I want the new iPhone

Cafe Society
101

But compare it to any other MP3 player, even any other one which existed at the time the iPod was announced. What makes the iPod so clean and simple in comparison? Cascading menus have been around forever. Yes, a lot of people compliment the iPod for its interface, but a lot of people complimented the emperor for his new clothes too - Steve Jobs seems to have a similar effect on people.

In my experience as a new iPod owner, the interface really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Ever tried to move just one click at a time with the click wheel? It takes twice as long as moving two clicks, because you either overshoot or move s-l-o-w-l-y to avoid overshooting. How about turning the backlight on after it’s turned itself off (e.g. to see which song just came up during shuffle)? Every button you might press to do that also changes something important. How about jumping to a related song - “Tainted Love” by Marilyn Manson shuffles up, and you feel like listening to the original instead? Hope you enjoy those cascading menus, because now you have to go through all of them again.

I just don’t see what’s so bad about the UI on every other MP3 player.

102

Right, in their mobile incarnations. The supposed big deal about the iPhone is that it’s a full html browser, meaning you can go to normal websites.

103

Just to reiterate about the QWERTY keyboard. This uses a technology similar to predictive text. Basically it gets an idea of the word you meant to type based on a dictionary. So if you actually type heooo instead of hello, the dictionary will realize that there is no word “heooo” and look for words based on keystrokes around the O.

104

You’re misunderstanding me; my gripe is that they’re presenting all these things as if they innovated them from scratch. Yes, it looks like they’ve put a lot of work into the usability and gloss of the interface, and that counts for a great deal - for some people; not so much for others, but as I say, what irks me is the presentation of unoriginal ideas (for example SMS messaging as chat conversations - I’ve been doing that on my Treo for years) as if they never existed before and were something Apple only just invented.

105

People keep on bringing this up as if it’s some kind of feature, it’s not. Desktop webpages are designed to be viewed on the desktop. They’re designed to be viewed by someone with a keyboard, a mouse and a screen 800x600 or larger. There’s no way to translate that experience onto a PDA, it’s simply not possible and nor should it be. Instead, webpages should be designed in such a way that they are presented in a way optimal for the viewing device. Again, this is not something new. The original HTML specification was specifically designed as a markup language that was to be device agnostic. CSS was designed again to provide the same functionality and has, built into the language, knowledge about how to deal with mobile devices.

Safari for the iPhone represents a step backwards for mobile web browing because it doesn’t even bother trying to adapt pages to fit the small screen. That this is touted as a “feature” is laughable.

106

Predictive text for virtual keyboards has been done since the original palm pilots. I highly doubt apple is going to come up with anything groundbreaking in this area that nobody has ever thought of before.

Incidentally:

  • The speaker is on the bottom? WTF?
  • Since cars are coming with ipod integration anyway, if only this thing had GPS it would make the perfect plug in car sat nav system. That feature alone would ease a lot of people’s qualms about the price.
107

I dunno - the touchscreen might actually be the most interesting feature of the device - typing on a conventional touchscreen virtual KB is a real chore because you have to make sure you lift your finger and wait a little while before pressing the next virtual key - a screen able to detect multiple touches at the same time can overcome that.
This multi-touch thing can be pretty impressive and I think there are ways to use it to improve the pointing accuracy of even a stubby finger.

108

Thats not the main problem with touch screen keyboards. Error rates are so high, you need to stop after each key anyway to make sure you typed in the right thing. And error rates are high because a) fat fingers and b) there’s no tactile response. I just tried again on my own PDA just to be sure and the multiple selection thing was never an issue. Your thumbs aren’t fast enough and they get into each others way too much for it to be an issue.

There is but nothing that you would want to actually use. Also, ironically, that’s also something thats come out of Microsoft labs.

109

Tactile response is a big one, I’m not so sure about the accuracy - a good deal of that depends on the way the sensor technology actually works and how smart is the software implementation, still, I don’t see how it would be even remotely possible to ‘type’ on a keyboard that is the width of this device, so it may be a moot point.

110

I’ve used predictive text before, and it’s nowhere close to perfect. For example if I want to type in “drop”. If I am little below it might go with crop, if I am a bit to the left on the “d” it might think I am trying to do stop. My experience with predictive typing has not been very good.

It’s not people, it’s Apple. Look at their page, iPhone - Apple, prominently listed is “Breakthrough Internet Device”. Which leads you to a page that says:

“Phone features a rich HTML email client and Safari — the most advanced web browser ever on a portable device — which automatically syncs bookmarks from your PC or Mac. Safari also includes built-in Google and Yahoo! search. iPhone is fully multi-tasking, so you can read a web page while downloading your email in the background over Wi-Fi or EDGE.”

The HTML ability is the big sell.

111

Text-heavy sites such as this one do better than just fine on my 2.5" phone screen. Examples: Opera, in reduced mode, Opera, in desktop mode, Built-in browser. The built-in browser is based on the Safari engine and licensed from Apple, BTW. Probably a similar experience to what’s in the iPhone right now. It has a mouse pointer you move around with the thumbstick to select items. Both of the browsers I use have features to reflow text into a single column and they support stylesheets and Javascript.

As far as what else you can do on a tiny screen, look here. The stuff I use all the time includes Google Maps, the music player, text messaging, the calendar, the camera, the gallery, and the Acrobat reader.

All of these screenshots were taken with a third-party application, of which thousands are available for the OS that the Nokia smartphones run. They were uploaded directly from the phone using the built-in Flickr client. Take a picture, hit send, select web upload, hit send.

If you want to see random screenshots of this phone’s interface, you can look on my Flickr. The reason I find the iPhone underwhelming is that the sort of stuff they’re promising has been available on other smartphones and PDAs for years. The new shininess is from the touchscreen and this visual voicemail business, but like I said, I hate touchscreens. I can type without looking on my phone’s keypad because I can feel the phone’s buttons’ outlines and I can feel when they’ve been pressed. That is something you can’t replicate with a touchscreen.

Oh, and the camera’s good too.

112

There were rumors of an iPhone and a widescreen iPod with a touch display flying around, but I figured those were both complete crap. Imagine my surprise when they were one and the same device, and were announced by Steve Jobs at Macworld.

As you can tell from my location, I’m in a great place for seeing the latest and greatest (as well as the weirdest and silliest) in mobile phone tech. I’ve been thinking of getting a new handset since my old one is close to two years old and uses MOVA instead of the newer 3G standard FOMA network, and I really dislike the interface on it. (It takes two or three menu navigations to input a new number, and you have to enter that section to put it in; you can’t simply put in the number and save it through a sub-menu. Took me 4 or 5 minutes of screwing with it before I even found out how to input a number and save it. Bloody frustrating thing.) I have the P506IC, (P means it’s made by Panasonic) which I picked for several features, (camera, screen, form-factor) but wasn’t able to demo for usability. The best handset I had for input, menu, and overall design was a Sony one. That had a scroll barrel and predictive input in Japanese that worked well and quickly for texting, even English input was easier and faster than anything else I’ve used. Slightly nicer was its successor which had a jog dial, but I never owned it.

I find nothing on the market right now that’s interesting enough to make me want to actually get a new handset. The interfaces are all pretty much the same, Sony has dropped the jog dial/scroll barrel interface since their partnership with Ericsson, and most of the included features in many handsets are nothing compelling. I don’t care about watching TV (which sucks battery like you wouldn’t believe) or iAppli, or most of the crap that’s supposed to be cool here. Only a few of the handsets include GSM, which is what I’d want for using it overseas since Japan uses a different network protocol from other countries, and the few that do are clunky. When I went to the US and Spain, I had to rent a handset from DoCoMo because mine doesn’t have GSM capability. That’s probably why Apple is using GSM, because it’s the current international standard.

I want this phone badly. I don’t care about the included iPod – in fact, I wish it wasn’t even included – but I want the interface and capabilities. I’ve been dissatisfied with the interface of every mobile I’ve used so far. It supports gestures, which should be easily extensible when OS X developers get their hands on it and Apple seems to have done a good job with it already. It supports widgets and standard web pages, which means that pretty much anything online will be accessible either through the browser or a widget. iMode-specific pages in Japan vary between sucking and being okay, and few manufacturers bother with real web capability, opting to support iMode and iApli only. I really wish it were easier to access the full internet. The zooming ability alleviates any problems with readability, though the screen, at 160 dpi, is already at a higher resolution than other devices I’ve used. I’ll bet it looks great even with small text.

The text input looks like it makes use of the kind of scaling that the current version of OS X uses in the Dock to make it easier to choose icons. That is probably what they are leveraging to make it less likely to choose the wrong letter on the keyboard, besides the technology behind the multi-touch screen. I rarely use my phone for email mostly because it’s a major pain in the ass to input anything. I hate having to hit a key several times to get the right letter and having to remember how many presses to get to a particular character, like a dash or an apostrophe. There are a few workarounds for sending photos and other attachments through iMode, but they are clunky and painful to use. Access to real email with picture attachments would rule!

Basically, this has everything I want and few things I don’t. It’s got a terrific interface and design, and it will probably make me use mobile email a lot more than I would otherwise just because it will make inputting text much, much less painful than the devices I’ve seen. It’s right in the middle between a PDA and a phone, and that’s pretty much what I’ve been looking for but haven’t found. The downsides are of course lack of tactile feedback, price, and (for me) the possibility that it will take a long damn time to become available.

113

Eh, put me in the “What’s the big deal?” category. First of all, the touch screen is going to be a problem. As others have said, the buttons are too small. As a data point, when I use the self-scan lane at the supermarket, the buttons on the touch screens are all at least 1" by 2" in size. Entering text onto the iPhone is going to be a painful experience.

Second, I’m not a fan of bundling multiple devices into one unit. If you lose your iPhone (or it gets broken, or it’s stolen) you lose your phone, iPod, and PDA all in one fell swoop.

Third, it costs $500 !!! My current phone came free with a 2-year contract. And it can send and receive text messages or e-mail, and is web-capable. My mp3 player (a 2 gig Sandisk) cost about $150 new (it’s probably worth about half that now) and it has more features than a comparable Nano. Like they say, do the math. I don’t check e-mails on my phone or surf the web. (I can wait till I get home, where I don’t pay extra for every kilobyte of data transmitted). I wouldn’t play videos on a portable player – I use my mp3 player primarily to play music during my commute to work. (I use an FM modulator to play it through my car speakers.) I’m not going to try to watch TV shows at work or anything like that; I’m not going to risk my job by watching reruns of the Simpsons on company time.

To paraphrase Shakespear, it’s a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

114

Well, I expect apple to bring it up because they’re trying to sell the damn thing. I’m just trying to clear through the ridiculous apple babble about the thing and bring poeple the real facts. Lets start from the top:

Phone features a rich HTML email client: So does Profimail. That was just the first I found via google, I’m sure there are others.
and Safari — the most advanced web browser ever on a portable device: Theres currently no evidence it supports reflow so no, it’s not the most advanced browser. IE, Opera and Mozilla based browsers are all available for the PocketPC as well as several others.
which automatically syncs bookmarks from your PC or Mac: Pocket IE does this, so does pretty much every other browser.
Safari also includes built-in Google and Yahoo! search: I don’t know how this is different from other browsers because it hasn’t been shown yet. People on mobile devices tend not to search as much since text entry is so annoying.
iPhone is fully multi-tasking: So is Windows Mobile
so you can read a web page while downloading your email in the background over Wi-Fi or EDGE: You can already do this on every other smart phone.

In short, it’s all ridiculous apple marketing puffery. There are many legitimate innovations that the iPhone has introduced but you have to be careful not to get sucked into the Jobs Reality Distortion Field.

115

ME, TOO!!
I watched Jobs’ Keynote address introducing the little miracle.
WANT IT!!
NEED IT!!
GOTTA HAVE IT!!

116

Incidentally, don’t get too attached to calling it the iPhone. Looks like Cisco is suing Apple over the name iPhone after all.

Seems there’s been a Linksys iPhone for several weeks now. The iPhone trademark has been owned for almost a decade now.

117

I never quite understood why iPhone. Apple phone (like Apple TV) is much better. Apple seems very confident they can win that one. I just don’t see it.

I think it is just Cisco taking advantage of the situation to get some extra cookies on the deal and well done to Apple for jumping the gun.

That said, The Cisco letter explaining the decision to sue is just disingenious. May their lawyers eat their profits for the next two quarters.

118

I used to think I just wanted a simple no-frills phone too. Then I got an iPod, and I began carrying both my clamshell phone and iPod wherever I go. Needless to say, that’s a lot of pocket real estate that could be freed up with the iPhone. I probably won’t be one of the first to buy it, as $500 is just too much to pay upfront for a new device like this, but I do want it and will be willing to pay if it works out well.

119

**Still excited? **

Apple’s VP confirms no 3rd party iPhone applications. No public API, no open development.

120

Furthermore:

iPhone Will Not Allow User Installable Applications.