Handful of Nothing

Warnings: This is a very long and personal review*. I don’t go into the issues like closed to applications, locked, or those that people are tired of reading about.I look to the device in my daily life and why it’s going to be replaced by the old one. So you can start reading it, and if you decide to go on, just click the keep reading button.

detail: I’m not saying here that the Nokias (that I compare the iPhone with) are flawless. Actually they have so much faults that I ended up using the iPhone. Small RAM, sluggish UI, hidden multitask, confuse IA, confuse configuration, long and wide road for simple features are also problematic in the S60 devices, but they actually are great as phones, and you will understand that the “change” is related to a series of critical failures.

Another forgotten detail: I now have both versions available, and I’m aware of the 1.1.1 news and the critics still valid for that version too.

Well, now after a while really* using the iPhone as my daily phone I got to one conclusion: for me, it sucks. Not hard, but it sucks. The reasons to that conclusion could be a little to “specific” for an user (me) but at some point an clarify IMHO where Apple screws nicely the device. I will let clear here that the review is based on a kind of user (me, multitask, music oriented, internet user, cares for UI speed and so on)

It’s also clear to me that fan boys (and not that much fan boys) can start flames about this problems being small, or any other apologies, but the fact is that Apple is far from being perfect in the product itself, but it’s for sure the best marketing company in the world. People accepts the product’s fault and worst start to blindly advocate for it. Come one people, if you want Apple (and the whole industry) to improve, the first thing to do is complain.

So, I’m a tech guy, or a early adopter and I really like to use one device. It’s convergence time right? Sure it is, and from the fact that I’m a interaction designer I cannot say anything less but “omg, this is amazing” in the matters of the UI. While it still has a lot of problems its simply a really advanced, state preserving, no-need-to-teach how to multi-task ui, that as far as I can imagine was simply the result of a lot of research about: What do you think is boring or could be better on your phone?

Apple got it quite nicely in some basic stuff. So I will talk about the real great things about the iPhone first, then I start kicking as hard as I can and it deserves. Let’s talk about the positive points :

1) Silence switch button. This is killer. Plain simple and an inconvenient truth that I don’t rave it on any of my N or E (more suitable here) Nokias, or even in other brands I was able to test/use.

2) Multi tasking. Most of the regular, not so early adopters but real enthusiastic people that have s60 in my personal network doesn’t even know that holding that 2 things with 2 squares (menu) buttons is giving you access to your running application. the iPhone made it quite transparent, open everything at anytime and it tries to preserve the state / point were you were in each application. This makes the very hard task of multitask quite easy and very very natural.

3) No window metaphor. no desktop like components. No silly borders that just waste space. I always advocated that window-like metaphor is a critical mistake on mobile UI designing. I couldn’t stand some of my devices that have 20pixels wide borders. It’s funny to see that this comes actually from the osX era, with no borders on windows, and for the iPhone the focus was on the content, not on the frame around it.

4) First mobile phone with multi touch and thus the use of gestures with multiple fingers. Ok, another thing hard to admit, but I already wrote about Apple not being the one to inventing it, but they deserve the merit of being the first to put it on a mobile device with such a nice use: Pinch in and out is just plain fun and natural to use. It not only made some of my friends go “OMG this is amazing” as it was for sure capable of selling the device itself. People becomes justs dazzled to see that the thing reacts fast and with a very nice precision to your gesture.

This 4th point has actually 3 important sub-items:

4.1) The gesture is nice, but only works because of it’s “physical behavior” and…
4.2) Because it’s actually quite fast. So no hardware was spared that could be a risk for the UI responsiveness.
4.3) The screen is very very sensitive (touch pad like) so you actually almost don’t touch it to use.

5) The “fake Physics” components / elements. The way some components, specially the most used one (list) reacts to user’s input, uses some really simple yet nice visual feedback, giving the user the impression that they are dealing with real material. This maybe a little bit because I’m just love physics / games or just because I’m a UI designer, but as far as I can tell all my friends that had the contact with the iPhone through me liked it.

6) Screen placement on the Hardware: Being a full touchscreen device, you need to have the best usable area of your device so… No hardware borders (bevel) in the edge of the screen, preventing you from accessing with ease the borders. Well, any ID knows that one our best friends is the Fitt’s law and that couldn’t be more usable on a touchscreen device, as corners becomes hotspot for critical tasks. But if you have a very high bevel to protect the screen you’re actually making it quite worse for finger usage.

7) Didn’t try to mimic desktop / mouse ready widgets on the UI : Select box. As far as a lot of people may not agree with the small wheel to select items on the web browser, or set alarm, it is really nice to see that they really treated the device as an single finger driven experience instead of just going the easiest path (using a normal select, drop down menu).

8 ) Nice integration with desktop. This is going to be a good and a bad point.
The good thing about this is that one single application : iTunes handles almost everything you need in the matters of synchronization, backing up, filling up your iPhone with content. I know some people that just hates the iTunes software but I cannot deny the incredible power it gave to regular end user to really fulfill some of critical tasks for a media oriented phone.

9) Real nice browsing experience : (also going to be a bad point due the lack of flash)

10) Nice email setup. Of course one of the good thing is fully integration with the mac (mail) but also in the device the wizard for a new account really saves you time when adding common accounts. This is also present on Leopard and etc. Quick and fast setup.

11) Flexible keyboard : .com / search / or other tricks on contextualizing the keyboard are just genius.

Unfortunately this review has a bad conclusion, so let’s start talking about the bad things, but with a quick “note” about…

Desktop integration

In the middle of bad and good I would like to point out the most controversial one. The number 8. Just because I really love and hate this that is hard to decide.

0) Device - Desktop - Service integration. This is the famous end2end, or how to deal with the customer in the whole product’s chain of events. For the iPhone this is : iTunes stores - iTunes - iPhones. And here goes my quick overview of that:

a) It’s incredible nice how everything is converged in one application only (at least in sight) the iTunes, and how it’s easier to upgrade, restore and fix problems yourself. It took a long time to see the other manufactures do that, and the software for example Nokia only came this year if I’m not mistaken (or last year with few phones). Here apple shined because it supported both mac and windows, while nokia is windows only, and in the matters of synchronization / backup the iTunes way is like 10x better than the Nokia PC suite, that has been targeted by users as evil since it’s release. Of course there comes one moment that I really didn’t want to use my music application to control how my convergence device should be configured / synchronized.

b) While this simplicity is fine, and a lot of real users just love this, sometimes you start to ask a little bit for more. You want to use your iPhone as your personal file holders (so you can take it to work), you want to be able to upload photos with a little bit better quality, no quality to make pinch gestures responsive enough. You want to see an eye without those dots used for compression. You want to synchronize with your thunderbird mail client, you want to play other videos (I’ve visited hell trying to convert some divX and then adding them to iTunes video library) Why CAN’T WHY JUST PUT MY iPhoto videos on the iPhone? that sucks big time. I don’t mind if you convert them on the way, but I want to synchronize an iPhoto album that is composed of photos and videos

So, in the end is this: you pay a high price for the convenience if you are a power user. Sometimes this can bee too high and make you change the way you do your stuff.

1) It doesn’t power on to play your alarm. Bad Apple. how can I trust you if you can make me lose my appointments? This has been a killer thing in all Nokia phones for a long time. Cellphone has become the alarm clock of bazillions of people so it really should be able to be on top of those problems.

1.1) Still on the alarm, update reminder by patricia: (again the lack of other physical keys) : the snooze button is in the touchscreen, so if you are one of those lazy persons that love the snooze and do it blindly with your phone you will find your self tapping the screen until you hit the small button.

On the Car

2) I’m used to just used to be driving and answering or making quick calls home to ask my wife something. The regular sequence is pretty simple : I pick up the phone, slide up (or do the traditional unlock sequence for Nokia phones) press the green buttons (this brings my recent called) and then most of the time the green button again (dial the last number). This is simply one of the most useful and needed features in a phone (making it clear again: for me). This for sure fits in the out of the car world, but in the car gets pretty more complicated because the focus is on the other activity : driving.

3) Answering a call : Well, you need to do the slide thing. I love clean design. Less for me is more, but a phone, needed a dedicated key for that. So I will not lie, my good will to use the device took me to actually “training” to do the slide without looking. Ok, now I can almost do it with no mistake, but, there’s one problem on that, bringing us back to the point [6] where I complain about the touchscreen. So having a call button actually kills this and the first problem.

4) Answering a call with the loudspeaker. To complement the previous question, most of the time (as I live in Recife where the traffic is chaotic) I try to use the loudspeaker. Actually I was so used to use it in the noisy way home (Car, Air conditioner, horns and music) with my other phones that I was really pissed with this one. The iPhone is just USELESS in a little bit more noisy environment. the 1.1.1 brought some improvements, but still amateurs compared to the mid level phones like my very old 6230.

Listening to Music

5) Listening to music : well this is the same as the loudspeaker. It’s crappy and even crappier for music. I have the habit of using the phone to listen to music. Every time that I install a new sound system, some nice fellow breaks into the car, break the whole dashboard and takes it away. So a regular speaker is minimal for me since the 3250 (more than one year and half ago).

6) The lack of dedicated music keys. Again I’m pressing the button of more keys, that would kill the design beauty of the iPhone and it’s single home button. The point is : while driving, or just listening to music, being able to change music with ease is not only important but again crucial. The good thing is: for the non-speaker situation a good headphone with music controls can solve this. I don’t have it but I will get one when possible. The one that comes with the iPhone has a “next and pause-play” command (click / double click) but the phone is just not the one someone who loves music would use, and still misses the previous action. Speaking of that, a 19 dollar official “adapter” to use your earphones just because apple made the plug deep into the device? no thanks (I know there’s cheaper solutions) but .. WHY? respect people Apple. (if you doubt, just read the reviews here)

7) (this is very personal) I’m a random guy. Yes, I then should buy myself a shuffle instead of the iPhone, but I really like to disrupt my random sequence with one particular music. Sometimes this music is or in the same album, and the natural action is to double touch the album, see the music on a list and select it. Even if the mental sequence I used was for selecting a song and start random playback, selecting a song from a album of the current song not only starts the new song but also interrupts my random playback and takes me to playblack inside that particular album. This behavior I assume is very personal and a device is not supposed to fulfill every user’s need but being able to select another song without disrupting the mode is a good idea. Let’s of course say that iPhone improved this already A LOT comparing to the old iPod ui.

ps: This was partly solved in the Zune (one of the few features I really like on M$ devices) where in the now playing you have access to the list of upcoming music, allowing to search for the music you want (without navigation clues of course) for a new song without breaking the random mode.

Browsing the Web

The overall experience on the iPhone is just great. And excluding the fact that flash is not included, thus you are excluded of A LOT of common web pages, of common services regularly used (not web2.0 things and so on) the experience is quite nice, and the best around. So there’s no much to talk here. I’m trying not to say the same things said in other places, and of course I will not comment about the crashing of the application. It’s known (in the developer’s world) that browser is a complicated software and in mobile devices is quite hard to make it really fault proof.

8 ) Not able to use the same 2 fingers gestures for zoom out. I understand that 2 fingers is used for slow scrolling inside divs (like frames) but for the sake of consistency it would be great to have not only a global zoom in, but also the zoom out.

Typing, keyboard and inputing data

I was reading some critics about some of the lists on the iPhone (design critics) but the overall experience of input data is good enough and the way the drop down menu (in web) or select list was implemented was great IMHO.

9) Keyboard in the vertical mode / one hand operation. Apart from all critics the keyboard after being able to really put it to use and actually let it adapt to me and adapt myself to it, it’s quite nice but is just not that nice when you need to use it in vertical mode one handed. While this is fairly trivial in any t9 enabled phone, in the iPhone becomes a little bit painful because you are not pointing with a finger but is actually using the thumb slightly curved. If you add to this a moving environment (car) it becomes even clearer. This is not critical but REALLY annoying when compared to physical keys.

10) spellcheck / correct tooltip too small. This is really annoying sometimes but I cannot say that it’s 100% of the time that is a bad thing. Depending of where is the input field it can be quite hard to touch the suggested word to cancel it. if you add to this the screen not fully “responsible” sometimes it can also get REALLY annoying.

11) The fact that you can only turn the keyboard on the browser. The horizontal keyboard is just amazing when compared to the vertical one. I know there’s of course a lot of complications in matters of UI to do that without adding rotating to each single input-capable screen but this would be a real nice addition.

Camera

The camera is a really boring application / feature on the iPhone. I really agree with some of the first comments about it that was something like :
“it seems that the camera was the last application / feature to be looked at, the time was short and instead of really needed features Apple gave the iPhone a simple animated aperture animation and saved photos. That’s it.

12) No video, this is simply boring as hell. I simply cannot count how many times I picked up the phone trying to record something and the frustration that took over me when realized that is simply not possible ;p

13) Again the take picture button is completely software, so taking pictures of yourself is a pain. If you are in silent mode, you don’t even know if you really hit the button.

14) Trying to take pictures one handed in landscape mode. It’s just a exercise of patience. The lack of the physical button added to the place of the camera x positioning of hands. If you are not using both hands you maybe have a hard time making usable photos. Of course this can also be really personal, and I can have some neurological problem but it looks that is just about having the picture button too close to the bottom and your thumb needs to curve in a not so natural way. I realize that the button and screen placements are like that for the sake of symmetry but is just not so good to use it (the natural position is the button on the top) but let’s keep going on…

15) No bluetooth features to send and received files, etc. Sometimes I got myself without my synchronization cable. So no transfer, no charging, nothing. I know that I wouldn’t be able to charge over bluetooth but to get that fresh picture and use it in photoshop? Sorry not possible.

16) No way of using the phone as a modem for the laptop. This bothers me REALLY hard.

17) Needing a paper clip to change sim. I hate this. Why? I carry 2 phones, sometimes I need to change the sim because the iPhone was dead and I was just not able because it’s impossible to remove the sim to place in the other phone. This is ridiculous.

Very boring details
18) Maps : you are not able to place a pin point. Some of the maps are just old and maybe has not the street name, and you can’t simply put a pin point, or trace a route between 2 points with you in the control (not 2 address)

19) Maps : When trying to trace a route, you choose one of the locations (start) and for any reason you type or pick up a wrong address in the second one and you try to fix (type the correct one) you are actually going to lose the input even of the first one (a blank from to input) and have to start again. So simple but so stupid.

20) Mail : you are not able to fast delete a lot of email. Ok this is also very “personal” as you can press edit and use 2 clicks on each item. But there should be an ways of selecting and then pressing delete. Not critical but a detail.

21) Mail : the mail if no explicit said (configured) will check email even when you are on an expensive roaming taxes. I know some people can call me stupid, but in those situations I understand (but not forgive, the nokia permission to connect etc) Apple evolved a little bit too much on this. wifi should be like it is transparent, but not gprs / 3g connections.

22) Notes: It’s the “let’s use some real metaphors to the extreme” and they made it. Extremely boring. I don’t know if worths too much goes so literal like this. A simple To-Do able list with white background would be a lot nicer. (integrated with the TODO in calendar)

Overall Telephony experience

23) This was supposed to be a good one. Why? Because it’s a phone. And as a phone voice should be killer. Everyone knows that the thing a phone should do best is : Calling. Cristal clear voice, nice speakers, easy dialing, incredible good antennas for receptions even with lousy carriers, nice handover from 3g / edge - wifi even better handover between carrier’s antennas, avoiding for example call dropping when driving. Last but not least : battery life.

Well this was supposed to be incredible in the iPhone, as you believe that the basic design assumptions were made “let’s see what users really love and hate on their current phones”. They really figured out some clever ways of doing things (like a pointed before.. multitasking) making user’s life easier in the device as a whole, but the choices on hardware can really be blamed for the worst thing in the iPhone: Call quality.

Ok, somebody will say : “It works just fine where it was supposed to work(AT&T)”, and as I’m using it in a Brazilian operator, people could actually say “This is a 3rd world carrier, should be crappy with any phone”. I will not defend myself of any of those things but actually talk about facts:

I wandered around the place with the same chip in 3 cellphones. A Nokia N95, one E61, and the iPhone. Starting the circuit inside the office, every 5 minutes someone called from a landline and the same carrier cellphones to the phones. It’s pretty clear that the place has some “blind” spots, and I wanted to make sure that all the phones were going to suffer about that. What I saw?

Well the iPhone just “goes” black on the weakest spots. No signal (the “no service” instead of the carriers names) of course we were not able to complete any calls, and of course also failed to notify me via SMS the missed calls (ok this can be an operator issue so please do not consider it if you’re not Brazilian)

In the same spot that the iPhone was dead, the both Nokias could hold signal (weak but there) and the calls were made. Let me make clear: In a same spot, with the same chip from a same carrier the iPhone was not able to complete one single call where the Nokias were able to receive all of them.

Then, elevator testing. Elevators are hard places to use a cellphone, and as I was expecting, after the door is closed the iPhone is again dead. No signal, no calls. Test with the Nokias: the N95 actually received 4 of the 5 attempts, and the quality was really above average. The E62 as able to receive all the 5 calls and the quality was slightly above average, but completely usable.

After that I started looking too much to the iPhone. Why? Because at some points in my daily routine the phone was just dead (some blind spot) even inside the office. This was completely not acceptable, and it never happened that way with my other phones.

This issue along with the already commented position about the quality of the speakers and the regular call speaker really made me decide to drop the iPhone to the secondary phone position. And it’s funny because I really want it for data (browsing, rich email) and my other phone is for calling, music and data.

Conclusion
before buying the iPhone, please consider your objectives. If like me you need a benchmark tool, or just a cool “fashioned-hyped” device to show off, it’s for you. If you really are looking for your critical / “it really matters to me” / only, and I trust it - phone I would strongly suggest you not to go the iPhone way in this first revision. A good phone from any other competitor (except motorola hehehe) will fit you better than the apple one.

For me I just wish I could merge the 2 devices. The superior User experience (UI - Desktop Experience) in the Apple phone, with the much better hardware / software (reception / speakers / etc) , programming philosophy (Open for developers - ok Iphone is going to be this in february) and of course the features from the Nokia phones.

I believe, that Apple is going really to improve it’s phone but will suffer from one thing : lack of portfolio. There will be an iPhone 2, but that’s it if doesn’t fit for your needs.. you’re lost. In the opposite way, apart from being a Finnish company, historically more “conservative”, Nokia’s new strategy, along with a great knowledge of the mobile market, powered with the world’s most impressive logistic, if combined with an improved and renewed (at least in mentality, what appears to be happening with Axel meyer on the front) design team can REALLY bring Apple’s appeal down and make the gap come (in UI level) back to a competitive way. Apple in the other side will not be able easily to match up Nokia’s expertize on the other areas so, in the end we should cheer for evolution. Evolution from both manufactures, focusing even more on the user and showing them that we want features, but we want it in very well designed user experiences, not seas of menus and 3-4 ways of accomplish the same tasks. We want beauty, but with consistency and robustness. If it comes with a real nice make up but the interior is almost a vacancy users will quickly start complaining (not too much, see the Razr) but when tides changes they will jump easily to next contender in the line.

What I really wonder is : When are the other companies going to realize that Design is so powerful that can make a company with so much problems and bad attitudes like Apple become almost like a religion? Of course in the Desktop they are in a niche, but I’m waiting to see the day I will meet some people defending their favorite brand like Apple fans. And why that? Mainly because of it’s design decisions, and it’s design oriented profile. But of course this is too complex for a single paragraph so I will keep it for a future post =)

* I was trying to enjoy it as much as possible. Completely open minded. Really “well humored” towards the new device. So this is not a anti-Apple, or a Pro-Nokia, but really a Gadget lover trying to find his ultimate buddy.

Ps: I also do not enter in specific problems like : Portuguese support in the keyboard, so if you are a Brazilian interested in more details about this, please comment.