My fourth descent into ADD

Edit: I never finished this review, but I’m publishing it now because it’s getting dated. The clear winner is the iPhone, though there are some things about it that drive me nuts.

In 2007 I decided to go with a T-mobile Wing instead of an iPhone and for the most part did not regret it. However with the release of the 3G iphone and the app store, I recently made the switch to the iphone 3g. In general I think the iphone 3g blows the wing out of the water, but there are things I miss. After spending a day with the phone, here are my initial thoughts.

User Interface

The iPhone is sleek, sleek, sleek. Windows Mobile is not. Although I’ve customized my Wing with the wonderful slide to unlock program, overclocked it, customized my today screen, and more, the iPhone is still faster and better at navigating. The wing came with a cumbersome 50 MB of program memory and 40 MB of internal storage memory. You had an external storage card of 2 GB, but with program memory limited to 40 MB, you’re hit with lots of limitations. Compare that to the iphone’s 8 GB of shared storage and program internal memory. The iphone staff thought of everything with accelerometers, proximity and light sensors, and multitouch gesture controls that make it a joy to use and faster to get around.

Windows Mobile is extremely customizable with both more options in the OS and any number of applications, registry hacks, daemons, and today screen plugins. However, some simple navigation was impossible. I remember on my Nokia 6800, if I wanted to quickly send an SMS, I just had to open the keyboard, hit the left nav button, and I was writing. On the iPhone, I hit power, unlock, click SMS, and then compose. On the Wing, I hit power, unlock, messaging, text/Multimedia, menu, new, SMS. Plus you have to wait for it to redraw the screen and load. It drives me nuts.

Winner: iPhone

Speed

Along the same note, the iphone 3g has a much faster processor than the wing. So did the original iphone. Because you can only run one application at a time and the applications are quick to launch and exit, it’s much faster getting around. Windows Mobile by default likes to leave applications open; it suffers from memory leaks and other slowdowns that make it painful. Opening and closing the keyboard, which rotates the screen, takes forever, even overclocking it. I have often wanted to throw my wing against the wall–it often would be so slow that it wouldn’t allow me to answer a call even though I pressed ‘answer’. Sometimes you could see what it was trying to do; like the display would come on and you’d know you’d be getting a call, but it would take 10 seconds to ring and you had no hope of answering.

Winner: iPhone