Obligatory iPhone rhapsodizing

/ technology

The day after the iPhone 3G was released, I got one. So did Gwen. It’s very nice. I feel like I’ve entered the future. It’s not fair to compare it to any other cellphone I’ve ever used—the difference is almost as stark as the one between the Mac I’m typing this on and a vintage 1983 DOS computer. I played with a friend’s Palm phone recently, and that was perhaps on the order of Windows 3.1 by comparison. Others have spilled gallons of electrons writing about this thing, so I’ll just offer a few random observations.

Out of the box, it is the source of enough wonder and delight to keep you going for quite a while, but the big deal now is that there’s an official path for independent developers to put software on it, which multiplies its value. The fact that these apps will be able to tie into location data, the camera, the web, etc, suggests any number of interesting possibilities. More than any other gadget I’ve played with in a long time, the iPhone seems full of promise and potential—and not just through software. Having a nice screen, good interface, reasonably powerful processor, and interesting ancillary functions suggests all kinds of hardware hookups to me. Two that I would really like to see:

  1. A car stereo that uses the iPhone as its faceplate. I imagine a home-screen alternative with direct access to four functions: GPS, phone, music, and radio (controlling a radio built into the stereo via USB).
  2. A bike computer mount. With the right interfaces, an iPhone as a bike computer could do a lot of interesting things: capture location-data breadcrumbs, capture performance data (heart-rate monitor, power monitor, cadence), capture photos and voice memos for ride logs. This would be a boon to bike racers and tourists alike.

One of the glaring problems everyone mentions with the iPhone is the lack of cut-and-paste. This is a problem, but another one that sticks out for me is the lack of a keystroke expander. There’s already predictive text input built in, so this wouldn’t be a new feature–there just needs to be a front end to the predictive-text library so that users can set up explicit associations between phrases and triggers. If any developers out there is listening, I’ve got my credit card ready.

Here’s a little interface quirk with the iPhone: One of the few physical controls on the device is a volume rocker switch. When viewing Youtube videos (which are always presented in landscape view), the rocker is on the bottom, with down-volume to the right, up-volume to the left. Check out this screenshot of what happens when you change volume using the rocker switch:
iphone volume control screenshot
The volume HUD appears, showing a volume “thermometer” on the bottom. Here’s what’s quirky: as you press the left rocker, the thermometer advances towards the right, and vice versa. This is counter-intuitive. The obvious way to avoid this would be for Youtube videos to be presented 180° rotated from their current position (that is, with the rocker on top), but for whatever reason, they only appear in one orientation. This is an extremely minor issue, but it stands out when the interface generally shows great attention to detail and emphasis on natural interaction.

iPhone announcement as cultural event

/ current events, technology

Apparently it comes as news to nobody that Apple announced the second-generation iPhone yesterday. This is interesting.

I’ve got plenty of friends who were aware of the rumored announcement for weeks before it came. And not just pathetic geeks who spend all their spare time huddled over Apple rumor sites–these are regular people who use technology but aren’t obsessed with it. One such friend referred to her own phone as a “Fisher-Price Phone,” which cracks me up. A few hours after the announcement, another friend dropped me a line asking “so are you going to buy an iPhone now?”

I’m guessing most of these people heard from their nerdier friends the rumors that a new iPhone was imminent. It’s not unusual that nerds would know the rumors, or that they’d discuss the rumors about the new phone with less nerdy friends, but it is interesting that so many people would have heard it, been interested enough to actually file it away mentally, and bring it up in conversation unprompted. That a rumor about an announcement to be made at a developers conference, would just become part of the zeitgeist.

Incidentally, yes, I am going to buy an iPhone now. T-Mobile’s service has been going down the crapper lately. I’m conflicted (to put it mildly) about doing business with AT&T, but in this case I’ll compromise my principles for teh shiny.

iPhone

/ technology

Everybody is talking about the iPhone, and who am I to resist that kind of peer-pressure?

The iPhone is stunning, and as it stands, I will not be getting one. Here’s why:

  1. Closed platform: The idea of spending $500 for a phone with as much potential as this but zero extensibility is a flat-out insult to would-be customers. Steve Jobs explains this by saying “we can’t have one rogue app bringing the entire West Coast network offline.” This is disingenuous or a lie. Somehow Apple trusts me not to bring down the entire Internet with one rogue app on my Mac, and the Internet is a lot dumber than Cingular at&t’s network. I don’t know for certain what the real reason is, but here are some possible candidates:
    1. Cingular at&t doesn’t want people installing Skype and iChat, which would let customers circumvent the company’s comparatively expensive services (seriously, 10¢ for a text message?). I don’t discount this possibility entirely, but considering Apple’s successful wrangling with music companies, I’d expect Apple to negotiate that away if they wanted to.
    2. Steve Jobs is notoriously fond of closed boxes. Probably plays some role in the decision.
    3. Apple wants to be able to act as a middleman and get a cut for any software you install on your iPhone. I think there’s a decent chance that this is at the root of it, but of course, it subverts free/open-source software distribution—and some of my favorite software falls in those categories.
  2. Storage not upgradable: The “cheaper” model is currently spec’d with 4 GB memory. By the time the phone is actually available for sale, this may seem a bit puny, and by the end of the phone’s useful life, it will be positively laughable. The lack of a flash-card slot may be another example of closed-box thinking, but regardless of why it’s missing, it puts the owner of the awkward position of spending a hell of a lot of money on a device that should be useful for a long time, but won’t be able to take advantage of what should be an easy and cheap upgrade.
  3. Lack of Flash/Java: I’ll readily admit that many uses of both Flash and Java are crap (some are brilliant though). Jobs has equivocated on Flash, but deciding to leave out either one is making a decision for customers that they should be able to make for themselves.

There are other shortcomings, of course: many people have focused on the lack of HSPDPA support. Apple’s explanation that the network for it hasn’t been built out sufficiently is of debatable merit. On the one hand, it means many people would be paying for a feature they couldn’t use. On the other, it means that when the feature would become usable, they still won’t be able to use it.

Apple is positioning this as a phone that happens to run a version of OS X. I view it as a tiny OS X computer that happens to have a cellular radio, and I view its features and lacks of features in that light. Despite all of this, it’s still an exciting development, not so much for the thing itself perhaps as because of related products we may see coming out of Apple (unlikely though it is, I’d be interested in something with a larger screen that dispensed with the cellular radio—sort of like the “sidepad” I wrote about before.) and because it should serve as a massive kick in the pants to the rest of the industry, raising the bar* in general.

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