Ardent Meridian

I have been writing code, in one form or another, for over 30 years.  I’ve built games at a hobby level, business and entertainment software at a commercial/shrink-wrapped level, and had my hand in projects that have, individually, touched almost half a billion people.

In short, I know my craft.

During that time, across the many and varied projects I have been involved in, I have worked with a wide variety of extremely smart and talented developers, some incredibly talented graphic artists and animators, and several musicians whose creations can literally move the soul.

These people have talent, dedication, skill and creativity – not to mention more ideas for things they want to try or tackle than they will ever have time for in their life-times.

During my time in the software world, there is another class of person I have come across repeatedly.  Some of them consider themselves “designers”, others just say they are “ideas people”.  But one thing they have all had in common is a near total absence of any actual skill or ability at all.

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I wrote last year about the battery life of the iPhone 3G, following on from lots of forum chat about perceived issues with it.  At the time I maintained those issues were down to people playing with their phones more as they were new and/or that those people were new to Smart Phones and simply had unrealistic expectations.

Well, the new iPhone 3GS is available, along with claims of improved battery life compared to the 3G and, of course, the ‘net is full of people complaining about battery life – when the numbers they are posting are very much in line with Apple’s claims.

So I thought it my be interesting to repeat the same kind of thing I did with my 3G and compare it with the new 3GS.

The image to the left here shows the results of me charging the phone to full and then using it as I normally would in the course of a day.

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Pac-Man is an indisputably classic game, and one of my absolute favorite video games of all time.  From the perspective of classic retro-games, probably my all-time favorite.  It is certainly the one I’ve played the most.

Whether it was frantically pumping quarters (or 10P pieces from what was my part of the world back then) into the old coin-operated machines, or gladly buying it in some Namco "museum" collection or other for almost every console it has ever released on, I’ve probably spent more to play it than any other classic game as well.

For the first time since Pac-Man has appeared on consoles I am finding myself highly-resistant to buying it.  Not because I don’t want it … but because I don’t understand why a game that is $4.99 for the iPod Classic should cost $9.99 on the iPhone, when the game, control excepted, is the same.

Actually, I understand it just fine and technically it isn’t Pac-Man that has gone insane, it is Namco.  The two games are right there in the iTunes store, easily compared to each other – and beyond adding accelerometer control (highly questionable at best for a precision-control game like this, and definitely not something I feel is worth $5) it is the same game just ported!

It’s the same story for Ms. Pac-Man and Pole Position Remix.  A penny over double the price just because it is on the iPhone rather than the iPod?!  What’s the extra value here … other than to Namco’s shareholders that is?  It just seems schizophrenic and rather silly to me.  Especially when you consider how profitable Pac-Man has been for Namco over the years.

When the same game is available on the Xbox 360 for ~$5, and given the certification process and similar distribution fee for Xbox Live Arcade titles, and the addition of achievements and online leader-boards, $10 for the game on the iPhone just seems unnecessarily exploitative.

I find it very hard to believe, particularly in light of the consistent price feedback on the Application Store, that Namco wouldn’t make a lot more money by lowering the price and increasing their sales volume. 

There are copious examples of much smaller developers doing just this, much to the, quite vocal, delight of their new found customers.

But what is one to do?

Say "sod that", that’s what … if Namco does get a bleedin’ clue and those games do drop to $4.99 I’ll buy them on the iPhone in a heartbeat … but I am not paying double for the same thing as exists on other, more involved, platforms just because it is on the shiny new iPhone.

Across the various forums I participate in, I’ve read a lot about people having issues with the battery life on the iPhone 3G.  While I am sure there are defective units out there, as best I can tell most of the issues being encountered are due to the way people are using the phone.

This screenshot, taken on my iPhone 3G, shows pretty typical battery life for me under "normal" use.  Normal use in my case constitutes running with 3G and Location Services (GPS) disabled, WiFi and Bluetooth enabled, push e-mail turned off (fetch every 15 minutes) and the screen at 60%.

If I am out and about and browsing I will switch to 3G mode for that, and then usually remember to turn it off … sometimes not.  I rarely use location services, and again tend to turn it on as needed.

Actual use of the device in this example breaks down like this:

• 1.5 hours making phone calls.
• Sending/receiving about 20 SMS text messages.
• 3.5 or so hours listening to music.
• About 20-30 minutes browsing (checking prices while out shopping) in 3G mode.
• Roughly an hour and a half gaming (MotionX Poker, Galcon and Enigmo).
• Reading e-mails as they popped up, on a 15 minute fetch cycle.

And that’s a pretty normal day’s use for me, and very comparable – maybe slightly better than my previous AT&T "Tilt".  Although the Tilt would be in 3G mode all the time (no way that I knew of to turn that off).  That said, the Tilt was almost never used for any kind of browsing due to Pocket Internet Explorer being unable to render the majority of sites I’d browse while away from my desk, coupled with the fact that I had to reboot the bloody thing every day to keep the Internet connection working.

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It was, with some anticipation, that I awaited the full and final details of the T-Mobile G1 handset; the first of what will hopefully be a long line of Android based devices.

The early images of the G1 that have been floating around on the web have been less than inspiring, but I was more interested in the G1 as a way to explore Android and its SDK running on actual hardware than in using it as my day-to-day phone.

The basic hardware specifications of the G1 are comparable, or superior, to most current smart-phones that are available at a similar price.  For example, it stacks up well against devices like the, slightly more expensive, AT&T "Tilt" (my previous day-to-day device).

The most interesting aspects of the hardware layout as follows:

• 3G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios
• 3.2" half-VGA (320×480) color touch-screen
• 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera
• Slide-out QWERTY keyboard
• GPS receiver
• Accelerometer/motion sensor input
• ~5 hours talk time with standby time claims ranging from ~130 hours to ~300

Although not billed as a "business" phone, comparisons with other smart-phones are inevitable, and in this space the G1’s primary competitors are Windows Mobile based devices, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry units and Apple’s iPhone.  In such a comparison the most glaring omission is the total lack of support for any integration with either Microsoft Exchange or Outlook. All of the competing devices have rich and solid support for over-the-air (OTA) synchronization with Exchange as a standard feature.

You could enable IMAP support on Exchange and again access to corporate e-mail that way, but e-mail is only a fraction of what Exchange offers; it is the combination of e-mail, scheduling, groupware and collaboration features in Exchange that make it compelling – and without that you’re missing the point.

It is, of course, possible that support of Exchange will be added later, either as part of the Android O.S. itself (although that doesn’t seem likely, given that Google already has their own infrastructure and solutions for that functionality) or via a third-party application via the Android Market.  That would, in my opinion, be a serious "sit up and take notice" event in the evolution of the Android platform and the devices it powers.

Despite the high-promise of an open platform for building applications, and how powerful that potentially is in the business space,the lack of Exchange support is going to render the G1, and other Android based phones, as unviable for common business use.  Again, the G1 isn’t billed as a business phone, it is more consumer-targeted, and that is fair enough.

So, how does the G1 stack up as a consumer phone?

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