My iPod Touch
I've been playing with my new iPod Touch for about a while now. Hardware-wise it's an excellent device. The screen is a sharp, high-resolution display, the touchscreen responds exactly the way you'd expect it to, and the graphics system is smooth and responsive in a completely appealing way. The screen seems exactly the right compromise between small enough to carry and big enough to show a decent picture and the zooming between letterbox and widescreen mode works great. I bought it to show pictures of my travels to people along the way and the interface was intuitive and appealing - everyone from the Cambodian tuktuk driver to my friends in Tokyo were impressed. The multi-region clock application is invaluable if, say, you were planning a multi-destination trip between San Francisco, Japan, Thailand, and Cambodia while your partner was off in Geneva. It's slick quality, a near-perfect advice for what it is, but "what it is" may be different than "what you want it to be".
But there's a major design decision of which Apple seems to be very proud, which dominates the Touch and the very similar iPhone. The interface is completely modal. There are only two buttons that always do the same thing: the power button and the home button. The rest of the controls change depending on what the device is doing. Apple sells this as the ultimate no-compromise, universally reconfigurable device, where every interface looks exactly like the developer wants it to. The calculator looks like a calculator, the iPhone keypad looks like a telephone and the you can flip through the calendar or address book quickly, directly, and intuitively.
In practice my experience was a little different. As Jef Raskin once explained to me, nonmodal controls are best for partial attention situations when your attention is divided between the device and the outside world. That's why pilots have hundreds of single function, non-modal switches all over their instrument panels: because in a critical situation when they're communicating with their co-pilot and trying to figure out what to do next they want to be able to blindly find a control, flick a switch, and make the plane respond the way they expect. That's similarly true whether you're flying a plane, driving a car, or walking down the street. If you're using your attention to avoid tripping or hitting other people you don't want to have to refocus that attention to get your device to do what you want it to, you want the thing to respond with a minimum of steps. It's the reason why my Prius locks me out of using all but the simplest touchscreen functions while driving; because the touchscreen is modal interface and modal interfaces are distracting in partial attention situations like driving.
Both the iPhone and the Touch are great devices for complete attention but not so great for partial attention. It's superb when you're using it as a video player because when you're watching video your attention is dominated by the device's content, but since I use my iPod either while driving, working out, walking through the city, or while riding BART while keeping an eye on my stuff and the people around me I'm in partial attention situations almost all the time, and I had a maddening time using it as an audio player. To do something as simple as change the volume I had to...
Four separate actions because Steve doesn't want to put something as simple and general-purpose as a volume control on the device. Maddening. In contrast, with my old Nano you can feel whether the unlock switch has been set and then just twirl the control wheel without looking. You can do it blindfolded. (After a bit of experimenting I discovered that you can double-click the home button to bring up a volume control, and of course the iPhone has a nonmodal volume control on its side, but I hope my above example can illustrate how a modal interface can demand more attention than is necessary.)
It's a little ironic to me that Apple is selling the iPhone as a telephone and the Touch as a music player because they both seem to be missing those marks while hitting other marks very well. Because they're limited to modal interfaces the Touch isn't a very good mobile audio player and the iPhone doesn't seem to be a very good mobile telephone but both devices are potentially remarkable compact general-purpose computers.
But Apple doesn't seem to want them to be general-purpose computers, because they're trying to prevent you from writing and installing your own applications. The Touch doesn't come with the same mail, maps, notes, weather, or stocks applications that the iPhone does but you can install these apps without difficulty. Installer.app is a slick, polished package system that works so well you'd think it came as a standard part of the system. There are also a number of third party applications including an RSS reader that gives you access to content that you can read while you're out of data range, a PDF viewer that I've loaded with Tokyo subway maps for arbitrary-resolution viewing goodness, an HP RPN calculator if you're into the retro nerd thing, two instant messaging AIM/YIM/MSN applications, a few decent games including Solitaire and Touch Touch Revolution. There's a BSD tools, SSH/SSHD, and vt100 terminal packages which turn the Touch into a useful tool for emergency remote administration (not to mention the VNC client which I haven't played with yet). It's even possible to install Apache and Ruby if, for some bizarre reason, you feel like seving your latest Web 2.0 application from a device that you can carry in your pocket.
All this hacking brings me to yet another reason why I decided to get a Touch rather than an iPhone: I can hack it without worrying about the consequences of bricking it. A mobile phone is a mission-critical device and must be reliable because people can't reach me if it goes dead. The worst that could happen if my Touch gets broken is that I have to listen to NPR on the ride home. And with the Touch I don't have to sign a contract or pay a monthly service charge to AT&T either. After my mostly positive experience with owning (and hacking) a Touch I might buy an iPhone and use it as a second line on my TMobile account, but I'm not going to use an iPhone as my primary communicator as long as Apple keeps trying to prevent me from making their product more useful.
The 16GB Touch has enough space to store all three "Bourne" movies, all 12 episodes of "Flight of the Conchords", 6 full-length movies, 4 hour-long documentaries, and the last 5 episodes of "Sopranos" plus 1200 photos, plus over 800 songs and 56 podcasts, plus all my iCal appointments and Address Book entries. Most of the video content doesn't have subtitle tracks and I'm not sure if the iPod would even display the subtitles properly but you can always burn the subtitles into the video while compressing with HandBrake if you know you'll want them. The Touch is a great device and I'm very glad I had it on my trip. (Some Midget will probably want to upgrade to an Intel-based Mac before attempting to recompress an entire DVD into h.264.)
Minor bugs and feature requests:
* "Auto-Brightness" doesn't appear to actually adjust the screen brightness based on ambient light intensity. It's possible that the iPhone has a sensor and that the Touch doesn't, and that the Touch doesn't normally display this control except that my hacking has convinced the Touch that it is an iPhone.
* The video player doesn't reorient the video in portrait mode like it did in the iPhone video demo. I do not consider this a problem.
* iPhotos are always scaled down to 480x320 resolution. While I realize that this is what allows me to put 1200 photos on one device, it would be nice if there was a way to select the maximum file size either individually or generally since some images (like subway maps) are only useful at full resolution.
* Mail.app displays japanese unicode Subject lines properly but the message body is not displayed properly. (This might be a bug in my hacked install and not the official iPhone release.)
* It would be cool if "Set Date & Time" could ping time.apple.com the way that regular macs do. Or if it set the time from your desktop mac when it synced.
But there's a major design decision of which Apple seems to be very proud, which dominates the Touch and the very similar iPhone. The interface is completely modal. There are only two buttons that always do the same thing: the power button and the home button. The rest of the controls change depending on what the device is doing. Apple sells this as the ultimate no-compromise, universally reconfigurable device, where every interface looks exactly like the developer wants it to. The calculator looks like a calculator, the iPhone keypad looks like a telephone and the you can flip through the calendar or address book quickly, directly, and intuitively.
In practice my experience was a little different. As Jef Raskin once explained to me, nonmodal controls are best for partial attention situations when your attention is divided between the device and the outside world. That's why pilots have hundreds of single function, non-modal switches all over their instrument panels: because in a critical situation when they're communicating with their co-pilot and trying to figure out what to do next they want to be able to blindly find a control, flick a switch, and make the plane respond the way they expect. That's similarly true whether you're flying a plane, driving a car, or walking down the street. If you're using your attention to avoid tripping or hitting other people you don't want to have to refocus that attention to get your device to do what you want it to, you want the thing to respond with a minimum of steps. It's the reason why my Prius locks me out of using all but the simplest touchscreen functions while driving; because the touchscreen is modal interface and modal interfaces are distracting in partial attention situations like driving.
Both the iPhone and the Touch are great devices for complete attention but not so great for partial attention. It's superb when you're using it as a video player because when you're watching video your attention is dominated by the device's content, but since I use my iPod either while driving, working out, walking through the city, or while riding BART while keeping an eye on my stuff and the people around me I'm in partial attention situations almost all the time, and I had a maddening time using it as an audio player. To do something as simple as change the volume I had to...
- push the home or power key to activate the screen
- "slide to unlock"
- rotate the device 90˚ ('portrait' orientation) to get it out of CoverFlip mode
- slide the volume control to adjust the volume
Four separate actions because Steve doesn't want to put something as simple and general-purpose as a volume control on the device. Maddening. In contrast, with my old Nano you can feel whether the unlock switch has been set and then just twirl the control wheel without looking. You can do it blindfolded. (After a bit of experimenting I discovered that you can double-click the home button to bring up a volume control, and of course the iPhone has a nonmodal volume control on its side, but I hope my above example can illustrate how a modal interface can demand more attention than is necessary.)
It's a little ironic to me that Apple is selling the iPhone as a telephone and the Touch as a music player because they both seem to be missing those marks while hitting other marks very well. Because they're limited to modal interfaces the Touch isn't a very good mobile audio player and the iPhone doesn't seem to be a very good mobile telephone but both devices are potentially remarkable compact general-purpose computers.
But Apple doesn't seem to want them to be general-purpose computers, because they're trying to prevent you from writing and installing your own applications. The Touch doesn't come with the same mail, maps, notes, weather, or stocks applications that the iPhone does but you can install these apps without difficulty. Installer.app is a slick, polished package system that works so well you'd think it came as a standard part of the system. There are also a number of third party applications including an RSS reader that gives you access to content that you can read while you're out of data range, a PDF viewer that I've loaded with Tokyo subway maps for arbitrary-resolution viewing goodness, an HP RPN calculator if you're into the retro nerd thing, two instant messaging AIM/YIM/MSN applications, a few decent games including Solitaire and Touch Touch Revolution. There's a BSD tools, SSH/SSHD, and vt100 terminal packages which turn the Touch into a useful tool for emergency remote administration (not to mention the VNC client which I haven't played with yet). It's even possible to install Apache and Ruby if, for some bizarre reason, you feel like seving your latest Web 2.0 application from a device that you can carry in your pocket.
All this hacking brings me to yet another reason why I decided to get a Touch rather than an iPhone: I can hack it without worrying about the consequences of bricking it. A mobile phone is a mission-critical device and must be reliable because people can't reach me if it goes dead. The worst that could happen if my Touch gets broken is that I have to listen to NPR on the ride home. And with the Touch I don't have to sign a contract or pay a monthly service charge to AT&T either. After my mostly positive experience with owning (and hacking) a Touch I might buy an iPhone and use it as a second line on my TMobile account, but I'm not going to use an iPhone as my primary communicator as long as Apple keeps trying to prevent me from making their product more useful.
The 16GB Touch has enough space to store all three "Bourne" movies, all 12 episodes of "Flight of the Conchords", 6 full-length movies, 4 hour-long documentaries, and the last 5 episodes of "Sopranos" plus 1200 photos, plus over 800 songs and 56 podcasts, plus all my iCal appointments and Address Book entries. Most of the video content doesn't have subtitle tracks and I'm not sure if the iPod would even display the subtitles properly but you can always burn the subtitles into the video while compressing with HandBrake if you know you'll want them. The Touch is a great device and I'm very glad I had it on my trip. (Some Midget will probably want to upgrade to an Intel-based Mac before attempting to recompress an entire DVD into h.264.)
Minor bugs and feature requests:
* "Auto-Brightness" doesn't appear to actually adjust the screen brightness based on ambient light intensity. It's possible that the iPhone has a sensor and that the Touch doesn't, and that the Touch doesn't normally display this control except that my hacking has convinced the Touch that it is an iPhone.
* The video player doesn't reorient the video in portrait mode like it did in the iPhone video demo. I do not consider this a problem.
* iPhotos are always scaled down to 480x320 resolution. While I realize that this is what allows me to put 1200 photos on one device, it would be nice if there was a way to select the maximum file size either individually or generally since some images (like subway maps) are only useful at full resolution.
* Mail.app displays japanese unicode Subject lines properly but the message body is not displayed properly. (This might be a bug in my hacked install and not the official iPhone release.)
* It would be cool if "Set Date & Time" could ping time.apple.com the way that regular macs do. Or if it set the time from your desktop mac when it synced.