(no subject)
Thoughts on the iphone so far...
Honestly? Everything performs as advertised. It's been a situation where I discover something new that makes me smile around every corner rather than having a little string of disappointments because I'm running into limitations. I think that's really what Jobs is doing with this device... he's selling it short. Don't get me wrong - the hype is absurd... but what they've done is said "here... we're giving you 5 donuts!" and making sure that you're thrilled with them... then revealing that they've actually given you 8 donuts to make *sure* they've clinched the deal.
Chief Engineer Scott is clearly working for their marketing team.
Anyway... here's the reality up to this point.
• The interface is just as beautifully functional as portrayed. It's responsive, intuitive, and fluid. It doesn't hesitate or feel like they've skimped on the processing power. The touch interaction is downright magical. The pan/zoom/tap behavior is intuitive and fluid and easily performed with two fingers. You "get it" right away. All the built-in applications feel "slick"
• It seems physically solid - not fragile. If you have a greasy face, you're gonna have a greasy iphone... but even the worst goo (cheesecake fingers? Yep.) was removed by simply breathing on the surface and dragging it across my shirt. It has not thus far required any more significant cleaning than a couple swipes across my left pectoral. Even with lots of finger marks on the screen, the display shows right through. It can be *filthy* and the only time you can see the grease and smudges is when the phone is powered off. You have to turn it at an angle such that the marks catch the light before you can even see them when the phone is on. This isn't an exaggeration - there were several times where I was using the phone and marveling at how great it looked, then notice that it was utterly filthy when it went to sleep. You'd never know while you were using it - they don't present an obstacle at all.
• You can't use anything but your finger to interact with the display. No pencil eraser... no stylus from your palm pilot. If it's not alive it doesn't register. I can see this being a problem for people wearing gloves... though interestingly, it responds to the touch of my finger through a towel or T-shirt.
• I haven't had any crashes or lockups thus far. The only peculiar "pause" I had was when the phone stopped responding to screen touches (like it was in "next to my face" mode. That was cured by hitting the "go to sleep" button and then waking the phone up immediately afterwards - everything was normal.
• The method they've implemented for squeezing bigger content onto a smaller screen is impressive. The graphics hardware in here has made me raise my eyebrows repeatedly. When you load a web page, for example, you treat it just like a photo. You drag it around and zoom in and out to any arbitrary % scale just like it's a great big image... but what's particularly impressive is that no matter what level of zoom you use, the device pauses for a fraction of a second and then *snap* the whole thing is re-rendered razor-sharp at the new arbitrary percentage. If scaling a web page to 84% is good enough for you to read the text and interact with the controls, then what you'll see at 84% looks like it was designed to be exactly that size. Zoom in or out again and it all re-renders just as crisply.
• The camera is solid but not spectacular. It's the only part of the phone that feels like an afterthought, honestly. Like they tacked it on because they knew people would reconsider if there wasn't one. The image quality is slightly better than my old Sony phone, but the resolution appears to be lower. The "indoors in low light" image output (shown at the bottom) was decent. There's no flash or light source of any kind on the phone. I'm torn on this one. Every camera phone I've ever used has been merely "good enough" - and this is just the same. "good enough" but nothing I'd ever rely on for anything more than quick memos to myself to remember product information or capture a quick face to go in someone's contact entry in my phone book. The camera interface is excellent, but the camera itself is utterly average.
• The video playback and image stability are startling. It's bright, crystal clear, and has "looking at a sheet of paper" type image stability. Colors are vivid, and refresh rates for video are high enough that I couldn't detect any ghosting, flicker, or artifacting of any kind. Even in bright direct sunlight (held up facing the sun in a blazing orange sunset) every pixel is still clearly visible. You can read everything. Really.
• Audio playback through the built-in speaker is surprisingly decent. And *loud*. I hadn't plugged in any headphones so I didn't think about it when I started messing around with the UI, and I was actually surprised when music came blasting out of it while I was holding it. Granted, you wouldn't want to annoy other people around you with loud audio in a public place - but it's nice that you can still listen to stuff even if you don't have headphones handy.
• The data transfer speeds are widely variable. At home I get a good signal but it doesn't give me the little "edge network" icon. Transferring a graphic-intensive web page took almost 2 full minutes and the map tiles in google maps are what I would consider "unusably slow". The text instructions and lower-bandwidth interactions were solid but slow. In on the expressway and in Ann Arbor yesterday, however, I was on the "edge network" the whole time, and I was able to use the live google maps feature to find my way to a picnic in near realtime. It was visibly, dramatically faster - but clearly the high-speed network does not penetrate the entire coverage area.
• The phone's ability to seek out and use any available wifi coverage is impressive. It gives me a polite little tone when it finds and joins an available network (and a different alert when it finds a protected network and wants to try and join). As I drove past a McDonald's yesterday, it let me know that it was using wifi for a few seconds, for instance. When it's on wifi, it is of course blazingly fast.
• The keyboard works very well. I would say that how it works for you is going to depend on a few factors... particularly, the size of your hands. I can type faster with the iphone than I can with a blackberry - but if my hands were small enough to go two-thumbs on a blackberry, I'm sure it would be as fast or faster than typing on the iphone. But I can't - I simply can't angle my wrists to get two hands onto a device that small. For one-finger typing, the iphone is fast enough to comfortably have SMS conversations with full punctuation and grammar intact. It is not, however, fast enough that I would want to write a document of any length using it. Something about the length of this bullet point's paragraph would probably be about the limit of my tolerance before I would start considering the wisdom of waiting until I could sit at a keyboard. That said, it is supposedly able to pair with bluetooth keyboards for text entry... I have not tested this.
• People complained about the absence of a wide-format keyboard (when you're holding the thing sideways). I was, however, able to get one... just not on demand. When using the web browser, if you rotate the device to landscape while browsing and poke a text field, the keyboard you get comes up as a huge landscape layout. I was able to type on this *very* quickly with two thumbs... but the only time I was able to trigger it was in a form field within Safari. Also noteworthy - when you're using the keyboard in landscape mode, you have room for about four lines of visible above the real estate required for the keys... so I can see why this isn't the default presentation method for the keyboard. Still, I'd like to be able to trigger it on demand for when I have a lot of typing to do - and it only appears to be possible in a web browser.
• JavaScript can muddle things up. As I said, the whole time I was using the phone, it felt like it had processing horsepower to spare... but pages like LiveJournal's text entry screen and google docs both use quite a lot of realtime interaction ("spellcheck while you type" and "save every word in realtime") while you're typing... and these things slowed the phone to a crawl until I figured out what was causing the performance hit and turned them off. Doing that sort of web 2.0 rails-type feedback just isn't practical unless you're on wifi. You go from "they keyboard responds as quickly as you can possibly hit virtual buttons" to "tick... tick... tick... tick..." if there's too much going on behind the scenes.
• Clearly some of the phone's functions are being proxy-fied. YouTube videos are an excellent example... though I was able to call up almost everything I went looking for, search results were clearly abbreviated - and some web links in emails that work just fine on a desktop machine returned "cannot find video" type results on the iphone. This was true even on wifi - and in fact, the you tube feature appears only to function on wifi connections and possibly when you're connected to the faster nodes of the edge network. It politely declines to connect to YouTube unless you have a high-bandwidth connection.
Gripes...
• There's no copy/paste functionality (or even "drag to highlight text" capability). So far it hasn't been a hindrance but I could see it being an issue if I was trying to edit any volume of text. Mostly it just seems like a peculiar omission.
• There are no "cursor keys" to speak of. Now this is silly since the phone has a touch interface - and the little "pop up magnifying glass" works exquisitely in all of the built-in applications... but when you're entering text into forms on a web page and the text area can extend beyond the limits of the display, there's no way to get your cursor conveniently into those ghost zones. You end up having to zoom out, scoot the page, and zoom back in to use the magnifying glass correctly.
• There was no way to store images from web pages. Again, not a big deal - but I wanted to grab several images from my web server and make them available on the phone... there was no way to do it through the web browser. Using iphoto and the mail application were the only obvious methods of getting images onto the phone (other than the built-in camera). I'm not sure what a windows user would do without iphoto unless the pc version supports connections to windows apps like picasa.
• Ringtones are thus far limited. This is one that I don't really care about, but I know it's a *huge* deal for a lot of folks. There's pretty clear evidence that this will be changing very soon (since there is already functionality hidden in itunes to deal with ringtones) - but how it will work is still anyone's guess. The thirty or so provided ringtones are all very nice... but it won't let you pick the tune of your choice to use as a ringtone. This seems like a step backwards based on how popular this feature has proven on other phones.
• Even though it's "the best ipod ever", they've neglected to add some kind of method for controlling music playback while you're in other applications. This is one of those "Huh??" things for me. It seems like any time there's music playback going on, there would be a little tab or widget available in a corner a-la-expose to pull up playback controls. The only way I was able to find to control playback required 3 clicks. When you're already using the phone, this is less than a second of interaction (home-ipod-pause) but it requires you to pop out of whatever application you're doing to get the job done. If you have music playback going on and you're in an application and the phone goes into "sleep mode", you have to go through several steps in order to get back to the controls... home-slidetounlock-home-ipod-pause. Again, I'm griping about things that take 2-3 seconds - but there are easy, obvious solutions that are so conspicuously absent that they give me that "you didn't read the directions so you just don't know" feeling. Except I did... and I do.
• There's no way to record audio. Um.. huh? I should be able to at the very least record and store voice memos and phone conversations... this seems like a no-brainer... but newp. No hint at this functionality within the UI.
• I now *have* to use iphoto. I hate iphoto... it's awesome but it feels like kindergarten for me. Not a fair gripe at all, but I really would like to have other options for dealing with getting images in and out of my phone.
• I wish there was some kind of rigid anchor-hole in the phone. Something that would allow it to be placed on a strap without having to go in some kind of holster first. It's not hard to hold onto by any means, but I can easily use it with one hand - and I can see myself doing something awkward and losing my grip on it at some point. I'd rather have it swing harmlessly down around my wrist on a tether than bounce across the tile.
I'm wondering how many of the UI qualms can be "patched out" later...
Honestly? Everything performs as advertised. It's been a situation where I discover something new that makes me smile around every corner rather than having a little string of disappointments because I'm running into limitations. I think that's really what Jobs is doing with this device... he's selling it short. Don't get me wrong - the hype is absurd... but what they've done is said "here... we're giving you 5 donuts!" and making sure that you're thrilled with them... then revealing that they've actually given you 8 donuts to make *sure* they've clinched the deal.
Chief Engineer Scott is clearly working for their marketing team.
Anyway... here's the reality up to this point.
• The interface is just as beautifully functional as portrayed. It's responsive, intuitive, and fluid. It doesn't hesitate or feel like they've skimped on the processing power. The touch interaction is downright magical. The pan/zoom/tap behavior is intuitive and fluid and easily performed with two fingers. You "get it" right away. All the built-in applications feel "slick"
• It seems physically solid - not fragile. If you have a greasy face, you're gonna have a greasy iphone... but even the worst goo (cheesecake fingers? Yep.) was removed by simply breathing on the surface and dragging it across my shirt. It has not thus far required any more significant cleaning than a couple swipes across my left pectoral. Even with lots of finger marks on the screen, the display shows right through. It can be *filthy* and the only time you can see the grease and smudges is when the phone is powered off. You have to turn it at an angle such that the marks catch the light before you can even see them when the phone is on. This isn't an exaggeration - there were several times where I was using the phone and marveling at how great it looked, then notice that it was utterly filthy when it went to sleep. You'd never know while you were using it - they don't present an obstacle at all.
• You can't use anything but your finger to interact with the display. No pencil eraser... no stylus from your palm pilot. If it's not alive it doesn't register. I can see this being a problem for people wearing gloves... though interestingly, it responds to the touch of my finger through a towel or T-shirt.
• I haven't had any crashes or lockups thus far. The only peculiar "pause" I had was when the phone stopped responding to screen touches (like it was in "next to my face" mode. That was cured by hitting the "go to sleep" button and then waking the phone up immediately afterwards - everything was normal.
• The method they've implemented for squeezing bigger content onto a smaller screen is impressive. The graphics hardware in here has made me raise my eyebrows repeatedly. When you load a web page, for example, you treat it just like a photo. You drag it around and zoom in and out to any arbitrary % scale just like it's a great big image... but what's particularly impressive is that no matter what level of zoom you use, the device pauses for a fraction of a second and then *snap* the whole thing is re-rendered razor-sharp at the new arbitrary percentage. If scaling a web page to 84% is good enough for you to read the text and interact with the controls, then what you'll see at 84% looks like it was designed to be exactly that size. Zoom in or out again and it all re-renders just as crisply.
• The camera is solid but not spectacular. It's the only part of the phone that feels like an afterthought, honestly. Like they tacked it on because they knew people would reconsider if there wasn't one. The image quality is slightly better than my old Sony phone, but the resolution appears to be lower. The "indoors in low light" image output (shown at the bottom) was decent. There's no flash or light source of any kind on the phone. I'm torn on this one. Every camera phone I've ever used has been merely "good enough" - and this is just the same. "good enough" but nothing I'd ever rely on for anything more than quick memos to myself to remember product information or capture a quick face to go in someone's contact entry in my phone book. The camera interface is excellent, but the camera itself is utterly average.
• The video playback and image stability are startling. It's bright, crystal clear, and has "looking at a sheet of paper" type image stability. Colors are vivid, and refresh rates for video are high enough that I couldn't detect any ghosting, flicker, or artifacting of any kind. Even in bright direct sunlight (held up facing the sun in a blazing orange sunset) every pixel is still clearly visible. You can read everything. Really.
• Audio playback through the built-in speaker is surprisingly decent. And *loud*. I hadn't plugged in any headphones so I didn't think about it when I started messing around with the UI, and I was actually surprised when music came blasting out of it while I was holding it. Granted, you wouldn't want to annoy other people around you with loud audio in a public place - but it's nice that you can still listen to stuff even if you don't have headphones handy.
• The data transfer speeds are widely variable. At home I get a good signal but it doesn't give me the little "edge network" icon. Transferring a graphic-intensive web page took almost 2 full minutes and the map tiles in google maps are what I would consider "unusably slow". The text instructions and lower-bandwidth interactions were solid but slow. In on the expressway and in Ann Arbor yesterday, however, I was on the "edge network" the whole time, and I was able to use the live google maps feature to find my way to a picnic in near realtime. It was visibly, dramatically faster - but clearly the high-speed network does not penetrate the entire coverage area.
• The phone's ability to seek out and use any available wifi coverage is impressive. It gives me a polite little tone when it finds and joins an available network (and a different alert when it finds a protected network and wants to try and join). As I drove past a McDonald's yesterday, it let me know that it was using wifi for a few seconds, for instance. When it's on wifi, it is of course blazingly fast.
• The keyboard works very well. I would say that how it works for you is going to depend on a few factors... particularly, the size of your hands. I can type faster with the iphone than I can with a blackberry - but if my hands were small enough to go two-thumbs on a blackberry, I'm sure it would be as fast or faster than typing on the iphone. But I can't - I simply can't angle my wrists to get two hands onto a device that small. For one-finger typing, the iphone is fast enough to comfortably have SMS conversations with full punctuation and grammar intact. It is not, however, fast enough that I would want to write a document of any length using it. Something about the length of this bullet point's paragraph would probably be about the limit of my tolerance before I would start considering the wisdom of waiting until I could sit at a keyboard. That said, it is supposedly able to pair with bluetooth keyboards for text entry... I have not tested this.
• People complained about the absence of a wide-format keyboard (when you're holding the thing sideways). I was, however, able to get one... just not on demand. When using the web browser, if you rotate the device to landscape while browsing and poke a text field, the keyboard you get comes up as a huge landscape layout. I was able to type on this *very* quickly with two thumbs... but the only time I was able to trigger it was in a form field within Safari. Also noteworthy - when you're using the keyboard in landscape mode, you have room for about four lines of visible above the real estate required for the keys... so I can see why this isn't the default presentation method for the keyboard. Still, I'd like to be able to trigger it on demand for when I have a lot of typing to do - and it only appears to be possible in a web browser.
• JavaScript can muddle things up. As I said, the whole time I was using the phone, it felt like it had processing horsepower to spare... but pages like LiveJournal's text entry screen and google docs both use quite a lot of realtime interaction ("spellcheck while you type" and "save every word in realtime") while you're typing... and these things slowed the phone to a crawl until I figured out what was causing the performance hit and turned them off. Doing that sort of web 2.0 rails-type feedback just isn't practical unless you're on wifi. You go from "they keyboard responds as quickly as you can possibly hit virtual buttons" to "tick... tick... tick... tick..." if there's too much going on behind the scenes.
• Clearly some of the phone's functions are being proxy-fied. YouTube videos are an excellent example... though I was able to call up almost everything I went looking for, search results were clearly abbreviated - and some web links in emails that work just fine on a desktop machine returned "cannot find video" type results on the iphone. This was true even on wifi - and in fact, the you tube feature appears only to function on wifi connections and possibly when you're connected to the faster nodes of the edge network. It politely declines to connect to YouTube unless you have a high-bandwidth connection.
Gripes...
• There's no copy/paste functionality (or even "drag to highlight text" capability). So far it hasn't been a hindrance but I could see it being an issue if I was trying to edit any volume of text. Mostly it just seems like a peculiar omission.
• There are no "cursor keys" to speak of. Now this is silly since the phone has a touch interface - and the little "pop up magnifying glass" works exquisitely in all of the built-in applications... but when you're entering text into forms on a web page and the text area can extend beyond the limits of the display, there's no way to get your cursor conveniently into those ghost zones. You end up having to zoom out, scoot the page, and zoom back in to use the magnifying glass correctly.
• There was no way to store images from web pages. Again, not a big deal - but I wanted to grab several images from my web server and make them available on the phone... there was no way to do it through the web browser. Using iphoto and the mail application were the only obvious methods of getting images onto the phone (other than the built-in camera). I'm not sure what a windows user would do without iphoto unless the pc version supports connections to windows apps like picasa.
• Ringtones are thus far limited. This is one that I don't really care about, but I know it's a *huge* deal for a lot of folks. There's pretty clear evidence that this will be changing very soon (since there is already functionality hidden in itunes to deal with ringtones) - but how it will work is still anyone's guess. The thirty or so provided ringtones are all very nice... but it won't let you pick the tune of your choice to use as a ringtone. This seems like a step backwards based on how popular this feature has proven on other phones.
• Even though it's "the best ipod ever", they've neglected to add some kind of method for controlling music playback while you're in other applications. This is one of those "Huh??" things for me. It seems like any time there's music playback going on, there would be a little tab or widget available in a corner a-la-expose to pull up playback controls. The only way I was able to find to control playback required 3 clicks. When you're already using the phone, this is less than a second of interaction (home-ipod-pause) but it requires you to pop out of whatever application you're doing to get the job done. If you have music playback going on and you're in an application and the phone goes into "sleep mode", you have to go through several steps in order to get back to the controls... home-slidetounlock-home-ipod-pause. Again, I'm griping about things that take 2-3 seconds - but there are easy, obvious solutions that are so conspicuously absent that they give me that "you didn't read the directions so you just don't know" feeling. Except I did... and I do.
• There's no way to record audio. Um.. huh? I should be able to at the very least record and store voice memos and phone conversations... this seems like a no-brainer... but newp. No hint at this functionality within the UI.
• I now *have* to use iphoto. I hate iphoto... it's awesome but it feels like kindergarten for me. Not a fair gripe at all, but I really would like to have other options for dealing with getting images in and out of my phone.
• I wish there was some kind of rigid anchor-hole in the phone. Something that would allow it to be placed on a strap without having to go in some kind of holster first. It's not hard to hold onto by any means, but I can easily use it with one hand - and I can see myself doing something awkward and losing my grip on it at some point. I'd rather have it swing harmlessly down around my wrist on a tether than bounce across the tile.
I'm wondering how many of the UI qualms can be "patched out" later...