As you may have inferred, from my previous "Windows Mobile Woes" postings, I was never entirely happy with my Windows Mobile Smartphone. But finally, the need to upgrade all kinds of everything just at the time O2 announced the availability of the new 3G model prompted me to take the plunge, and in February I got a shiny new 3G iPhone.
It's really a very nice device in many ways. It looks good --- it was literally a shiny new iPhone --- and it feels good: very solid, just weighty enough to feel important. And to go with the polished appearance and solid feel of the hardware, the software is equally polished and solid.
Polished, in that it has interface features that are not only effective and intuitive, but are also actually fun to use: the way you flick your finger across the screen to scroll things (and then watch them slow to a halt), the pinch/stretch gestures to zoom in and out, and so on. And solid, in the sense that I still don't know how to reset it --- something which sets it apart from my Windows Mobile phone, which I had to reset within a week, and more often than I could count thereafter.
But a thing about the iPhone is that it is much more than a phone, or even a phone with all the "extras" we now expect --- storing our calendar and address book, sending texts, playing music and taking photographs.
The iPhone is really is a highly portable location-aware computer that is designed to be continuously connected to the Internet. As such, it is a platform to provide users with instant access to information, entertainment and services, and the email client and highly capable web browser are the most obvious and useful manifestations of this. But in fact the stock price and weather forecast displays and the YouTube player are more revealing of the essence of the iPhone. These are nothing more than programs (applications) that the user can run to do a specific thing. They very probably use the Web to fetch the information they need, and just display it way that is more iPhone-compatible than a normal web page.
A key feature of the iPhone is that it makes it really very easy to install these little programs --- these "apps" --- to provide extra functionality over and above the basic features provided by the software on the phone itself. Indeed, the iPhone embodies an "App Store", which is widely touted as a stroke of business genius on Apple's part.
The App Store is an application that allows iPhone owners to browse, select and install new apps. Many apps are free, but, as "Apps Store" suggests, many others cost -- not a lot (60p is typical), but enough to encourage developers to contribute apps to the store, so that there is a huge range, and continually expanding, range of apps that iPhone users can download, and indeed DO download, in enormous numbers.
Apple charge a proportion of the sale price, and this has made them a great deal of money, But the real effect of the App store is far more significant: it has helped the iPhone become the centre of a culture, with a substantial community of software developers providing new apps that allow owners to add new functionality to their iPhones quickly and easily, and for just pennies. And by spending a few pounds on Apps, users are buying in to their phone, too: whenever two or more iPhone owners are gathered together, they will show each other their favourite new apps. This not only stimulates more sales for the apps themselves, but also keeps owners engaged with personalising, and singing the praises of, their iPhones.
A marketing man's dream.
Another really strong point of the phone is that it is able to determine its own location. Like many phones, the iPhone has a GPS, and, like many phones, this takes a long time to determine its location, and does not work well in cities, or at all indoors. But, uniquely, the iPhone augments its GPS with two other ways to determine for determining its location: it can ask the telephone network, which always knows the rough position of every phone; and it can use Skyhook's system for determining location based on the relative strengths of the Wi-fi networks that can be detected. The iPhone does a superb job of using all three of these mechanisms in combination, and this allows it to display its approximate location on a map within fifteen seconds, even in a city, or even indoors --- performance far better than any GPS alone can manage.
But although the iPhone has many great features, it also has some noticeable limitations. A particilarly annoying one is probably the result of contractual wrangling with the phone networks. Although the iPhone is a reasonable tool for things like handling mail and reading the web, it cannot compete with a computer with a full-size keyboard and display. But Apple's software will not allow the phone to be used to connect another computer (a laptop, for instance) to the Internet. Similarly, the need to balance battery size against the plethora of radio systems has meant that the iPhone has decidedly mediocre battery life --- barely last two days, so it really needs to be charged daily.
But although these limitations are the result of necessary compromises, others are omissions affecting eatures I would have taken for granted on any kind of iPhone-like device.
Perhaps most surprising is the lack of any kind of cut-and-paste mechanism, so that, for instance, the only way to get a phone number from the address book to a text message would be to write it down and key it in again. Nor is there any kind of "undo" for anything.
Another surprising system-wide omission is searching. It is possible to search for contacts by name, but not on words in the notes or address. Nor any way to search within a web page, or to search the diary --- you may know you have something in your diary, but you can only find what date it is by looking through all future events until you come across it.
There are also a number of other omissions: iPhones cannot send MMS messages, record movies, or allow the user to supply the sounds used for many purposes. Finger-flick scrolling is intuitive and fun, but it is ineffective for long documents and the interface provides no alternative. There are scroll bars to show the portion of the document currently visible, but they disappear the moment the text stops moving, which often means that there is no sign at all that there is more of a page or document that cannot currently be seen. Users just have to get in the habit of trying to scroll each page, just in case tehre is more to be seen. And while this may be a good way to hide secrets in an adventure game, for serious interfaces it is just plain annoying.
Reminders for events can only be set for a handful of fixed times in advance, and are signalled once, and once only, by a feeble little noise that last less than two seconds. This means that not taking your phone to the toilet with you risks making you late for your dentists appointment.
The web browser, despite supporting a wide range of features, has a seriously cut-down user interface, and among other shortcomings doesn't let you disable image downloading --- is a surprising omission from a device which is expected to frequently be used with only a slow internet connection. Nor does it allow you to save web pages, or images, or anything else you have accessed on the Internet. And although Apple provide an app for writing notes on the iPhone, that is where they are likely to stay, because (with the exception of email, calendar and address books, which will synchronise using Microsoft Exchange protocols), the iPhone provides no way to synchronise files, or indeed any other data, with another computer. As a result, various apps are being programmed to provide some kind of (perhaps manually-initiated) synchronisation of their own data. But although this is better than nothing, piecemeal manually-initiated data sharing seems inaequate in terms of both reliability and convenience.
These are not minor imperfections: they are omissions which seriously interfere with common activities. Yet despite this, the iPhone is still a terrific device that literally feels good and is actually a pleasure to use. It has taken me a while to get used to the idea of being seen to posess an icon of style, but now I'm likely to start an iPhone "show and tell" at the drop of a hat.
Who'd have thought it?
