It’s always made me crazy that phone experiences aren’t better integrated with the desktop. On the desktop you have the space to manipulate large data sets and UI elements very easily and quickly.
There have been feeble, wretched attempts made by Nokia and Sony. I’m disappointed with the integration Apple has offered so far with the iPhone via iTunes. It’s extremely limited and frustrating. The new Mobile Me interface seems promising, but I’m not holding my breath that it’s what I want.
In the video below, Google demos the type of customisation that I’m looking for. At about 3:30 they show how you to customise the phone experience through a desktop interface. Just drag-and-drop content and UI widgets to your phone. Finally somebody has done it right!
My beloved K750 has crapped out on me. It’s not beloved anymore.
To replace it, I almost bought the N95. Then I played around with it. It has a killer feature set, but it’s extremely expensive and it has the absolute worst hardware and software design. It’s pitiful. For half the price I got the iPhone. Thank god for that.
The iPhone is almost certainly, as my friend Wayne put it, the best 1.0 product ever. I’m really dying to know how they pulled it off. How did they manage to design such a refined user experience in a 1.0 - without news of the phone’s details leaking?
I say that even though my version of the iPhone lacks the ability to make or receive phone calls, text messages, or email/web on-the-go via GPRS!! I can NOT wait until they work out the crack.
So what’s to love?
The drop dead beautiful UI design and hardware. That’s obvious just looking at screenshots, but using it is far more impressive.
The touch keyboard works extremely well. I often use one hand to type and I’m definitely much faster typing on it than a standard mobile keypad. Admittedly, I was never one of those hyper-thumb freaks.
The speed of the interface. It’s incredibly responsive and smooth. Just like Macs, putting it to sleep and waking it up is instantaneous.
The photo quality is very good. I thought the K750 took decent shots, but the iPhoto pix are significantly better (however, I do have some gripes about the camera).
The apps (calendar, maps, notepad) are stunning. Purely from a UI design perspective it’s beautiful. The interactions are very quick and very smooth, with nicely anticipated shortcuts and navigational details.
Gripes?
I can’t transfer songs from different machines. WTF?! That’s absolutely fucked. That is just stupid, lame and IMO really cripples the device.
Camera controls. The thing I used most on my K750 was the camera and the MP3 player. Same goes for the iPhone. The K750 definitely had better hardware controls for both. The iPhone is sorely lacking a hardware camera shutter button. The touch screen shutter is awful. It’s the one time I desperately need tactile feedback and precision. The touch screen sensitivity doesn’t always work and that is maddening when you’re trying to capture a split second moment. It also could really use auto-focus and a macro. Plus, they need to move the lens - my finger always shows up in photos!
Audio playback controls. The volume buttons are great, but I also need controls for play/stop and next/previous without using the screen. I know the Apple headset has those controls on the mic clip, but I don’t use Apple’s headphones and that controller isn’t so elegant anyway. My K750 would do next/previous by holding down the volume up/down. I wish the iPhone did the same. For play/stop it should use the camera shutter button I want added. Finally, scrolling through long audio files like This American Life episodes is hellish with the scrubber. Here’s a great suggestion from Chris Fahy: an on screen jog dial for scrubbing audio.
The wifi reception is really weak. And it doesn’t always activate automatically.
As I mentioned, the touch sensitivity is not always reliable, which can be pretty maddening sometimes.
The predictive text is terrible and it always messes things up. I wish I could just turn it off.
I constantly want to use the home button as a back button in the iPod
Here’s an idea: Wifi syncing. Duh. I’m sure they must be working on this.
What I miss from my K750?
The LED light. It was ostensibly the camera flash, but I used it mostly as a flashlight and reading light. It came in super handy on many occasions, especially camping.
The radio. I expect a radio will be available on future iPhones. It’s really nice to listen to the radio sometimes.
I won’t miss…the flimsy/broken connector jack, the flimsy/broken thumbstick, the flimsy/broken camera shutter button.
The iPhone is definitely giving me Apple love. I’m still not quite compelled to switch to a Mac. I’d really just love to use my iPhone as my primary OS. If I could connect my iPhone via wifi to a big screen and keyboard then BAM…I’ve got my pocket computer that has most my data in the cloud and acts as a Web OS client device.
It was pretty easy to predict video billboards the day that LCD screens became available. Being able to get movie times from a movie billboard (note: not a concept I saw in the Surface demos) is something I’ve been waiting for, for a long time. This “vision†of “surface computingâ€, to me, seems like a very limited, one-trick gimmick. I think paper thin screens will be far more useful and ubiquitous. I seriously doubt that surface computing – in the sense of a dedicated table - will ever go mainstream. Some underlying concepts are likely to persist – ie, some types of gestural interactions, device synching, but those aspects of Surface are no any way revolutionary or unique to this product.
My reaction to Streetside
It’s stunning. Incredible implementation. Absolutely gobsmacking. I was able to look in the doorway (and window) of my old apartment in San Francisco!!
I went down the street where my old office was and I didn’t recognize it since I haven’t been there in 5 years and things have changed. Very trippy.
And it just works. Click around a few times and you know how to use it in all its glory. Yet, it’s quite sophisticated. Amazon did some streetside mapping that was kind of cool, but Google’s implementation is absolutely jaw dropping. The shear scale of data, the elegant game-like interaction, the speed, the depth, the dynamic contextual layers.
I worship Google.
The only thing I wonder about is the usefulness – whether it’s really worth the effort. It’s an extremely cool experience, I can see a few practical uses, lots of impractical uses, but compared to Gmail or even just street maps, I’m not sure there’s such a big pay off beyond bragging rights and cool factor.
However, combine it with a mobile phone and GPS – then I could see it being extremely powerful. Combine Streetside with Microsoft’s dynamic 3D stitching – then I could take a picture with my camera phone and in realtime it gets posted to Google and it’s a form of personal memory mapping and user generated real time mapping. Google could pinpoint where I was, when I was there, and even show me the photo. If, years later, I meet somebody who was at the same place at the same time then we could see how our paths literally crossed. Of course, there’s all the geo-tagging opportunities (this restaurant was rated by your friend Joe last week, there were 3 late night muggings in this alley in the past week).
I wanted to avoid adding more noise to the iPhone echo chamber, but resistance is futile.
The iPhone makes for a jaw dropping demo.
The demo site is also beautifully done. The day of the launch I was slobbering and blubbering when I saw it.
iWant
It has (almost) everything I want: camera, mp3 player, email, web, and…oh yeah…voice calling. In that order.
When I saw that it has no buttons a big smile came across my face. The biggest frustration I have with my beloved Sony k750 are the buttons - the joystick intermittently goes off in a random direction and the camera shutter button craps out regularly. I think the lack of buttons isn’t as important as people are making out. I look forward to it.
Making and receiving calls is what I do the least on my phone. I mostly shoot photos and listen to music. In terms of communications, I probably use email the most, both reading and writing, followed by texting and least of all calls. I don’t talk on the phone very much mostly because of the extortionist voice prices in NZ, but also because I hate talking on the phone. The mobile version of Gmail is fantastic. I use Opera Mini all the time to read Stuff, the NY Times, get the weather, get the train schedule, and occasionally Wikipedia when the kids ask me something I can’t answer. I also use the flash as a reading light. The k750 truly is a magical wonder device.
On the down side
Having WiFi would be great, but I think 3G might be more useful, particularly here in NZ. The iPhone voicemail demo is nifty, but it’s still so crippled. The Telco carriers are fools for not maximising the value of voicemail. I’d be willing to pay extra to forward voice messages to my email, like I did with jFax years and years ago.
Maybe somebody will build an app to do that. Oh. Right. The iPhone is Steve’s personal closed platform. Shame, that. Still, it could be fun developing widgets for it.
One thing that I’d miss from the k750 is the radio. I really do enjoy tuning in to National Radio and Radioactive.
Like most people, I was disappointed by Apple TV. Mostly because I expected there to be a seamless integration between the iPhone and the iTV. It makes so much sense to have the iPhone be a remote for the iTV, as well as being a way of presenting media from the iPhone onto your TV.
The size of the iPhone might be the biggest sticking point for me. It looks pretty fecking big, but it’s always hard to say until you hold one. I used to haul my Palm in my pocket for years. Hell, I even managed to force my Newton in my pocket a few times!
Phone from the future (if the future is 1992)
Speaking of the Newton, it is interesting how in many ways the iPhone isn’t that much further on from the original vision for the Newton. It was 15 years ago that I was at General Magic, the step-brother of the Newton, working with Tony Fadell (lead engineer of the iPhone) on my Mediaphone concept. Note the buttonless touch screen…
It was 12 years ago that I did some work on the original Apple iTV. And it was 7 years ago that I worked on a Wifi prototype that had an mp3 player with social networking communications and digital payments. It’s inexcusable that we’re still waiting for mCommerce.
My point? OMG, it takes forever, really forever, for new technology to hit the street. The iPhone is not a futuristic device. It’s an extremely old device that’s been promised for years and it has only just arrived from ye olde future. A guy could get old waiting for these future technologies to arrive.
