In an article and a video, DN’s technology reporter Yvonne Edenholm discusses the Samsung Omnia, a medicre phone at best. Edenholm, however, suggests that the Omnia posts a serious threat to the iPhone. Looking at how she demoes the phone however, I seriously doubt any form of threat. It just goes to show exactly how crappy the UI and the touchscreen of the Omnia is.

Let’s examine it more closely.

• At 00:48: Edenholm drags a widget to some sort of start screen. The animation is extremely choppy.
• At 00:53: After removing two other widgets, she attempts to remove the widget she added at 00:48. Even after several tries the phone doesn’t recognize the gesture as trying to move the widget.
• At 00:55: She adds a clock widget. There is a very visible delay between her dropping the widget and it actually appearing. After appearing, without her tapping it, it opens the clock panel.
• At 01:00: She double taps the clock widget to bring up the clock panel (again), the clock widget moves around in the middle of the double tap.
• At 01:04: It takes several tries to close the clock panel.
• At 01:07: She tries to drag some sort of game widget to the the screen. The phone instead minimizes the widget menu.
• At 01:13: She tries to drag the clock widget back to the widget menu. The clock did not go in to the menu, but instead went behind it.

This is the phone that you think might be an iPhone killer? Are you serious?

I find it somewhat ironic that the new ads for Vista brings out some of the worst parts of Vista. I’m not talking about parent controls as a bad thing, they’re not. I’m talking about the text in the dialog box.

Still not getting it? I’ll lay it out for you. Why, oh, why does it say msnmsgr.exe? Why not Windows Live Messenger (or whatever they’re calling it)?

For your reference, this is how it looks in Mac OS X Leopard:

Not to say that this is perfect. I’d use the application icon instead of the Finder icon and it might also be a good idea to explain that the next thing you need to do after clicking one of those allow-buttons is to enter an administrator password, but it’s not a Vistaster.

Bonus: The screenshot is a screenshot of when the movie is paused. Yes, to start playing the movie again, you press the pause-button, and to pause the movie, you press the play-button. Logical, isn’t it?

It seems that I am not the only one who thinks the App Store is revolutionary

As for MobileMe itself, in the beginning the web interface, albeit nice looking; was pretty slow, and the iDisk is very slow. Still, I am generally positive. Sure, it could be a bit cheaper, and they really should make the iDisk faster, but all in all, it’s a good product, and you get a lot from it. It’s very clear that a MobileMe account makes your Mac experience even better.

I give it 8 thumbs up (out of 10).

However, there is one feature that the anti-iPhonists seem to underestimate, and that is the power of the App Store. iPhone really is the first truly mobile platform. Sure, there’s been apps for other phones, but never with a support from as many companies and with an average quality as high as the ones for the iPhone. To me, as a developer, the iPhone is really exciting for several reasons.

• It really is a location agnostic platform. People bring it with them everywhere. This opens up tons of possibilities for apps that help with everyday life.
• While it is somewhat of a commodity, it certainly isn’t just for the techies or businessmen, like so many smartphones before it.
• The API and the developer tools are great. On other smartphones you have you use either craptastic Java or something like Symbian or Windows Mobile. Most apps are made in Java, which makes them horrible, and both Symbian and Windows Mobile are horribly bad API-wise (and otherwise too).
• The App Store makes selling your apps really easy. The 30% cut Apple takes is a very low price, and because it is the only channel for apps, good apps will get proper exposure.

Thanks to the App Store, the iPhone really will be the iPod of the phone world.

Blogging from the iPhone also makes me realize how wonderful Markdown is. If you’re not using it, you really should check it out.

Typing using two thumbs is surprisingly good on the iPhone, even though I have very large hands. The word prediction works surprisingly well.

So, which are these awesome apps, worthy of my excitement?

Existing apps:

• Twinkle: Awesome Twitter client from the folks at Tapulous. The best twitter client out there, really; which says a lot, seeing as it has some very tough (ADA-winning) competition from Twitteriffic.
• OmniFocus: I’ve learned to expect greatness from the folks at Omni Group. The ADA-winning iPhone version of OmniFocus is no exception. It has built-in syncing with the Mac app, which makes this the best GTD app for the iPhone.
• Super Monkey Ball: Really cool, not to mention very favorably priced; iPhone game. Stunning graphics, innovative controls, this has everything needed for a great game.
• Brain Challenge: This little nugget of gold I bought yesterday, and it too is a very good game. I have only used it for two days now, but I’m hooked. It is varied, it comes with different difficulty settings, so that you can make it as hard or as easy as you wish and it’s a blast to play.
• Tap Tap Revenge: Another app from Tapulous. It’s a really fun game, and if you think that SMB is favorably priced, Tap Tap Revenge is even more so, seeing as how it’s free. It does leave things to wish for, namely more songs, but that is on it’s way.
• Enigmo: This is the second ADA winner of this list. A challenging game, which works really well for the iPhone. You may remember that Brian Greenstone from Pangea Software talked about this at the WWDC keynote, and said that they think the iPhone version is even better than the Mac version. I totally agree. This is a game that is great on the iPhone.

All of these apps are excellent, not to mention worth their price. In all of the above cases I think the developers easily could have added another $5-$10, and it would still have been worth it’s price.

I do want to give an honorable mention to another app as well, Exposure¹ by Connected Flow. It’s a Flickr client, and at that a pretty good one. Well, it is the best one available for the iPhone, and while a lot of things works very well, photo viewing could work even better, and I certainly look forward to seeing what happens with the app with future updates.

Upcoming apps:

• Friend Book: This app was out on the App Store for a while, but was pulled due to privacy concerns. This is another app from Tapulous, and with the high quality they’ve had already I expect nothing less from Friend Book.
• Rolando: Holy Macaroni, this game looks like a ton of fun! Some people have compared it to Loco Roco for the PSP, and while I recognize that certain elements are similar, Rolando looks like an awesome game. I can’t wait until it’s released.
• MarsEdit: There have been some whispers of an iPhone version of MarsEdit on Daniel Jalkut’s Red Sweater Blog. It will be very interesting to see what he cooks up.
• Béchamel: Yes. There will be an iPhone version of Béchamel. A totally awesome iPhone version. And guess what? I’ll be able to try it out before everyone else! (Mostly because I’m developing it ) While we’re not ready to release any specifics, be prepared to have your minds blown.
• Secret upcoming iPhone App from Smiling Plants: We have another app as well, in the pipeline. It’ll be released before the iPhone version of Béchamel, and it’s going to be a very useful and very beautiful tool. Keep your eyes open.

Enough about the good. What about the bad and the ugly? Not surprisingly, there’s very little of it. Perhaps the biggest problem is that there are a couple of bugs in the OS, but I do expect that to be fixed with a software update. It would be nice to gain access to the Bluetooth module using the APIs as well. I expect this to come later. No MMS, Radio, voice dialing, whatever, blah blah woof woof. I don’t use it anyway. Does anyone really use MMS?

The App Store, while a really great idea; has some problems. There are a lot of craptastic apps. The most prominent example is the four or so “flashlight” apps. These took about 3 seconds to do, and there was no code what so ever involved in doing them. Why are they in the App Store? They are utter crap! They don’t deserve to be there!

If you don’t spend more than an hour making your app, it really has nothing to do on the App Store. Seriously. There’s also been some controversy about some developers adding leading spaces and such to their apps to have them listed first in the alphabetical listing. My view? Ban the apps and revoke the developer keys. If you can’t behave, you don’t belong with the real apps.

Apple, please clean up the App Store. Other than that, you guys have done great work, as usual.

Eldalote:~ magnus$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
  116   svn
   90   symfony
   83   cd
   43   ls
   31   ssh
   18   sudo
   18   mate
    8   man
    7   curl
    6   mkdir