iPhone's single-task operating system renders it a poor man's Nokia

This afternoon it was snowing in Chiswick. That is unusual because it’s so near the city of London which seems to give off a load of heat meaning that whilst everyone else in the area is deluged in snow at the moment, we’ve had a bit of rain.

Only this afternoon, something strange happened with the weather and woosh, down came the snow.

I was on my way to get some shopping when it did. I thought I’d record the moment with my iPhone 3GS.

I took pretty decent photo of some snow falling. Here it is, as a matter of fact:

I took the picture using the Flickr app. Of course there are multiple methods of taking pictures and transmitting them to places via the iPhone. But I decided to use Flickr.

I used the ‘capture from camera’ function now familiar to us all. I confirmed I was happy with the photo and hit ‘upload’.

And that’s when my trouble started.

Yes I was on Orange’s pretty good 3G network BUT I’d chosen to upload the image in full 2048×1536 resolution. And why not?

So I stood there, waiting.

Like a total plumb.

Like a total flippin’ idiot.

I stood and waited whilst the fantastically good looking blue bar slowly moved itself along the page indicating the upload journey. All around me, people on the street stared. I didn’t want to put the phone in my pocket because… well… the touchscreen might accidentally do something. I obviously couldn’t switch the phone’s screen off because that’s bad practice when your iPhone can only do one thing at a time.

So I waited.

I hung around cursing the iPhone and the one-thing-at-a-time operating system chugged along.

I waited some more.

I thought to myself, ‘What the fluck am I doing, standing in the street, waiting for my technology to perform?’

The whole concept, you see, was not to snap a picture — the iPhone can do that very nicely now — but to capture-transmit-and-share my experience.

I should have taken my Nokia N86 with me. Running ShoZu. It’s gorgeous camera would have done a much better job — but the whole experience would have been about a billion times better. Here’s why. For those who don’t know (and there are a lot of you), here’s how the Nokia platform — allied with ShoZu (or using Nokia’s own Ovi share service) works:

With the Nokia N86:

1. Take out the phone, activate the camera
2. Snap the picture — the picture is automatically tagged with your GPS location
3. Check you are happy with the picture
4. 2 seconds later, the ShoZu app prompts you: “Send this to Flickr?” You click “Ok”
5. Put the phone back in your pocket, get on with your day
6. Total time commitment: 4-5 seconds

With the iPhone:
1. Take out the phone. Because I want to share immediately, I activate my application of choice — in this case, Flickr. But I could have used ShoZu, Tweetie, Twitpic Uploader or a ton of other apps
2. Click on the ‘grab from camera’ option
3. Snap the picture
4. Press upload and wait whilst the stupid blue line inches across the screen
5. Total time commitment: 30-90 seconds, depending on network speed

The Nokia user model wins hands down. (Although I agree that the rest of the user model isn’t quite on par with the iPhone).

I understand that I could have taken the photo on the iPhone and just kept it in my ‘album’ for when I got home — or for when I got near a fast hotspot. But what I wanted to do was share immediately.

And the iPhone sucks at this.

It totally blows.

I found myself longing for the N86 because the experience would have been so much better, so quicker, so much smoother.

Sadly it doesn’t appear as though multi-tasking is coming any time soon to the iPhone. I’ll tell you why. A few months ago, I was at a meal where a senior, senior Apple iPhone person was in attendance. I gave a commitment never to mention the precise location his or her identify, or their job title. I’ll refer to them as a ‘chap’ but they could well be female. I was one of the only Europeans in attendance (so, yeah, the location was somewhere in North America) and the chap from Apple was holding court on our table.

We all took it in turns to politely fire questions at the chap. Everyone around him threw him warm and fuzzy questions about how-much-they-loved-the-iPhone (and so on). There were, incidentally, iPhones in every hand. I had my iPhone and my (ageing) N95. When my turn came, I asked about multi-task support.

The chap leaned forward ignoring the rest of the group.

“Tell me why? Why do you want that?” he asked.

“Err, well…” I replied, slightly surprised. From his demeanour, I inferred that this was an issue he (or she) had been exploring in-depth with other Apple people.

I continued, “If I’m using Google Maps and I need to look at my calendar, I don’t want to have to lose my position, or if I’m running a particular application — of which, as we all know, there are TONS — I don’t want to have to ‘start again’ when I click the main menu.”

I’m sad to say that at this point the chap’s (or lady’s) eyes appeared to glaze over. I’d lost him.

I tried again.

“When I’m running Evernote,” I explained, “I have to WAIT for it to upload things before I can quit. I’d like it to do that in the background?”

The chap deployed a strategically placed fake smile at me — intimating to the rest of the group that I was a total weirdo and that no sane person would ever want to do this.

So I don’t think we’ll have multi-tasking for a little while yet. Which is a shame. I’m getting very, very tired having to think in a linear fashion with my iPhone.

It is for this reason that my primary handset is a (multi-task capable) BlackBerry — mostly because I really, really like the physical keyboard. I then typically carry an iPhone 3GS and/or my N86 as a secondary device.

I’d like to see some Android devices with proper N86-standard cameras at some point too. Won’t somebody please make an Android device with a decent QWERTY keyboard and a proper camera (not just a high spec megapixel one that’s not any good) with decent flash?

Is anyone else getting annoyed by the one-thing-at-a-time iPhone user model? Does anyone else get an elicit buzz out of hitting ’email’ and letting the device automatically check email in the background? 😉

Orrrr… is it just me?