situation is also not great, but it&#8217;s pretty good.  Yahoo users can get their email pushed out to the iPhone, everybody else can just set up email manually.  Those folks won&#8217;t have push, but thankfully the iPhone&#8217;s email client is pretty good.</p>

<p>For contacts and calendar, well, you&#8217;re either going to have to sync manually via iTunes or buy into MobileMe or Exchange in some way.</p>

<p>We&#8217;re going to call this one a Tie with a possible KO in the future if Android sync apps come out.  Syncing desktop to Google can be a pain for some whereas the iPhone at least gives you the option of wired sync.</p>

<h3>Advantage: Tied (for now)</h3>

<h2>Conclusion</h2>

<p>For Google-lovers, the G1 clearly offers better cloud and sync.  For MobileMe and Exchange, the iPhone clearly wins out. If you want the trifecta of Google and Exchange/MobileMe goodness, the iPhone also has that edge. For the rest, it&#8217;s a bit of a (ugly) tie, but the way things look platform-wise the G1 has more potential there.  In all, the best way Apple can close that potential gap is to open up the iPhone to more syncing solutions from other companies.  We&#8217;re not holding our breath. We are holding out a little bit of hope, though: if Andoid really does take off, Apple just might feel compelled to respond by opening up their platform.</p>

<p>One last footnote: Why do Apple and Google hate ToDo and Notes?  Back when Palm invented the Palm Pilot, Personal Information Management (PIM) was a 4-legged table: Contacts, Calendar, ToDo, and Notes.  While we&#8217;re more than happy to see that Email has been added to that equation, when are we going to get those forgotten PIM essentials on modern platforms?</p>
<p>This is a story by <a href="http://theiphoneblog.com">the iPhone Blog</a>.  This feed is sponsored by <a href="http://store.theiphoneblog.com">The iPhone Blog Store</a>.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/10/17/android-vs-iphone-which-does-a-better-job-syncing-to-the-cloud/">Android vs. iPhone: Which Does a Better Job Syncing to the Cloud?</a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/10/17/android-vs-iphone-which-does-a-better-job-syncing-to-the-cloud/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>15</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Apple Launches MobileMe: ActiveSync + Web 2.0 Apps For the Rest of Us!</title>
		<link>http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/06/09/apple-launches-mobileme-activesync-web-20-apps-for-the-rest-of-us/</link>
		<comments>http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/06/09/apple-launches-mobileme-activesync-web-20-apps-for-the-rest-of-us/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:48:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rene Ritchie</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud services]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dot mac]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mac]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[me.com]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mobileme]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sync]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.theiphoneblog.com/?p=2725</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[

During the 2008 WWDC Keynote today, Apple VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller, confirmed the rumors of a .Mac maga-revamp in the form of MobileMe.

Apple&#8217;s answer both to previous critiques of the admittedly out-dated .Mac service, and the expected cloud computing boom (see Android, Google), MobileMe features ActiveSync-like &#8220;push&#8221; email, calendar, and contacts syncing between your [...]<p>This is a story by <a href="http://theiphoneblog.com">the iPhone Blog</a>.  This feed is sponsored by <a href="http://store.theiphoneblog.com">The iPhone Blog Store</a>.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/06/09/apple-launches-mobileme-activesync-web-20-apps-for-the-rest-of-us/">Apple Launches MobileMe: ActiveSync + Web 2.0 Apps For the Rest of Us!</a></p>
]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img src="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/images/stories/2008/06/iphone_mobile_me_confirmed.jpg" alt="Apple Announces .Mac is now MobileMe" title="Apple Announces .Mac is now MobileMe" width="458" height="278" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2728" /></p>

<p><a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/06/09/wwdc-2008-live-meta-blog/">During the 2008 WWDC Keynote today</a>, Apple VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller, confirmed the rumors of a .Mac maga-revamp in the form of MobileMe.</p>

<p>Apple&#8217;s answer both to previous critiques of the admittedly out-dated .Mac service, and the expected cloud computing boom (see Android, Google), <a href="http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/">MobileMe features</a> ActiveSync-like &#8220;push&#8221; email, calendar, and contacts syncing between your iPhone (or iPod Touch) and your Mac or PC, or via any web browser with some pretty spectacular looking Web 2.0/AJAX style online apps. It also adds photo syncing, clearly targeting consumers.</p>

<p>iDisk (the online storage service) gets a bump to 20GB, and goes fully online as well. Mac user? Still enjoy the Mac sync, iWeb, and Back-to-my-Mac that you know (and I) love.</p>

<p>Launching in July in time for <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/06/09/iphone-3g-release-date-july-11th-price-199-and-299-3g-gps-want/">the new iPhone 3G</a>, and priced at the same $99 as .Mac, it still smacks the expensive, but if your don&#8217;t have Exchange, and value highly polished syncing and web-based solutions, this might just be the service for you.</p>

<p>Existing .Mac customers will be rolled into MobileMe &#8212; <a href="http://www.apple.com/ca/mobileme/migrating/">see Apple&#8217;s migration page for details</a> &#8212; with a choice of maintaining their old @mac.com address, or the new @.me equivalent.</p>

<p>For more, go to <a href="http://www.me.com/">me.com</a> (which will redirect you to <a href="http://www.apple.com/mobileme/">Apple.com/MobileMe</a>), where a handy-dandy MobileMe guided tour awaits!</p>
<p>This is a story by <a href="http://theiphoneblog.com">the iPhone Blog</a>.  This feed is sponsored by <a href="http://store.theiphoneblog.com">The iPhone Blog Store</a>.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/06/09/apple-launches-mobileme-activesync-web-20-apps-for-the-rest-of-us/">Apple Launches MobileMe: ActiveSync + Web 2.0 Apps For the Rest of Us!</a></p>
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			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/06/09/apple-launches-mobileme-activesync-web-20-apps-for-the-rest-of-us/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Top 5 Things the iPhone Could Learn from the Competition &#8211; Wait-a-Thon!</title>
		<link>http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/05/27/top-5-things-the-iphone-could-learn-from-the-competition-wait-a-thon/</link>
		<comments>http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/05/27/top-5-things-the-iphone-could-learn-from-the-competition-wait-a-thon/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 27 May 2008 13:42:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rene Ritchie</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Editorial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wait-a-Thon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[BlackBerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cloud]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[email]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[htc]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nokia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palm]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[top 5]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Video]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[windows mobile]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.theiphoneblog.com/?p=2464</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[
[Note: This a a Wait-A-Thon post! Comment on this post -- or any post tagged "Wait-a-Thon" -- for your chance to win a $100 iTunes Gift Card! Note that you must post with a valid and real email address so we can send you your prize -- no switching!]

No need for double-takes. You didn&#8217;t click [...]<p>This is a story by <a href="http://theiphoneblog.com">the iPhone Blog</a>.  This feed is sponsored by <a href="http://store.theiphoneblog.com">The iPhone Blog Store</a>.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/05/27/top-5-things-the-iphone-could-learn-from-the-competition-wait-a-thon/">Top 5 Things the iPhone Could Learn from the Competition &#8211; Wait-a-Thon!</a></p>
]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img src="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/images/stories/2008/05/what_the_iphone_could_learn.jpg" alt="What the iPhone Could Learn From the Competition" title="What the iPhone Could Learn From the Competition" width="500" height="500" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2467" />
<em>[Note: This a a <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/03/07/app-wait-a-thon-win-100-in-itunes-gift-cards/">Wait-A-Thon post!</a> Comment on this post -- or any post tagged "Wait-a-Thon" -- for your chance to win a $100 iTunes Gift Card! Note that you must post with a valid and real email address so we can send you your prize -- no switching!]</em></p>

<p>No need for double-takes. You didn&#8217;t click the wrong link. Just breath, dig deeply, and stick with me for a moment. Yes, you really are still reading the iPhone blog.</p>

<p>For a 1.0 device, the iPhone knocked the ball &#8212; if not out of the park &#8212; soundly into the fence, and sent a complacent industry fumbling and flurrying to catch it. But no device, not even from Apple, could get everything perfect the first time at bat. Now, I&#8217;ve pretty much staked my turf here by playfully <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/category/this-week-in-schadenfreude/">poking a little bit of fun at the competition</a> but, truth be known, when they&#8217;re not <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/tag/iclone/">wasting their time on iClones</a> every platform and handset has some great &#8212; even killer &#8212; features to recommend it. In that spirit, here&#8217;s my top 5 list of what Apple should seriously consider stealing&#8230; er&#8230; learning from the competition if they want to hit a home run with 2.0 and beyond&#8230;</p>

<p><span id="more-2464"></span></p>

<p><strong>5. Blackberry&#8217;s Email Management</strong></p>

<p>RIM is the undeniably #1 in smartphone market share, but they come in at #5 on my list for the simple reason that, while what they do well they do phenomenally well, as a platform I think that very maturity has led to little innovation, and hence little (and narrow) potential to mine for iPhone improvements.</p>

<p>That said, they are the email monster for a reason. With one major caveat, nobody does email bigger or better than Blackberry and while Twitter, IM, VoIP, video chat, and other technologies old and new battle it out for communication domination, email remains the mainstay of the mainstream, business and consumer alike, and in that regard Apple has something important to learn from Blackberry.</p>

<p><em>What Blackberry Does Right</em></p>

<p>Blackberry does email to the point where the two are almost synonymous. Push notwithstanding, when it comes to managing email, the Blackberry is a beast. It&#8217;s simply the best there is at what it does.</p>

<p><em>What Apple Could Do Better</em></p>

<p>RIM uses a centralized Network Operations Center (NOC) to handle all Blackberry messaging everywhere, providing true, near-instantaneous &#8220;push&#8221; to thousands and thousands of <a href="http://www.crackberry.com/">Crackberrians</a> each and every moment. But here&#8217;s that major caveat: it&#8217;s a single point of failure. <a href="http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&#038;rls=en-us&#038;q=site:crackberry.com+outage&#038;ie=UTF-8&#038;oe=UTF-8">Outages</a>, from carrier to regional to network-wide have increasingly plagued the service, as have <a href="http://crackberry.com/indian-government-gets-ok-rim-monitor-blackberry-network">privacy and security concerns</a>.</p>

<p>With the upcoming 2.0 update, the iPhone <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/03/06/apple-to-rim-you-been-served/">will support the ActiveSync</a> &#8220;push&#8221; technology Apple licensed from Microsoft. ActiveSync eschews the &#8220;one NOC to manage it all&#8221; and instead  simulates &#8220;push&#8221; between local Exchange Server and mobile client &#8212; in this case, the iPhone. If someone else&#8217;s Exchange Server &#8212; even Microsoft&#8217;s in Redmond &#8212; goes down, it effects your iPhone service not one bit.</p>

<p>That just leaves the iPhone MobileMail app itself. Fairly easy to set up and use, it still remains a challenge to manage multiple accounts and messages.  Better mass-mail handling, especially for important functions like delete, is imperative (and is <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/03/10/iphone-20-mass-mail-delete-ppt-quickview-and-spotlight/">rumored to be coming with 2.0</a> as well). </p>

<p>Beyond that, however, better organization is needed. A single, unified inbox, like the one on the desktop Mail.app would be a great first step, followed by the ability to hide selected, seldom-used IMAP folders to clear up some clutter.</p>

<p>Speaking of IMAP, since MobileMail can &#8220;see&#8221; IMAP folders for Calendar, Apple Mail To Do, etc. better integration with the iPhone Calendar and Notes application (and dare we dream &#8212; Task app?), seems natural given what&#8217;s been done in OS X 10.5 Leopard&#8217;s Mail.app.</p>

<p>And since the spammers seem intent on mail-bombing the internet back to the stone age, some client-side anti-spam filters would also be most welcome.</p>

<p>Taken together, these improvements would go a long way to making the iPhone king of the next email generation.</p>

<p><strong>4. Palm&#8217;s Click Counting</strong></p>

<p>We want powerful, we want beautiful, and &#8212; dangit! &#8212; we want drop dead easy to use. Great design is functional design, great user experience is intuitive, almost transparent experience. Apple nails this to a large degree. <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/05/02/top-10-reasons-the-iphone-is-incomparable-wait-a-thon/">I&#8217;ve said it before</a>, but my two-and-a-half year old godson can pretty much navigate his way around the iPhone, from pictures to camera to notes (his ABCs) to calculator (his 123s) which unbelievable ease and accomplishment. But there remain a few problem areas.</p>

<p>Palm OS, dinosaur that it is, has legendary ease of use. Rumor has it that early Palm developers, like co-founder Jeff Hawkins, literally counted each and every &#8220;click&#8221; it took for a user to accomplish a task, and did everything possible to optimize and minimize that number. It has failed miserably to keep up with the times, but in a few key ways (no pun intended!) it&#8217;s still timeless.</p>

<p><em>What Palm Does Right</em></p>

<p>Palm understands moving around a mobile device like nobody else. Almost every task can be accomplished with just a few touches, clicks, or key presses. <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/05/05/iphone-at-work-the-business-case-wait-a-thon/">Brian has already covered</a> the ease of entering appointment/calendar data on in the constantly-saved model of the Palm OS, and I&#8217;d add past innovations like photo speed dialing (which seems a natural for the iPhone, and ironically was a Palm innovation for their first Windows Mobile device, and requires a 3rd party add on for Palm&#8217;s own OS!). <a href="http://www.treocentral.com">TreoCentral.com</a> no doubt has many more examples. Though perhaps not as practical on an all-touch device, even little things like typing to begin a contact search or call are all time-saving techniques mastered by the Zen of Palm, and a spirit the iPhone could easily learn.</p>

<p><em>What Apple Could do Better</em></p>

<p>In addition to being so old its joints creak and crack every time it turns around, the Palm OS lacks the power to deliver a modern user experience, and bizarrely lacks standardization even across its own device platform (besides the aforementioned lack of photo dialing on the Palm side, GSM and CDMA phones have sported different dialing apps, some modernized while others are left to languish in whatever layer of hell 1990 monochrome aliased bitmaps are condemned).</p>

<p>Adding photo dialing to the iPhone would be trivial. All the Quartz and Core Graphics/Animation services are there, just begging for an Apple take.</p>

<p>Likewise improved calendar entry: tapping on an empty slot should bring up a New Event editor the same way tapping on a filled one brings up a viewer. And data should be saved automatically unless specifically cancelled. The mobile world is both more prone to interruptions and less forgiving of them, after all.</p>

<p>The sideways flick currently used to move between photos, Weather app cities, and other information surfaces could be leveraged more widely as well to speed up functionality. Let me flick between album lists while a song is playing, or email folders from one account to the next.</p>

<p>Digging down into, and backing up out of stacked screens is so iPod Classic.</p>

<p><strong>3. Windows Mobile/HTC Speeds, Feeds, and Divergent Needs</strong></p>

<p>As any <a href="http://www.wmexperts.com">WMExpert</a> would tell you, Windows Mobile &#8212; in Microsoft&#8217;s most favoritist model &#8212; is not a product but a platform. So, I&#8217;m adding in stalwart hardware manufacturer HTC to round out the reference. Before we get too deeply into that, however, it&#8217;s worth remembering that the Microsoft model makes for an almost diametrically opposed situation to Apple&#8217;s. At the time of this writing, there is only 1 iPhone model, from 1 manufacturer, on 1 US-based carrier. Last count, there were 3.2 gazillion Windows Mobile phones across a plethora of OS variations (standard, smartphone&#8230; er&#8230; purple?) and innumerable manufacturing SKU&#8217;s not only from HTC, but Palm, Motorola, and even Symbian co-founder Sony Ericsson, among others, which run on every carrier and it&#8217;s multitude of resellers. </p>

<p>But Apple&#8217;s end-to-end control of the device, while giving it an undeniable edge in stability and user experience, comes at the cost of variety and individual configurability.</p>

<p>Back in the dark days of tech support we used to joke that if you were in Mac support, every question had a simple &#8220;yes, here&#8217;s how&#8230;&#8221; or &#8220;no, sorry&#8221; answer, while if you were in Windows support, every question inevitably started with &#8220;maybe&#8221; and led to hours and hours of digging, tweaking, and testing. And in many ways, the same holds true with the iPhone today: One feature set and a limited range of settings. And in very narrow ways, that leaves room for Apple to learn something from Windows Mobile.</p>

<p><em>What Windows Mobile Does Right</em></p>

<p>Again, I&#8217;m including HTC in this equation, and from that standpoint, they deserve credit for upping the game with a VGA quality screen and a release schedule that allows them to continuously field the latest and greatest mobile processors.</p>

<p>On the Windows Mobile side proper, the beast is so infinitely tweak-able it might as well be a hobbyist kit. Dig deep enough, and you can find settings for how you&#8217;d like your settings, and settings for those settings as well.</p>

<p><em>What Apple Could Do Better</em></p>

<p>While my heart remains set on a Nano-esque 202dpi screen (the current iPhone is 160dpi) bringing 720p to the mobile world, I would realistically expect VGA&#8217;s 640&#215;480 in the next revision. The iPhone, with the video-out cables, is already capable of pumping 640&#215;480 to your TV, why not to the iPhone screen? And while a yearly, single product release cycle doesn&#8217;t give much room for proc bumps, going beefy from the start, and getting the new chips early like Apple does with their laptops and desktops, would keep up the cutting-edge tradition and reputation, and help see devices healthily though their annual life cycles. (This might even be something proprietary chips via the recent <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/tag/pa-semi/">PA Semi purchase</a> could help with&#8230;)</p>

<p>On the configuration side, while Windows Mobile has &#8216;em, they&#8217;ve also left them pretty much scattered every which where but under under a unified Settings area, which is precisely where the iPhone sorts them. However, though its certainly understandable that Apple is focusing on the casual user, surfacing some lower-level options a la Windows Mobile, organized and implemented with Apple&#8217;s fit and finish, would go a long way to appeasing power users who currently turn to jailbreaking in a desperate attempts to get closer to the metal. On the Mac side, there are 3rd party apps that create GUIs for otherwise Terminal-only settings, and while I&#8217;m not suggesting (though maybe pipe dreaming a little&#8230;) that Apple should provide an official way to get Terminal up on the iPhone, an Advanced button that allowed for more options and deeper tweaking would be a happy medium for many users.</p>

<p>(What, you thought I&#8217;d beat the dead horse of cut and paste?)</p>

<p><strong>2. Nokia&#8217;s Mobile Video Creation</strong></p>

<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m streaming live right now, come chat!&#8221; is pure Twitter bacon (like spam, but you opted in to it). Many tech pundits, who are also iPhone users, love the Web 2.1 ability to stream video from anywhere and everywhere, whether it&#8217;s <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/05/22/scobleize-your-iphone-in-18-easy-apps/">Robert Scoble</a> shoving a camera in front of economic powerhouses, or the infinitely better looking Cali Lewis demoing Wii fit for the good of the masses, or the first lady of Apple (and self-confessed Jobstalker) iJustine zooming down the highway, live streaming video, especially live streaming mobile video, is the latest IT thing.</p>

<p>Many (most?) of these bleeding edge technojournalists are also Apple fans and devoted iPhone users. So, the fact that they&#8217;re all using N95&#8217;s to stream their mobile videos shows that Apple could learn something from Nokia.</p>

<p><em>What Nokia Does Right</em></p>

<p>Say what you want about Nokia&#8217;s Soviet-military design aesthetic and their rather pathetic North American release schedules, they know how to throw a camera at a smart phone. The N95 sports a massive 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss lens and DVD(ish) caliber video capture. This compares to the rapidly obsoleting 2 megapixel cam on the iPhone, which also fails to enjoy any Apple-provided video capture (which means jailbreaking and loading unsupported third party apps are your only current option).</p>

<p>So, while Apple and the iPhone&#8217;s built-in iPod rules the roost when it comes to consuming mobile media, the N95 can&#8217;t be touched when it comes to creating that media on the go. This is why all those aforementioned iPhone toting blogerati, when they clog my Twitter feed with their live streaming announcements, are streaming live via the N95.</p>

<p><em>What Apple Could Do Better</em></p>

<p>There have been rumors of an upcoming <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/04/22/patent-watch-mobile-ichat-touch-cometh/">iChat Mobile</a> application, and even <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/05/14/iphone-risk-swiss-timing-and-ichat-tv-rumors/">video conferencin</a>g, and that&#8217;s a start. Apple, however, stands alone in 360 degree spherical integration, and while they don&#8217;t have as massive a footprint in most of them the way Microsoft might, they at least have a toe in all of them, from hardware, to software, to services, from production, to processing, to deployment, to consumption. You can fire up Final Cut Pro on your iMac, create a movie, upload it to .Mac and sync a copy to your iPhone. Imagine that power harnessed around mobile media creation?</p>

<p>Right now, QIK and Nokia need each other to produce streaming video (while the N95&#8217;s battery lasts, that is). Imagine an iPhone with a decent camera and video capture that could stream live via, or send recorded clips to, .Mac gallery. And imagine if Apple took the much-needed step of enabling support for UstreamTV, stickam, Flickr, and YouTube. </p>

<p>Coupled with seamless integration with the Mac, iMovie 08, and higher end apps, and &#8212; BOOM &#8212; the king of mobile media consumption becomes the king of mobile media creation as well.</p>

<p>Everyone could be a life-caster.</p>

<p><strong>1. Android&#8217;s Cloud and Location Based Services</strong></p>

<p>I know. Android is still somewhere between vaporware and the eternal beta tag that hounds so many of Google&#8217;s initiatives. How could they be my #1? Here&#8217;s the thing: with a few notable exceptions (we&#8217;ll get to those in a paragraph or two), they&#8217;re batting nearly 1000 on all &#8220;cloud services&#8221; right now. And the cloud is the future.</p>

<p>What are cloud services? Most of us run applications locally on our computers. We buy software, install it, and use it to save files on our hard drive. Cloud services change that game entirely. They run applications on servers (often huge data centers) that we access via our browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox), or through a dedicated client (iTunes, Sidebar Objects, Dashboard Widgets, etc.). Instead of buying them, we get them for free, sponsored by advertising, or via paid subscription. And instead of saving files locally, we have the option of saving them on the same servers (and data centers) the services themselves run on. We may lose some potential privacy and control, but we gain the advantage of multiple backups scattered over many geographies to preserve our data. If you think this doesn&#8217;t sound too different than the old server-client model, or the Sun and Oracle predictions of the network being the computer, you&#8217;re right. Just on a far greater scale.</p>

<p>What are location-based services? According to Google, the next gold rush. It&#8217;s tying the cloud in to your current location, based on WiFi, and better yet &#8212; GPS coordinates.</p>

<p>Apple provides some of these services already, with .Mac mail, iDisk storage, .Mac galleries, Back-to-my-Mac, and Sync, and rumors indicate they may be amping it up with <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/05/07/iphone-20-mac-push-email/">IMAP IDLE-style &#8220;push&#8221; email and PIM sync</a>, and maybe even <a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/05/08/mac-to-be-revamped-alongside-iphone-20/">a complete revamp</a> with the next release, but they still could learn a lot from Google.</p>

<p><em>What Google Does Right</em></p>

<p>Confession: I&#8217;m a .Mac subscriber. Yes, it&#8217;s buggy and overpriced, but Back-to-my-Mac and the Sync features alone were enough to lure me in. Nevertheless, Google owns this space. They&#8217;re predicted to earn more than Microsoft&#8217;s Windows + Office monopoly soon, and some say that&#8217;s only the beginning. Indeed, the entire raison-d&#8217;être for Android is to give away an OS in hopes of getting Google&#8217;s services onto more phones and thus, into more hands. </p>

<p>They want you to meet an old friend over one of their Open Social powered networks, use their email to contact the old friend, their search to find a great diner near the both of you, their calendar to schedule a lunch, their Docs suite to get some work done while you&#8217;re waiting, their Blogger to write up the event, and their Picasa gallery to store pictures of your reunion. (All with tasteful text and banner ads, tuned per your interests and location, served up along with your results and data)</p>

<p>What&#8217;s more, many of their cloud services allow for easy collaboration. You can share your calendar, work on your spreadsheet along with some colleagues logged in back at the office, and publish everything online for the world to see.</p>

<p>And the most important piece &#8212; indeed the missing link up until recently &#8212; Google Gears allows for offline persistence; you can keep using many of your cloud apps and cloud-stored data even when you don&#8217;t have a WiFi or cell connection. If you have to get on a plane to see your old friend, you can keep typing away, and when you land everything will sync back up.</p>

<p><em>What Apple Could Do Better</em> </p>

<p>Where Google strikes out is integration. Their offerings are a disjointed and sometimes disoriented mishmash of homebrews and buyouts, with nowhere near the cohesive user experience or inter-offering leverage Apple could provide. Until recently, some services didn&#8217;t even work under a single login. There are also huge holes in their offerings, like Amazon S3- or Microsoft Skydrive-like storage (yes, you can rig up gDrive, but I&#8217;m talking official offerings here).</p>

<p>Apple already has some of these holes filled (iDisk), but are missing many more pieces themselves. There are <a href="http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/01/gone-indie/">suggestions Apple doesn&#8217;t &#8220;get&#8221; social networking</a> (or doesn&#8217;t want to get it). But an easy to use blogging service built into .Mac and the iPhone would be an excellent start. And given Apple&#8217;s existing &#8220;Cult of Mac&#8221;, a social network tied into that admittedly snobbish demographic would be an easy sell as well. Tie it into the location-based services (opt-in, of course) and suddenly the cloud network takes on physicality as well. Instead of &#8220;Steve&#8217;s Twittering: Meet up at the Mothership after Keynote&#8221;, Steve can see how many of his friends and contacts are already at Keynote, and tying into search, calendar, IM, and other services could make for a very easy workflow to set up the meet.</p>

<p>This brings me back to the integration. The way Contacts flows into the Apple client for Google Maps gives a hint at how it should &#8220;just work&#8221;. The iPhone Maps app in general shows that Apple can make hybrid client/cloud software better than anyone on the planet. Imagine that leveraged across the device?</p>

<p>Get an email with a spreadsheet, and instead of just a preview, you could launch iWork Online, make your edits, and have them available to all team (or family &#8212; Apple&#8217;s consumer focus!) members instantly. Still working when you get on that plane? Newer versions of WebKit promise offline modes with database support for just such an eventuality, and WebKit is the foundation of the iPhone&#8217;s MobileSafari browser, and much of its data rendering in general).</p>

<p>And once the iPhone scales, and iPhone data starts to get aggregated and leveraged (with firm privacy and security policies!) for the benefit of other iPhone users, watch out. Today&#8217;s social networks and sharing proof-of-concepts will looks positively anemic.</p>

<p>Apple (or an Apple/Google alliance even?) could get an immediate edge going into the next great paradigm shift in computer technology.</p>

<p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>

<p>So there you have them: better Blackberry-style email management, Treo-centric focus on click counting, Windows Mobile-ish configurability, Nokia inspired mobile video production, and Google Android beating cloud services are my top 5 things the iPhone could learn from the competition.</p>

<p>Is Apple already thinking along these lines? We&#8217;ll have to wait for WWDC &#8212; and likely Macworld 2009 &#8212; to know for sure. How about you? If Apple could take 5 things from the competition to improve YOUR iPhone, what would they be?</p>
<p>This is a story by <a href="http://theiphoneblog.com">the iPhone Blog</a>.  This feed is sponsored by <a href="http://store.theiphoneblog.com">The iPhone Blog Store</a>.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/05/27/top-5-things-the-iphone-could-learn-from-the-competition-wait-a-thon/">Top 5 Things the iPhone Could Learn from the Competition &#8211; Wait-a-Thon!</a></p>
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