Teradome.

Using an iPhone is a bit like using nothing at all. It really is a remarkable product. Everything about the device and hardware melts away, and the efficiencies of the interface (even in the original, as noticed in my wife’s 1st-gen iPhone) reduces almost all the friction between you and the task you need to accomplish.

Not surprisingly, it leaves me a little cold, although I am warming up to it. I’m the kind of mobile enthusiast who looks at a device and sees it as the assemblage of components and not as a single whole. I like to see the best pieces possible used, or to have an mental image of how it’s put together. Think of a motorcycle mechanic and his ride — he’s thinking about how all the pieces are put together and how each bit can be tweaked out further. My Nokia phones were perfect for this; solid brand, great phones, just enough industrial design to expose bits but still make them slick.

The iPhone is kind of the antithesis to all that. It’s almost impersonal in it’s ultra-minimalistic design. Yet imagine the smoothest-riding motorcycle is the world, one that feels like you’re riding on nothing but clouds. That’s the UI experience of the device. I don’t have all the fine settings or features in the iPhone browser that I do in S60, but on average I’m doing the everyday things at least twice as fast (if not faster) on it compared to S60. Sometimes it’s the hardware speed, sometimes it’s the number of clicks/presses, sometimes it’s both. iPhone OS is liquid quick in all regards.

Go check out 0:40 of this video of the N97 2.0 firmware coming soon — it highlights a number of things: a general slowness of the UI, the lack of a hardware shortcut to the music player, how launching Music always takes you to this “everything Music” home screen, and certain glitches of returning to it backgrounded, such as briefly seeing the Now Playing screen flash before getting to browse your library. None of this existed in the iPhone before, and this is the current experience of Nokia’s flagship phone today. For someone with no previous interest in S60, its no wonder why they would consider this unbelievably janky.

I do miss the multitasking of the device, mostly when wanting to do a little dictionary or Wikipedia lookup in the middle of composing a Twitter update. The irony was that the device was so strapped for RAM that, more often than not, opening a new application would cause the memory manager to quit one of the running background applications, usually the Twitter client. The personalized homescreen with live widgets was a noble idea, but because widgets are fed by their full applications, they were victims of memory management too, resulting in a widget’s app being quit and having home screen content not updated for hours on end.

Basically, I’ve left Nokia because they’ve lost my confidence. I trust their intentions, their commitment to industrial design, their belief in mobility and certainly in how it will change the developing world for the better, but I can’t be confident that the products they build for me the power user, or even for me the North American, will be the right products. It started with the mishandling of the Maemo community, from OS2007 HE to “Fixed in Fremantle”, but ended with a 6 month marketing campaign for a “flagship” product that gets trumped only 2 months later. The personal sting to all of this is that historically Nokia has only supported AT&T 3G bands, but their new Maemo device is T-Mobile 3G only — and I was one of those fans that switched to AT&T not for an iPhone, but for data on an N95.

So now I’m sitting where I need to be culturally in this mobile battle. In the US, with the US brand leader, with the top of the line experience of right now. I miss that underdog feeling of rooting for Nokia (if you can call rooting for Nokia that) in the States, wanting some European flavor to finally break through the American wall of Sidekicks and Blackberries. Perhaps Nokia will finally make the deals they need to make to get their top phones subsidized here and maybe people will see them more than a dumbphone provider. It’s just unfortunate that they had to burn through so much trust to get to this point — considering the level of attention they’ve given the States before, it was the only currency they’ve had up until now.