SimplyBlog
Summary: I’ve tried the new iPhone, and it meets expectations. It’s fun. It’s engaging. Here’s my interface analysis and a few nuisances. I discuss the touchscreen, the keyboard, Coverflow, Clock (where’s the date?), Calculator, SMS, accessibility, audio quality, and the quality of iPod features. The speakers are awfully quiet, a problem for hearing the ring. I encountered a little bugginess. Finally, my personal wishlist: audio recording, Wikipedia, presentations, and shortcuts. Bottom line: minor issues but still very cool. Plan to get one!
The Grand Opening
I went to the Palo Alto Apple Store for the 6 pm opening on iPhone Day, June 29. I didn’t wait in line, because even if I buy an iPhone it will wait for my current cellphone contract to expire. The crowd was enthusiastic, spilling out into University Avenue enough to block a lane of traffic, but not quite enough to close the road down, as I had almost expected.
Apparently Steve Jobs was there but I never saw him through the crowds. Also, apparently Bill Atkinson was there (creator of both MacPaint and HyperCard) -- I would love to have chatted with him. In any case, I had plans to join friends at the movies to see Bruce Willis (in a very fun movie co-starring Mac guy), and had to leave the festivities before I got into the store. Among the crowd, I also saw the most fashionable woman I’ve ever seen, like a work of art; if you’re her and you’re reading this, give me a call ;-)
I came back on Saturday and got a lot more time to play with an iPhone. I stood in the store and hoarded it for long enough to put it through all its paces.
Oh, and a helpful disclaimer: I own Apple stock. Sadly, not enough to retire on...yet.
The overall impression
It works. It feels good. It’s responsive. It met and exceeded my expectations. It’s fun to use. It’s beautiful. It’s easy to use. I liked it.
I’m not saying the iPhone is perfect. Read on and you’ll see that there are issues. But I can’t think of any electronic product that was so fun to play with the first time since I got my first Mac in 1984 and played with MacPaint. I certainly enjoyed my first Palm, and this was similar but even better.
Is it really revolutionary, and why?
I think the iPhone IS revolutionary, but the reasons are subtle.
In a lot of ways, the interface is quite familiar. The Palm has had a similar opening screen and interaction style, for over a decade. All the features are familiar. The touchscreen is new, yes, but doesn’t change things radically from pen-based interfaces. The on-screen keyboard offers word prediction and spell correction, which is nicely integrated, but those technologies have been around for decades, and Apple’s Newton did handwriting recognition much in the same spirit. At some level, honestly, there’s nothing new here.
But...
Apple has pushed the technology and the design of each component to the limit. They’ve incorporated a very high resolution display, enabling them to innovate in the layout in a number of ways; for example, small text labels are still legible and crisp, enabling more to be squeezed into the layout. The touchscreen is responsive and the interface for it is thoughtful in its details. Various hardware features enable the detection of tilt, proximity, ambient light; and the integration is smart and subtle. What really makes the interface brilliant, however, is the refinement. Step by step, every application is straightforward, beautiful, responsive, and achieves a great tradeoff of power and complexity.
[Addendum, Thu, July 5 --
Forgot to mention this important point...
Cellphones and smartphones have been around a while, and the current interaction style (or, the current “generation”) has been around for about 10 years. In all this time, cellphones and smartphones have had terrible user interfaces, but the phone manufacturers have done little to address the problem. Phones are intimidating and difficult. Many phones have no obvious buttons for hanging up a call (perhaps re-using the dial key). Many have no obvious way to get into voicemail. My last phone hid the voicemail in a menu that required scrolling through 2 levels of menus to find it, and had an undiscoverable shortcut. My current phone accesses voicemail through a shortcut of pressing *86, because “86” spells “VM” (for voicemail) on the keypad. Why can’t they just have a voicemail button? Visual voicemail, which has existed on computers, had never made it to the cellphone until the iPhone.
In addition, phones have forced people to navigate with 4-way arrow keypads and heavily overloaded buttons. The arrow keypads are a tedious way to get through lists. I always found the iPod’s clickwheel as a great improvement for moving through lists (and I’m still inclined to postulate that it’s the most efficient way for experts to scroll), though I’ve observed many novices having trouble with it. Pen-based smartphones have used scrollbars, an improvement over the keypads. This is a case where I think the touchscreen, along with gesture-based scrolling, is providing a clear improvement where other cellphone manufacturers have simply ignored the issue.
It’s as if the cellphone manufacturers didn’t care about usability. A designer may well have warned any given team, but I can imagine easily how such designers are dismissed. They’re told their ideas are impractical, or that the changes wouldn’t make much difference to the users anyway (and no one would ever authorize the test to confirm that end users didn’t care). They’d be told that the phone obviously has lots of features that people ask for, or that surveys show how happy the customers are (customers who have learned that they can’t expect anything better). Meanwhile they miss the point that most features on most phones are rarely used because the user interface is so intimidating.
To wrap up, this is why the iPhone is a breakthrough: Apple acknowledged and tried to solve the painful aspects of the user interface. Features are visible and discoverable, and the interface invites exploration rather than intimidation. Apple also delivers the phone in a way to help people learn to use it: Steve Jobs gives a very clear and well-orchestrated demo that many people watch. TV ads show how the interface is browsed. A detailed set of videos on their website also explain the interface in a slow, steady, patient way. The phones are in Apple Stores and fully functional so that people can try out everything (in contrast to most phones in most stores that won’t even turn on), and salespeople are available nearby who either know the device or are willing to find the answer to any question you ask. So, even if the user interface had problems, Apple’s maneuvered to maximize your familiarity with the device for a successful experience.
]
Is it really a good interface?
Most of the interface is obvious; a few times not immediately, e.g. your eye just doesn’t focus on a control at all times. I will, for instance, find myself looking desperately for a button at the bottom of the screen only to eventually discover it at the top. In Safari, I kept looking to the bottom for the bookmark button, but it was at top-left and somehow I kept overlooking it. I’m suspecting you learn it quickly, but as a design perfectionist...
I like, in the iPod section, setting up default buttons (shortcuts) for the iPod, but it’s non-obvious how to do it the first time. It’s hard to get to the screen, then you click on, for instance, Audiobooks and it does nothing; turns out you have to drag icons down to the bottom, and there are only 4 slots for the shortcuts (if I remember right).
Here’s a central point: there are no dropdown menus and no right-click menus. Thus, no cut and paste. No undo. And there’s no way for these apps to easily expand to more features while controlling complexity. The advantage is that every feature is “visible” - I put it in quotes because, even though nothing is hidden in a menu, it doesn’t mean that features aren’t hidden on other screens that you might not find. It forces the application designers to very very carefully design each feature they add because they can’t just throw extra options in a menu. To me, it’s like bonsai. You could plant your trees in a garden, and they will grow haphazardly, but they will grow. Or you can plant them in a pot and wire their branches and control every little detail. The bonsai plant will never get very big, but if carefully tended, it can be beautiful and have many of the virtues of a larger tree. iPhone apps are like little bonsai trees.
The touchscreen defines the iPhone
The interface of the iPhone is largely defined by the touchscreen and the size of the display. Because all controls have to be finger size, components can’t get too small. The on-screen keyboard makes apps needing text entry workable but much less pleasant than typing with a laptop. Tappable lists need to have tall rows, so you never see as many items in a list at one time as you would on a Palm, or as you might like; it’s not as much a problem as I expected, but it is a fundamental limitation. In my experience, most users as they gain experience with a user interface begin to prefer high information density, and that’s not really practical on an iPhone.
The touchscreen begs for iPhone apps that are fundamentally touch-oriented, such as drawing (though without precision) or puzzles. Right now, the only apps that feel like they are meant for a touchscreen are the Photos and Google Maps apps. These apps take advantage of pinching and brushing gestures, which are disappointedly underutilized throughout the rest of the iPhone. The pinch/stretch gestures are in Safari, and allow the text to be zoomed up to a nice legible size. One gesture - scrolling - is used successfully throughout, and the feel of it is very nice, with a generous bounce at the end of lists.
The keyboard
Normally I’m quite happy to be a male, but I realize that my fingers are probably about 50% wider than the typical female of my species. Females, behold! Finally a technology that is inherently biased in your favor. Your fingers (at least, typically) will obscure less of the screen, and I would assume, will be able to more precisely target the small keys of the on-screen keyboard. (Actually, I’m curious to hear first-hand experiences, to know if this is really correct.)
The keyboard is a bit tricky, but seems easy to learn. A little practice helps to hit the right key, but the keys are awfully small. Sadly, not all text entry applications allow you to turn the iPhone to widescreen orientation, which stretches the keyboard out and makes the keys easier to hit. The keyboard predicts what you are typing and shows you the word it thinks you are typing; if the word is right, you just hit the spacebar for it to fill in the word. I was disappointed it didn’t do smart things like automatically put in a space after a word or after a period. Word prediction worked acceptably for me, but it seemed to rarely guess ahead very successfully. It failed terribly when I tried to type “ha ha ha”, and it really wanted to substitute the word “us” for each word (you can see that the letters are near on the keyboard).
At first, the punctuation on a separate screen was annoying, but there’s a shortcut where you can tap and hold on the punctuation button, and drag to the character you want. When you release, it automatically reverts to the main keyboard. Nice! Still, it’s odd that items like a period aren’t on the main keyboard. Also, I love my letters, and would love to have access to nifty symbols and glyphs that just aren’t there.
Coverflow
Coverflow is the central gimmick in making the album view attractive. I have to admit the animation makes it fun to flick through album covers. However, I strongly question whether coverflow is an effective way to locate music or even to browse for an album cover. Only the central album covers (about 3) are meaningfully visible at any one time, so you really only have a very narrow window on your list at any time. In addition, while it may work acceptably for a small number of albums, I can’t imagine it working well for browsing the thousands of albums I own, especially after buying so many singles off of iTunes. I imagine a grid display of album covers (much like the grid of photos in iPhoto) would enable people to find albums faster, and could support pinching for zooming in and out.
In any case, coverflow is entertaining, and I wonder why they don’t use it in other parts of the interface. For example, it seems a natural way to browse the Safari thumbnails, at least in landscape mode. Instead, they only show one thumbnail at a time, and have a set of dots at the bottom showing where you are in the list, a cumbersome method in comparison.
Clock
My biggest surprise was how hard it is to find the date on the iPhone. The time displays at the top of the screen, and I wish there was an option to display the date as well.
Where would you go to find the date? I would choose the clock, but the Clock application only shows the time, not the date. It shows multiple time zones, but for day, it only says “today” or “tomorrow” (or presumably “yesterday”). It turns out you can find the date by choosing Calendar and looking at today, but I’d rather the date displayed with the time.
Also with the Clock, you’d think you could tap or double tap to edit the timezone of a clock, but items can’t be edited, just deleted and added.
Is the iPhone a good phone?
While at the Apple Store, I tried calling my parents. The phone rang but no one answered. Hmm. Do they have these phones rigged so they don’t make actual calls?
The speakers provide adequate sound for casual listening, but audio was very hard to hear in a crowded and noisy Apple store. I’ve read others complain they can’t hear the phone ring well, and I believe it will be a serious problem in noisy environments.
The ringtones are nice: noticeable but pleasant, not jarring. Even so, I’d still rather they had some more boring, generic, “phone ringing” sounds. I’m glad they avoided the typical synthesized tones on most cellphones. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to assign an MP3 as a ringtone. I read a rumor that Apple is planning to charge $0.99 to assign an MP3 as a ringtone - I hope it’s just evil gossip, because that would definitely be bogus exploitation of the user.
The calculator
The calculator is too literal an interpretation of a standard 4-function calculator. A backspace key would be a delightful improvement (they support backspace in the Mac calculator), and a more full-featured calculator would be welcome, e.g. a standard student calculator with at least the level of trig functions.
SMS is a rip off
They offer SMS for text messaging, which uses the cellphone network. AT&T puts a limit on SMS messages and charges extra if you send more than the limit. Shame on AT&T! Shame!
Text messages use so little network bandwidth that charging for them after someone has already paid for an unlimited data plan is just plain crass, greedy, and disrespectful of the customer.
I’m sure the revenue issue for SMS is why building an IM client was not a priority for the initial iPhone. No doubt there will soon be web-based IM clients optimized for the iPhone to allow people a way around SMS.
Speed and robustness
While most operations on the iPhone were speedy, an occasional delay happened. The most noticeable was in Google Maps, where moving or rescaling caused an uncomfortable delay waiting for data. It should be possible to improve the experience through caching and by displaying lo-res detail or outlines while waiting for hi-res info to download.
As for robustness...most things worked very well, but I was able to produce a hard crash of the whole system in my first minute of use. I’d opened up a contact and decided to take a picture for that contact. It was delightfully simple, and I positioned the camera to take a picture of my hand. Snap! The photo was taken but the system had crashed. Nothing could bring it back to life until I did a hard reset (holding the menu button down simultaneously with the hold button at the top of the phone)..
On trying another phone, I had the inexplicable experience of all the applications suddenly exiting out after I’d been in the app for a couple minutes. It interrupted things I was in the middle of. I still don’t have an explanation for this. Maybe it has something to do with being a demo / display model.
Accessibility
One thing they’ve added to the iPod is that the iPhone uses some icons for the iPod interface. It’s just one screen, but a step in the right direction.
As mentioned, resizing the font in Safari is possible, and resizing in Photos and Google Maps helps support people with vision issues. Some default fonts are fairly large, as in scrollable lists, where the items have to be large enough anyway for easy selection. But other fonts are fairly small and appear to be non-resizable.
The phone supports attaching TTY devices for the hearing disabled, probably a legal requirement.
Overall, it doesn’t look like accessibility was much of a concern in the design of the device, and touch interfaces create some problems of their own. Keyboard-driven devices at least theoretically allow for almost anyone to be able to enter letters, if slowly and one at a time. Not everyone can touch arbitrary spots on the screen, and not everyone has the dexterity for the various gestures in this interface.
Is the iPhone a substitute for the iPod?
For the most part, it’s an equivalent iPod. A little more attractive, but with similar functionality. It doesn’t support the current iPod games. It doesn’t seem to support showing song lyrics, which I hope is just a silly oversight that they’ll soon fix.
The main reason I wouldn’t upgrade from my 30 Gb iPod is the limited memory, 4 Gb or 8 Gb. A lot of us can’t put our whole song library on the iPhone, and generally speaking, you probably wouldn’t put more than one full-length movie on it, at most. Honestly, I’d only sync a movie to it if I was explicitly planning on watching the movie, such as when I took the iPod on a plane flight. The limited memory for videos clarifies why adding YouTube functionality was so important -- people weren’t likely to use video much on an iPhone because it couldn’t hold much, but YouTube allows them to easily temporarily download short videos.
The decision not to use a hard drive in iPhones makes sense at a number of practical levels: it enables the device to be slightly smaller, more reliable, and more energy efficient. But I think there’s a bigger strategic reason. Apple wants to reset memory sizes to a lower value to encourage a healthy upgrade cycle in the coming years. If they’d started with 80 Gb, many people might decide not to bother upgrading. With Flash memory, it will be 5 to 10 years before the standard models can hold a few videos and a person’s entire music library, and hopefully people will keep upgrading to hold more, and in that time, Apple can come up with new uses for the iPhone and iPod that require even more memory.
What’s missing? My own little wishlist...
News articles have mentioned some obvious missing features: GPS, 3G network support, ability to buy or create ringtones, ability to buy music directly from the phone, and surprisingly, the absence of a to-do list. None of these is honestly too critical. I kind of like having a to-do list, but it would have to have a smart new user interface or I find to-do lists very impractical. I put together 400 to-do items on my Palm and then gave up because I couldn’t get things done as fast as I have ideas of what to add. Maybe it’s just my attention deficit.
Audio recording
I would really like to have a voice recorder, and can’t see any technical reason it’s not there. I’ve long suspected Apple avoided audio recording on the iPod to minimize the chance that iPods started being banned from concerts, movies, and everywhere else that people want privacy. Now that there’s already a camera on the iPhone, maybe audio recording is less of a big deal.
Wikipedia
I’d love a simple Wikipedia tool; I use it all the time. I know it’s easy to bookmark in Safari and browse there, but I think a custom app from Apple could really make the experience wonderful.
Presentations
I’ve been wondering why iPods hadn’t yet added support for PowerPoint and Keynote presentations. Imagine going to a talk with only your iPod instead of your laptop. Dock the iPod into a projector, and Go! This kind of business application can only improve sales as executives argue that iPods/iPhones are a necessary business expense. Don’t believe me? I’ve been a business executive. Business people don’t necessarily require an excuse to expense a gadget, but every little excuse just makes it easier.
Shortcuts
In the iPod section, it’s possible to set shortcuts that appear at the bottom of the screen. I’d really like to be able to put shortcuts onto the opening screen, or only one click down on a Shortcuts screen. I’d like one-click access to my favorite bookmarks, favorite iPod features or favorite playlists, favorite photos, and primary contacts. Even though you can set favorite contacts in the phone tool, one-click access to call home from the main screen would certainly be nice.
Why wouldn’t I get an iPhone?
- Limited to 8 Gb, so it doesn’t serve as an iPod upgrade.
- No lyrics when playing music, and it won’t play iPod games, so it serves as a bit of a downgrade.
- Waiting for my current phone contract to expire.
- Wish there was a cheaper AT&T contract. Wish I didn’t have to get their data plan and could just use wireless for data.
- The rings are awfully quiet.
- I have a phone, an iPod, and a Mac laptop. There’s not much here that I don’t already have. I could use the digital camera, since mine is broken; also, it’s somewhat convenient to be able to update calendar, contacts, and notes without my laptop, and these kind of suck on the iPod right now anyway.
- Heck, Apple’s all sold out anyway.
Still -- I’m sure I’ll get one soon!
Related article
Initial iPhone impressions
Sunday, July 1, 2007
