It’s been a week since I said goodbye to Verizon and switched to the iPhone, so I would like to take a moment to give my first week’s opinion about my new toy. For this post I’ll focus solely on the iPhone itself by giving my impression of the hardware and software the phone has. I’ll be publishing two more posts discussing the iPhone apps and iPhone accessories I’ve been playing with in the next few days.
As I write this review of sorts I’m going to stay away from elaborating on any of the normally lauded features. If you’re anything like me, then you know what big item features comes in an iPhone 3GS. This post should give a more personal understanding of what owning this device is like to someone who only has read about the iPhone.
As I think about what words best describe my iPhone experience thus for, the best description I have is subtle love.
Over the past few years I’ve started to learn how to cook and I’ve discovered that the most important ingredient in any dish is love. You can taste the difference in a dish when the chef actually cares about the meal. The dish isn’t prepared simply for the paycheck at the end of the week, it’s prepared so that the diner can enjoy the meal. That difference is quality is shown in the iPhone. It doesn’t feel as though it were designed purely for money, it was made to make my life easier, better even. It doesn’t show that love with any one killer feature. It’s the collection of smaller things that are refined and melded together that make you realize what an amazing device it is. Each area of the device received equal attention so as not to make one area more dominate than the others. This ideology is what makes the completed project feel closer to perfection.
The best example I have for this point, is the toggle switch on the side of the phone used to put it into silent or vibrate mode. It doesn’t get mentioned in press releases or featured in keynotes, because it’s a lowly switch. But its design shows exactly what subtle love is. That switch understands why it’s there and knows in what circumstances it will be used in. You put a phone into silent mode, when 1.) you are going to be in a situation where a phone ringing would be a disturbance or 2.) you are already in that situation. When I’m in a silenced phone setting, I slip my hand into my pocket and switch it to silent mode. It was designed to be discreet, which is exactly the situation you’re in when your phone needs to be silent. I could see someone designing the silent mode switch in software under the phone app, which might appear to be a logical place for it. But that would require one to pull the phone out, slide it unlocked, tap the phone app and switch the phone into silenced mode. Too many movements, plus very rude to appear to be playing with your iPhone when the manager is giving his presentation. It wouldn’t be discreet. It wouldn’t be subtle.
Also of interest is that it is a toggle switch, not a button similar to the lock button on top of the iPhone. A toggle switch seems like an odd mechanism for control. When I first found it I knew there had to be a reason for it, although it wasn’t immediately obvious. I didn’t give it much thought, until a day later when I found myself in a silenced phone situation. I reached into my pocket and felt that the toggle switch was not flush with the volume control buttons, meaning the phone was already in silent mode. If the iPhone had used a button instead of a toggle switch, then I couldn’t be 100% sure of which state the phone was in. Perhaps those things are minor to most and I’ve overanalyzed it, but that level of thought and design speaks volumes to me.
Another area that doesn’t get as much attention as some of the other features is the SMS. Having conversation threads with people I’m texting is the way SMS should be. I can follow the conversations. No more confusion over what a random “Yes” or “Only on Tuesdays” mean if I’ve forgotten what they were in response to. No more backtracking through my log of messages to find the previous message to that sender to remember what I was asking of him/her. It feels like Apple did for SMS with the threads, what Google is trying to do for email with Google Wave. Taking something that is old or familiar and revamping it to become more useful and inline with modern practices.
Visual voicemail is another area that is revamping old for modern practices. Selecting which message to play, regardless of order they were received, and being able to skip to certain around in the message just makes sense for a modern interface. It’s subtle, but shows the love for making a better, more useful device.
I was surprised as to how well I adapted to the touch screen keyboard. I know most people cite that as I big reason why they aren’t interested in purchasing an iPhone, but I believe I’m actually faster on it. Granted I’m coming from a 9 button keypad and not a full keyboard like a Blackberry might have, but so far I haven’t had many issues. Most of my typing mistakes get corrected properly by the autocorrect. And after adjusting to some of the features that are designed to speed your typing, such as after typing an apostrophe the keyboard switches back to the letter keypad, my typing increased. Basically, you just have to learn to trust the iPhone and its greatness. Trust that it knows exactly what you want to do. And if it doesn’t do what you expected it to do, then your expectations are wrong and you should thank your iPhone for showing you the error of your ways.
I was pleased to discover that the iPhone even accounts for my terrible use of the popular Southern vocabulary words y’all and ain’t. Never would have guessed that it would have an entry to autocorrect yall to y’all and aint to ain’t. Perhaps the rest of the world has given up on trying to correct our backwardness and decided to cater to us. Ain’t that sweet of them.
The iPhone from a hardware and software aspect feels seamless. I can’t think of any situation where the phone failed to provide options to achieve what I wanted to do based off of context. When I receive a picture message, I can easily make it bigger and save it to my phone. When I’m using a bluetooth headset and receive a call I can easily switch my audio sources if I need to. When I’m listening to an audio book and receive a call, the audio book immediately starts back when the call is over. The iPhone understands context better than any other device I’ve owned. It shows the hours of testing that went into understanding how a large number of people use this phone, not just how a small test group does. I’m sure there are a few places where the iPhone fails to understand the context, just none of which were so poignant that I can recall right now.
One final feature I’ll mention is the ability have and rely on the Internet at all times. I knew that it was going to be huge, but I failed to understand to what degree it would affect my day to day living. Now I can get the answers to trivial arguments I tend to find myself in daily. If I hear a vocabulary word that I’m unsure of its definition, it’s easily had. Weather, sports scores, movie times and all kinds of daily things that have questions without typically receiving immediate answers are now just an app away. The ability to get real-time answers to all my questions is a massive game changer to how I go about my day.
The only frustrations I can really list is that I wish the iPhone had some way of multitasking. I don’t like having to close my current app, open Safari, find what I need, close Safari and reopen the original app. That process get’s very frustrating if you’re in a situation of needing to switch like that very frequently, such as trying to find a good map strategy for Fieldrunners[itunes link]. To their credit, most apps remember where they were when closed and since I have the speedier 3GS iPhone there is minimal waiting, but it’s still an area that needs improvement.
Another area where the native iPhone OS failed me was in the listening to audio books. The iPhone lost my place too often and I grew tired of trying to keep up with each chapter and time position I was on. Luckily this was easily fixed with the app, bookmark[itunes link].
I have had an amazing first week experience with the iPhone I believe for two main reasons:
One, Apple simply made a killer device. You can’t own the phone for more than a few minutes to realize that. Many talented people spent years of there life refining this product to make it as perfect as they could. They also developed a system where people in mass could develop for the device to cheaply fix many of the foibles.
Two, I purchased a mature product. I did not have to suffer from growing pains that early iPhone adopters had to. All of the major complains like copy/paste, weak camera, no video, and MMS were already fixed by the time I purchased the iPhone. Also another major groining point for people on the iPhone is the AT&T network and its lack of coverage and reliability. I lucked out in this case also. Three weeks ago most iPhone owners in my area, and especially at my work, complained of limited 3G coverage and only getting a few bars of cell service. But two weeks ago our area must have received some more cell towers or whatnot, because most now get 3G and at least 4, usually 5, bars of coverage.
I’ve been having nothing but a positive experience with my iPhone thus far, although that might change a bit when I get the first bill.
You paid for the iPhone, but the koolaid was free. Your last sentence says you’ve had “nothing but a positive experience,” but just a few paragraphs above, you mention two “failures.”
You’ve got a koolaid mustache.