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August 13, 2009
Antother Few Days with an iphone
A few more tidbits.
The feature set in ActiveSync pales in comparison to the rules-based filtering/forwarding control provided by the BlackBerry server. You can't not sync your inbox, so if you get a lot of mail, your options are to flood your device, or setup enough rules to move everything out of your inbox. Neither is a good solution.
The Mail UI on the iphone is pretty marginal - why do I need to navigate my entire folder structure, without an option to pick favorites, or collapse unused portions of the tree?
The lack of rules-based anything on the device takes a lot of the "smart" out of "smart phone." I've been through several attempts to get alerting working in a way that's similar enough to the BlackBerry setup to be a real replacement, but I'm concluding it's just not possible - at least not without running a jail-break only app. iBlacklist and mCleaner both look promising, but I can't propose that we jail-break all the phones around the office.
I had a conversation with a really smart friend of mine who is, shall we say, close to Apple, and his best suggestion was "do the filtering server side" - which sounds good 'till you actually think about it.
I want (need) messages, be they push, SMS, or whatever, from a system in trouble to wake me up at two in the morning, but I absolutely do not want my drunk friend to wake me up 'cause he has the sudden urge to sing Hava Nagila (you know who you are).
There's no server that can make that decision - only the device can. Only the iphone can't. Seems "there's no app for that."
After a bit of reading it turns out that making push work on the phone requires that you activate it (via iTunes) with a SIM from the carrier locked carrier. Once that's done (and some magic handshake/key exchange happens with the Apple push servers, I suspect), push works just fine, but the architecture still seems retarded.
The "background apps kill battery life" argument against background apps seems pretty lame, too - my BlackBerry does just fine - and a well written app (using select(3), or other event driven API) consumes no CPU - and hence no battery - while it's waiting.
Of course it would be possible to write a badly behaved application, but if Apple is rejecting apps for the occasional bad word, surely they can include a test of "in the background" behavior and reject poorly behaving apps, too.
Apple's hard-on for controlling every aspect of the experience seems like it's seriously limiting the ability of developers on their platform to innovate and provide customer value.
Let's see how that continues to work for them.
Posted by dberger at August 13, 2009 8:58 AM
Comments
Most of the rules you set in Outlook run server-side. They only run client-side if there's some thing in the rule that can't be done server-side (like refiling a message to a PST folder).
I also perform refiling of my personal mailbox at delivery time, before serving messages via IMAP, rather than doing them client-side via mutt rules or whatever. I always leave mutt running, so you'd think this would work fine with a handset staring at the same mailbox, but no, not if the handset's mail client is dumb like mine is.
Posted by: Matt at August 13, 2009 7:36 PM