[QUOTE=Red Barchetta]
Let me revise:
Can one do anything meaningful on a 3.5" screen? Sure.
Do I want want to attempt to do anything meaningful on a 3.5" screen? Hell no.
I’ve tried various portable internet devices, and surfing the web was painful on each and every one of them. Now I’m not saying it’s not a nice bonus, but it’s hardly worth of being hyped as a primary feature.
[/QUOTE]
Eh, I find I can do plenty on my 3.7" screen. I listed all the sites I regularly visit every day on my device. All of them are perfectly usable in their mobile incarnations. If that doesn’t count as “something meaningful” then I don’t know what does.
[QUOTE=Cuckoorex]
Warning: the Mac faithful are going to hate this post, and I fully anticipate a flurry of “you don’t get it” and “if you hate Macs why even reply” posts.
The iPhone totally underwhelmed me. I use PCs and Macs, and I readily acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. As a graphics professional, I relish the Mac. As a consumer of entertainment in the form of games and movies and web sites, I prefer the PC. I’m pretty comfortable with both platforms and don’t have a strong bias one way or the other. However, while I think that the iPhone is ambitious in concept, ultimately I have little use for it; count me among those that are asking, “what’s the big deal?”
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I’m not a mac faithful, I don’t even own a single apple product but surely you can see the difference between “I don’t have a use for it” and “whats the big deal”. So you’re not part of the target market, thats no big deal. The iPhone isn’t supposed to appeal to everybody.
The average youtube clip appears on your screen much smaller than 3.5" yet look at the explosive growth of youtube. That people do not want to watch tiny video is something that has already been proven wrong. If the platform is compelling enough, quality takes the back seat to almost everything. Would you want to watch the entire LoTR trilogy on your iPhone? Probably not. Would you want to watch short, funny, 3 minute long vigenette soap operas? Maybe.
[QUOTE=Happy Wanderer]
I have seen some experienced users type pretty darn fast on the dreaded physical keyboard. Can Mr. Jobs show me a study that says that with practice you top out faster on his keyboard than a physical switch one? I doubt if he can.
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This is just pure Jobsian RDF. Thing is, we’ve known for about… oh… 20 years now that physical keyboards can type faster than virtual keyboards of the same size. Apple knows that, every single smartphone maker knows that, it wasn’t boneheaded stupidity that made them take up 40% of the phone with a keyboard. The iPhone will never be a full replacement for the blackberry or any of those other text-centric devices for precisely that manner.
[QUOTE=audiobottle]
Regarding the smartphone aspects of it: from what I’ve read, it is not a smartphone in the sense that you can install 3rd party apps on it. You’re pretty much Apple’s bitch when you get the phone. That’s cool with some people, and it will probably turn off a whole bunch too. I’m with the poster who said wait for the 2nd generation. I think that’s usually the best advice with any new gadget. That doesn’t stop me from drooling all over it though.
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I very much doubt this. At the very least, you can install widgets. Theres absolutely no compelling reason whatsoever for them to limit the platform. What could they possibly gain from that?
[QUOTE=RumMunkey]
Well this place, for one, would do just fine on the iPhone screen I think.
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I was actually reading this thread on my PDA because my lecture was really boring.
[QUOTE=rjung]
You must’ve skipped the keynote. He specifically dissed the watered-down mobile-friendly websites and the limited web browsing capability of existing cell phones. The iPhone lets you surf the web exactly as if you were behind a computer, and Jobs demonstrated browsing Amazon and the NYT on it.
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This is another Jobsian RDF. Technically, he’s sort of correct, no smartphone can match the experience of the iPhone but I can almost guarentee that my PDA shits all over the iPhone in web surfing experience for the simple fact that it has twice as many pixels. For mobile devices, pixels is king. The more pixels you have, the better websurfing experience you have and the only reason the iPhone is better than the current smartphones is because it has more pixels, not for any other reason.
Smartphones don’t let you surf the web exactly like on a desktop? Guess what, thats a feature not a bug. You don’t want to surf the web like it’s on a desktop because the thing you have in your hands isn’t a desktop. Again, we’ve known this for, oh, 15 or so years now.
What you mainly want for any web surfing experience is to minimise the amount of left-right scrolling. The way you do that for mobile devices is to implement some sort of reflow algorithm that rearranges the website to fit into a much narrower screen. The only reason Jobs presented it that way is because it looks like Safari doesn’t have any reflow capabilites. The desktop view is all you’re going to get which means reading wide text is going to involve a lot of left and right scrolling.
The other thing he glossed over is selection. With a mouse, your accurate selection region is about (very roughly) + or - 2 pixels which means interface elements have to be roughly 5x5 pixels minimum to be useable. A stylus is slightly worse because you have to jab at the area you want to select so your interface elements need to be a bit bigger, around 10x10 pixels or so. Fingers though, are horrible and fat. you really need about 30x30 pixels to acheive anything. This might be fine when you get to design your own interfaces a la apple by making everything huge but it’s going to suck balls for the web, especially with no reflow. Trying to accurately select a link to click on is going to be a major frustration. Again, this is something that has been known for the past 20 years or so.
The pinch gesture might alleviate that to some extent but it’s inherently a two handed gesture which limits it’s applicability. It’ll be interesting to see how that all plays out.
