So as promised, here are some random thoughts on the iPhone now I’ve been using it for a couple of months.
First, the good stuff:
- The interface is awesome. It looks great, of course, but it also works amazingly well. The response is usually very snappy, and the animation is smooth as silk. That’s not unusual for high end applications on full-sized computers, but it’s completely unheard of on a handheld device. I know a lot of people think the iPod interface is pretty snazzy (I’m not one of them!) but this thing blows it out of the water. The closest I can think of is the PSP’s menu system, but even that doesn’t really come close. All the little graphical flourishes add so much to the overall experience – delete an item and watch it get sucked off the screen, attach a photo to an email and watch the image shrink while the blank message comes up from behind it – it’s all 3D and feels like a flash demo rather than a real product. iPhone makes even the latest version of Windows Mobile, Symbian or Palm look like Windows 3.11.
- Web browsing actually works! Another first for a handheld, (almost) entirely un-gimped web browsing. The pages render perfectly, the fonts look crisp, images show up at full size and all the CSS & AJAX magic works just fine. The “double-tap to zoom” works really well too – Safari usually does a great job of guessing what exactly you’re trying to read and zooms and centers the display just right. You can of course rotate the screen for a wider view, but to be honest I don’t find myself doing that so much. Most of the pages I read regularly (Joystiq, Engadget, BoingBoing) render text in fairly narrow columns and I like having more to read before having to scroll. If your eyes aren’t so good though, I’m sure the larger text in landscape mode is a helpful thing.
- Calendar, contacts, weather, etc – all these basic apps work well and do what you’d expect. There are some niggles (why doesn’t the notes app sync with anything? why can’t I search contacts?) but overall it’s a nice experience using them – and of course they’re graphically very polished (particularly the Stock and Weather apps).
- Google maps is really nice. It doesn’t really work very differently from the regular web-based version, but I’ll say it again – this is a handheld. I remember the first time I scrolled a Google map on a PC (jaw dropping!) and now it’s in my pocket. Nice! Add in the satellite, hybrid and traffic modes, plus directions, and you’ve got a great little tool for anyone who travels at all.
- Edge data actually works, and WiFi is amazingly fast. Sure 3G would be nice, and when the HSPDA version comes along I’ll probably buy it like a sucker, but for now it’s perfectly usable most of the time.
- The keyboard is way better than I expected. You do get used to it, I was pretty terrible at first but now I’m pretty fast (and reliable). A real keyboard is still preferable for typing, of course, but given the other advantages I’m happy with the choice Apple made here. It’s certainly the best touchscreen keyboard ever made.
You’ll notice I didn’t mention the actual phone features (this is a phone, right?) – well there’s a reason for that. They’re “OK”. I’m not a huge phone user in the first place (I bought the iPhone more as a web/email tool than actual phone) but even I can tell you sacrifice a little for the slickness of the design. My main issue is that it’s simply not very comfortable to hold up to your face and you leave great big greasy cheek smudges all over the screen in the process! Yes you can use a hands free, and that might be a better bet, but I’m not one to walk around with an ear piece in “just in case”. Things like SMS and voicemail work fine, again with little cosmetic features like “conversation” style SMS (it keeps messages from different people on different screens and arranges their and your messages in thread order). Also, the ring could be louder and the vibrate stronger.
Finally, the stuff that sucks and some suggestions for Apple:
- It crashes. A lot less now after a couple of updates, but Safari does still have a habit of vanishing in the middle of a session. Luckily the music keeps playing now, which it didn’t pre-update.
- Speaking of the iPod, the new interface is awesome eye candy (coverflow for choosing albums, whizzy graphical effects everywhere) but it takes way too many taps to do something simple like pause if I’m not right in the iPod app at the time. Again, you can tell Apple knew this and that’s why they added the pause button to the headphones, but they suck (as always) so I’m button-less. At least the volume can easily be adjusted with the side-mounted rocker.
- Safari needs Firefox-style search plugins. You can easily search Google or Yahoo directly from the browser, but Wikipedia or IMDB requires you to go to the homepage first (which can take a while, see below!).
- Spellchecker – ’nuff said.
- Outlook sync is still a little flaky. Which is better than when I bought it (didn’t work at all). I know the pain currently being felt by the developers working on this feature (the Outlook API/data model is the most insane I have ever witnessed) but it needs to be better. And it needs to include notes!
- No copy & paste. This is absurd – I’m writing stuff down on a post-it note just so I can retype it in a different app (for example, copying an address from Safari to an email). I understand that it’s really hard to come up with a good UI model for this using a single finger, but it needs fixing.
- Ringtones – so now I can pay $0.99 to make a ringtone from a song I’ve already paid $0.99 for. Gee thanks. What about if I want to record my own? What if I don’t want music as a ringtone but some other sound? No? That’s dumb. Think Different indeed!
- I want to switch off the data portion of the phone without switching off the phone part. On vacation in Europe recently I had to be extremely careful not to press any button which would cause the phone to make a data connection, as while roaming overseas that’s charged at an amazing $20/mb. Crazy! I calculated that my normal data usage, at those prices, would be nearly $1000 a week. They either need to get AT&T to offer unlimited overseas data for free (or cheap) – which is very unlikely – or add a button to disable non-WiFi data.
So that’s it. I really like this device, it’s perfect for me as the first smartphone which combines good internet facilities with a small physical size. There are phones out there with more features, better keyboards, 3G, etc – but they’re usually pretty chunky (see any HTC, Treo or Blackberry) and the interface is far from great. On the other hand you have tiny phones like the RAZR which have no useful data functionality to speak of. I needed a middle ground, and this is it. As a long time Mac-o-phobe and very reluctant iPod user, this is the first Apple product to really make me sit up and take note. Let’s see what comes next!