I know.. the mere thought of that phrase will send poor old Dragonwyntir into a rage spiral. But user-ability (no FLASH, anyone??) flaws aside, I love my iPhone. I am an artist and photographer, so the iPhone really appeals to my creative graphic side. Plus it is just too much damn fun.

When I was looking for a new phone, I carefully weighed my options looking at the pros and cons. The winning factor for me was the applications. When looking for cool apps for your phone, there is no contest to the iphone. So without further ado, here are some of my faves:

Photography: The photo apps were really what sold me in the beginning. I am a compulsive Photo taker, and You just cannot beat the options for iphone. Here are some of my favorite photography apps:

Hipstamatic:Ahhh the good old days of analog photography. This app allows you to give your images a old school feel from the days of early color photography. With various film and flash options the possibilities are endless.

Lo-Mob: It is along the lines of the Hipstamatic, but Instead retro film styles it is more of Large format film styles (like Helga camera) and Alternative film processes (like Polaroid transfers). No sure exactly what I am talking about? Check out the website for some great examples of what you can do.

Tilt Shift Generator: Tilt shift Photography is all the rage with the kids these days. It gives your photos a “toy model” feel by narrowing the depth of field and vignetting the areas. this application does the job of a lot of the more expensive SLR lenses for your teeny tiny camera phone. It’s a lot of fun to play with, and really allows you to gain perspective on landscape photography.

Photogene: A must have for any photo buff. This allows you to make corrections  to your photos, in camera.

Art Apps: These are some useful apps for artists/graphic designers/ all around creatives.

Random Pose: When creating characters or you need a model reference and no one is available to pose for you, Random pose is a great alternative. It allows you to flip through their library of CGI anatomy models (both male and female) in various poses. The use the skinless model method allowing you see the muscle tone and get your drawings more life like.

myPantone: Pantone is pretty much the first and last name in color picking. It is the industry standard and is used world wide for color matching, printing, and forecasting color trends. This app gives you access to their complete line of palates as well as a color picker. You can use your camera to help match the pantone color you are looking for. This is a must have for designers of all shapes and sizes, as well as lovers of color.  There is a free and a paid app option, so you can choose your level of color love.

Social Networking: Because most of my friends are virtual ones.

Whrrl: A social networking game much in the vein of foursquare. For those of you not familiar it is the new hip thing where you use your phones GPS to pinpoint where you are and you use it to “Check In” online. It is sort of like a “where on earth is Carmen San Diego” meets scavenger hunt meets ultimate stalker tool. With Whrrl you gain rank and achievements by checking into places falling under certain categories (which fills my need as an achievement whore). It also allows you to upload pictures of your current location adding to the gallery. I personally find it more entertaining than foursquare, and hope that it gains more popularity. I should also mention this app is not just for the iphone: You can get it for pretty much any smartphone.

Qrank: Another little social networking ditty that links you and your friends in an all out trivia death match. You can sync up with your Facebook and play your friends in daily trivia, gain points, rankings and *gasp* achievements! You don’t need an iphone to play, just a facebook account, but having the mobility allows you access to gain achievements by playing in different geographical locations.

App Toys and Gadgets: for the digital kid in all of us.

Lightsaber: Unleash the power of the force with the awesome geek app. It allows you to pick your saber color, handle and even create your own jedi character. Once you have picked you can wield your phone around with the might of the force and make the iconic “whooshing” noises without having to actually do it yourself. a Must have for any fan of Star wars.

Harry Potter Spell Wand: So you are more of a student of Hogwarts than a Student of the force? Well then this is your app. Get sorted, learn spells, duel with your friends and gain points for your house. Now if could get me a house elf all would be right with the universe.

Robot Unicorn Attack: The adult swim fave is now on the iphone. Probably one of the best side scrolling flash games out there to ever question a mans sexuality.

SonicLighter: Why waste butane at your next concert? With this you can show your love for your favorite rock ballad by holding up this app. Made by the same people who brought you the ever popular I am T-Pain App, this virtual lighter gives you color options as well as the ability to set your flame height, blow torch your friends or see the globe and how the rest of the world is illuminated.

An honorable mention:

As a tea junkie Teavana has become my bodega. They have an app that allows me to sort through their blends, make my own and know what time and temp to brew my tea at. It also  helps me to curb my spending by making my favorites and allowing me to keep a shopping list. And if you are interested, the Jasmine Dragon Phoenix Pearls Green is sublime and cannot be matched.

So those are some of my faves. If you have an iphone go and check them out.

Engadget already posted a fantastic overview of some of the steps Palm should be looking at taking.

Here’s a different idea:  Partner with Rhapsody.

The Rhapsody music service was recently cut away from Real and into an independent company.  It’s been struggling to maintain its subscriber base, and facing stiff competition from itunes and the zune ecosystem.  You know who else is facing stiff competition from those guys?  Palm.  Of the major smartphone players, only Apple and Microsoft (soon) will have comprehensive solutions for entertainment on their devices.  Sure, Palm integrates into the Amazon MP3 store, but it’s hardly comprehensive, and the actual media player in WebOS is anemic and sickly compared to the Ipod and soon-to-be windows phone 7.

Palm could provide a relatively quick burst of great publicity by working with Rhapsody to get the music service onto WebOS devices, complete with offline caching, and every other Rhapsody bell and whistle.  For extra credit, call the guys from Varia Mobile who were the brains behind the Ibiza Rhapsody’s best-in-class interface (which also ran on a linux core).

As Engadget pointed out in its open letter, Palm is the only other company playing serious ball in the mobile gaming space.  The gaming offerings simply beat the pants off of everyone else out there outside of the iphone.  Adding a truly competitive music experience, and the positive media attention it would garner seems like a no-brainer, and Rhapsody is the only major service without a flagship phone at this point.  Since Rhapsody is already working on a beta app for Android (and already available on iphone), the choice is either leap ahead or get left behind.  Palm absolutely needs a compelling music experience baked into webos… almost as bad as they need the good press such an announcement would bring.

1. – Thank you Engadget for being vital to this post (I shall be using liberal links to their various stories on the matter).

2. – It is impossible to be exhaustive about this topic, so I’ll TRY to be as concise as possible during said rant.

The “straw” for this back-breaking article is this article posted on Engadget this week (the result of a Q&A session at the MIX conference).  In short, it states that the new Windows Phone 7 Series phones will not have copy/paste functionality, nor will they have true multitasking (a la the card system found on the Palm Pre).  SAD.  PANDA.

As a tech aficionado, I have always been keenly interested in standing back and watching these large companies lumber around the world and gasping as I watch them drop their feet at the right and wrong places, usually to the corresponding level of approval of their fans/consumers.  What has been of particular note to me is watching the handful of titans in the industry in question (in this case mobile phones) dance the dance of what I refer to as “The Three I’s”: Imitating/Improving/Innovating.

Offering an aside, Khidr and I have discussed many times that, as much as we want to believe the marketing speak about how the customer is central focus of these companies,  but the not-too-awfully-harsh reality is that the paying customer is the central focus.  Companies of these sizes are driven by where the dollars are (guided in many cases by shareholders), and the choices they make have to be geared towards the most lucrative sectors.  And as tech aficionados, we have to come to the realization that, even though we are generally willing to part with early adopter dollars (which offer a pretty intense premium *cough* iPhone launch price *cough*), we are also quite discerning with our discretionary income, and therefore we make up a painfully small (though increasingly vocal) portion of the consumer base.

Getting back to The Three I’s, though.  The announcement that WP7S phones are not going to be offering copy/paste functionality smacks of de ja vu, and smacks largely of the first I, imitation.  Indeed, copy/paste took over two years to finally arrive for the iPhone.  More importantly though, looking over the WP7S announcements and OS specifications, it’s not all that difficult to see where their inspiration is coming from in lots of areas.  To keep perspective, everyone from the most jaded fanboy to the most non-tech-savvy individual on the connected planet needs to be perfectly clear about how amazing the iPhone has been, both commercially and for the mobile industry at large, due in no small part to the almost alien technology that seemed to power it when if first came out.  I’d like to take a moment to quote Paul Thurott from Part 2 of his iPhone review (this stuck with me long after I read it):

Make no mistake, the iPhone is one gorgeous device. I’m not exactly a social butterfly, but people have approached me to discuss the iPhone I’m holding in numbers that I’ve never experienced. (The only thing that ever came close was my 12-inch PowerBook G3, also an Apple device, which used to garner unsolicited comments from people on a fairly regular basis years ago.) As is customary now with Apple mobile devices, the iPhone is much thinner and lighter in person than you assume it will be after viewing photos of it online. Its screen is sleeker and more photo-realistic than seems possible. It looks, almost, like a device from the future, and as one reviewer accurately put it (in a rare example where mainstream press hyperbole is actually true), the iPhone makes all other smart phones look like Soviet-era machinery by comparison. No doubt about it, there’s the iPhone and then there’s everything else.

What Apple has done is re-invented the smartphone in such a potent way that it has introduced it to a truly untapped sector of people who never even considered playing with the fathers of smartphones such as Blackberries and WinMo/PocketPC devices of yore.  (As a video game nut, it merits mention that a similar thing has happened with Nintendo’s Wii, and the motion controller launching this year from Microsoft and Sony are painfully relevant echoes of the mobile phone topic we are discussing today).

Microsoft smells that money, and they are moving, unabashedly, in that direction.

The piece of this that hurts the most is that we as the tech consumer don’t really mind a bit of imitation when it is sprinkled with the right level of improvement (and a dash of innovation is of course the “magic” that pushes things into the stratosphere).  The iPhone IS  a great smartphone, but there are serious missteps (widely publicized I might add) that don’t also require imitation.  Yes, the iPhone was hugely successful, but it was DESPITE those missteps, not because of them.  This is not some arcane magical spell that needs to be repeated verbatim to open the secret door to a customer’s heart.  Why can’t we take what is great and step things up in the areas that so sorely need improvement?

This not to say that there is zero improvement present in the WP7S phones.  The superior Zune music service and the state-of-the-art Xbox Live ecosystem will have varying-yet-pervasive levels of integration into the phone experience, the much-more-stringent hardware requirements will ensure a much-more-consistent experience throughout the various hardware and carrier partners (which in and of itself is another improvement to the AT&T-locked, Apple-bred hardware we are used to), and the strong leverage of other Microsoft products such as Bing will make your phone an much more omniscient device when it comes to using your device for small, tech-benefiting life choices such as “which Texas BBQ places are close to me?” (hint: the answer will always be Salt Lick).  And let’s not forget the hub system; if true innovation is to be found in the W7PS phones, this hub system is where you’ll find it.  For the first time in modern computing, there is an OS-level, user-independent categorization of your applications.  The idea that a music app just magically lives and can be accessed in the music hub is the kind of brilliant elegance that I first saw in the online “it just fucking works” experience that Xbox Live affords gamers.

But copy/paste guys?  Let’s not forget that Windows Mobile (you know, the “old and busted” Microsoft doesn’t want to talk about anymore) has always been a strong presence in the business world (RIM and Microsoft have always sparred in that ring without contest), and things like copy/paste and multitasking are parts of the business world that, regardless of implementation (which has certainly caused its own problems), keep users productive on-the-go.  Unilaterally purging those features simply because Apple did feels extremely short-sighted.  I stand by the fact that Microsoft has some of the brightest software engineers in the business, so I’m sure there are other intricacies that went into the decision, but without a clear-cut answer (per that recent post on Engadget, “Microsoft says most users, including Office users, don’t really need clipboard functionality”. Yeah…), we are left with a fairly obvious aping of the Apple strategy in a quest to ape their business success.

Turning the discussion briefly to Google, it’s also interesting that they are glomming (I’ve always hated that word) off of the old strategy that Microsoft used to fuel the Windows Mobile machine through version 6.5: namely, a strategy of scatter-shooting your OS onto as many platforms as will have you and bifurcating your OS in a strange class-based system (Android 1.x vs. 2.x) depending on the hardware performance.   I find this a little bit disturbing (indeed the Monolith that is Microsoft was nimble enough to abandon this model all but entirely), and also pretty heavily weighted to the imitation portion of the spectrum (although again, not taking away from their other I’s, we have improvement showing in the stronger overall integration with their services, and their innovation shown in the bottom-just-dropped-out-of-the-GPS-business announcement of free Google Navigation for those blessed with Android 2.x).

A special mention during all of these enormous moves/choices that these companies are making must be made to Palm.  The Pre truly represents a stake in the ground as far as marrying many of the best choices all of these recent developments.  I applaud them for offering strong multitasking, controlled hardware partnerships, and careful expansion to multiple carriers, all wrapped in a mostly-intuitive package.  It is certainly not a media phone, no question there (something I think should be a new category now that the iPhone has stiff competition in WP7S), but there is a purity about the Palm approach in webOS that is impressive in this time, and they (in my opinion) have innovated in a more pronounced way than all of their competitors.

It is perhaps with a heavy heart that this must be considered with only a nominal amount of importance in this day and age; Palm has literally pulled themselves away from the jaws of Hell with a major re-invention of their approach to smartphones, and much of the financial momentum they would have enjoyed has been swallowed in a nearly unprecedented rescue effort for the company.  Meanwhile, these other juggernauts (Microsoft/Google/Apple) have had the luxury of offering merely a piece of the smartphone puzzle, and when it doesn’t work they simply float through on the strengths of the other legs of their business.  It’s great business, but it slows the pace of innovation, and it is we the consumer (paying or otherwise) that suffer.

On the other hand, we haven’t seen the Pre or Pixi spread to any other carriers, and we’ve seen the launch of the Droid, and with that, all manner of analyst write-ups signaling the end of Palm.  It makes sense that, with big red’s media blitz of all things “Droooooid,” eyes would glass over a bit, but it’s way too soon to count Palm out, especially considering that the Droid, while much prettier than previous Android phones, is still running the same OS that was in the marketplace when the Pre launched 6 months ago.

That said, it’s crystal clear that Palm has a couple of moves it needs to make once we get through this long December.

1. Carriers

It’s been absolutely beat to death, but it needs to be said again and again.  Sprint is bleeding out, and no matter how sexy your hardware, it just isn’t a carrier most people are willing to move to to get your phone.  This is a soft spot for me, since I migrated to the Pre with my fiancee because we wanted to be on Sprint.  Since we’re both heavy data users, the Sprint Family Data plan was by about 40-50.00 the cheapest plan available on any carrier.  129.00 a month gets us basically unlimited voice (especially with unlimited mobile to mobile going to any carrier’s cellphone), unlimited text, and unlimited data.  It just can’t be done cheaper anywhere else.

But, people still hate Sprint, and if Palm is going to have a chance at the kind of super adoption it needs, they need to cell the phone through more carriers.  Verizon is an obvious choice, and has been mentioned most often, but along with that, I think it’s important to offer a GSM version compatible with AT&T.  The lack of Iphone competitors on AT&T certainly makes that possibility look bleak, but instead, I’d recommend offering an unlocked GSM version for direct retail sale, as they did with the Treo Pro.  If they can get the retail price to a reasonable point (sub $500.00), while they might not move a ton of units, they will gain a huge amount of mindshare just by being available.

2. Multimedia

The WebOS platform is still lagging as a media device.  There’s been considerable (wasted) effort to continue the cat and mouse game of hacking itunes compatibility.  That effort is useless if the Pre is not where I want to keep my music.  I’ve already replaced the default music player with the remixed homebrew version by Hedami Software.  This should be a major point of focus, especially since Palm is going after the consumer market.  It could also be a huge point of distinction between WebOS and the equally anemic media qualities of Android.

3. Native Apps

WebOS is amazing in how it uses web standards to build apps.  Having zero prior experience programming, I was able to build a working (but ugly and buggy) game in a couple of days.  It absolutely lowers the barrier to app creation, and with Palm’s upcoming Ares platform, all the budding developer will need is a dream and some time.  That said, the lack of graphically intensive apps, especially games on the platform is a major limitation of the platform and something that, ultimately, will not make it a decent alternative to people sucked in by Apple’s gravitational pull.  Palm needs to turn on that graphics chip collecting dust inside the Pre and give developers a way to get at it, it’s that simple.

4. Community Involvement

I mentioned that my solution to the gimpy media player was to install a homebrewed alternative.  There are hundreds of community made patches that improve, fix, or augment bits of the platform.  For example, in the unpatched email program, if you swipe an email off the screen (a common WebOS gesture), you delete it.  I mean, you seriously delete it.  It’s gone buddy, hope you didn’t need it.  There’s a patch that enables a confirmation to appear under the swiped away email “delete, or cancel.” It’s simple, and absolutely necessary.  I think one surefire way for Palm to get ahead, being the substantially smaller than Google and Apple and Rim and Microsoft company that it is, is to incorporate the best of these patches into their updates.  Just give credit for community contributions on a credits page somewhere.  You have a passionate community that is working hard to improve this phone, so it should be used wherever the community has succeeded.

That’s pretty much it.  There’s still plenty of room in this market for competition, but Palm definitely needs to be already thinking about WebOS 2.0, and where to take the platform next year to stay one step ahead of the next Iphone if they’re going to have a shot.  Here’s hoping they do.

Things I like/love:

Email, Calendar, and Messaging – These all just work the way you’d expect them to.  On the messaging front, the built in IM client only does Gtalk and AIM, which is nice, but I would very much like to get my live ID in there as well.   Email is a joy to use.  The fonts Palm chose and the interface is just spectacular.  For Gmail, all of my sub-folders are there which really helps with mobile organization.  Deleting messages is just a swipe to the right to slide them off the screen into that big junk-mail box in the sky. 

The Calendar syncs with ALL of my Google calendars, and lets me view that information however I want (all, none, one or two, etc…)

The Messaging is quick, integrates with universal search on the device, and provides a single interface for SMS and chat, with your SMS messages threaded just like IMs.  

The fact that all of this is seamless, and I got all of this set up just by putting my Google info in once (for the email) just goes to show how much thought went into their planning this device as a pipeline into your online identity.

WebOS is beautiful.  It’s not immediately intuitive, but Palm decided to choose a few simple metaphors that ultimately pay off in usability at the expense of immediate approachability/familiarity.  Here’s a few examples:
The Pre has the gesture area, which someone coming from any other phone may not immediately realize.  It’s incredibly useful, but you have to 1) know it’s there, and 2) know what the gestures do.  When you first boot up the phone, Palm has a little welcome video and brief tutorial to teach you the back gesture.  The feedback is very nice as there are two soft leds on either side of the single button to let you know if it realized you swiped back or forward. 

If you want to close an app, you need to "minimize it" to it’s card by either pressing the single button (which will always do the zoom out), or swipe up on the gesture area quickly to minimize the app.  Once you’re in your card view, you just flick the app up to toss it away.  The functionality is really nice in that you can quickly switch between open applications (much faster than I ever could on windows mobile, although SPB Mobile Shell 3′s task manager helped with that a little bit) or close out of an application you don’t want anymore.  The functionality and the metaphor works beautifully, but if you didn’t know that that’s how it’s done, I could see a new user getting a little nervous that there’s no "X" on the app.
Another really useful motion that I didn’t know about until another Pre user showed me, is that you can access your quick launch (4 programs and your launcher key)  by slowly dragging up from the gesture area.  You can call this up even if you’re in a program.  In practice, I’m not sure if this is really necessary since flicking up quickly or pressing the single button will minimize your app, and show you your quick launch anyway, but in practice, it’s one less button press to get where you want to go. 

Moving icons around, or adding them to your dock is a simple affair, just click and hold to while you’re in the launcher menu to drag one of the four icons off your quick launcher to free up a spot, and then do the same to drag a new application down.  It works, and once you know how it works, it works effortlessly, but I wouldn’t have understood intuitively that I had to get rid of one of the icons before I could add a new one, instead, I probably would’ve just assumed that those icons are not for me to change. 

One other thing that I didn’t find right away that should’ve been touted loudly, is that you can save any webpage as an "app" so you get a little icon, and a quick launch right from the applications menu.  Very nice for example to get greader access, or any other site you visit regularly.

Overall though, the interface, the card system for applications (new applications get their own card, and applications can generate new cards for specific tasks, so for e.g. you’re in your email, and you go to start a new email – the compose screen gets it’s own card, so you can flick back and forth, or do other things while you’re composing, look at other emails, etc…) works really, really well.

Things I don’t like:

There is no way to save things like pictures or media files (podcasts, etc…) from the browser.  This is my biggest WTF yet.  I mean, seriously, how dumb is that.  I have a beautiful phone with a full web browsing experience that is fast and ridiculously beefy at rendering pages, and I also have a device with a great media player and beautiful home screen that I’d like to add wallpaper to.  So why the hell can’t I download a podcast or save a picture to my collection, or for that matter simply set a photo as my wallpaper.  Really really silly omission.  Dear Palm, please fix this.  Soon.

The usb cover.  I’m used to devices that let their jacks hang out in the open.  Minor gripe, but considering the battery life is not what it was on the treo pro, I do have to plug it in from time to time, so this could be easier. 

Lack of apps.  Speaks for itself.  Will be fixed.
Ultimately, it’s by far the best phone I’ve ever had bar none.

Any other Pre users out there? What do you think so far.