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June 30, 2007

I picked up an iPhone this morning, as its been 5 years since my last cellphone purchase and all my friends bought iPhones last night. I'm not good with the peer pressure.

After an afternoon with it, these are my initial observations:

I.
The AT&T voice network, and the iPhone, are amazing. They completely blow-away Sprint PCS 'service'. My block is a half dead zone on sprint & tmobile , both cut out like crazy when friends visit, I've had to use Skype @ home. With AT&T -- not a single dropped call so fat, and more importantly- not a single dropped word. Sprint, you suck ass.

II.
The iPhone is not an iPod and a phone. Its a phone with iPod features. iPods are intuitive products that really liberate & empower the user -- they're user friendly, people keep buying them and using them because of customer loyalty from positive experiences with apple. Cellphones are not the same -- pretty much everyone hates their provider , dropped calls, increasing prices, customer service that is piss poor , 'retention policies' that victimize the subscriber to try and make them stay with a sub-par experience... i could go on.The iPhone is riddled with the after-effects of greedy back-door marketing deals. While half of the product was made by experience designers and usability engineers at apple, the other half is obviously made by rent-seeking MBA lowlife scum from AT&T that want to squeeze every single dime out of you.

Specific Gripes

I. The iPhone does not have an iChat client ( AIM / ICQ / etc ) - while just about every other phone does. Why? Only Steve Jobs knows, but my money is on this: AT&T wanted to keep people off the data network for the $20 a month bargain fee, and force them to upgrade to the unlimited SMS option -- as iChat would completely circumvent the SMS and multimedia sms (picture mail) billing schemes. Thankfully some people are rolling out web-based AIM servers , which are popping up on the net now-- thank god for TwistedPython , which makes that a breeze ( I've read of 3 projects so far, 1 in twisted 2 in other frameworks ).

II. The iPhone doesn't support flash - yet? at all?. Most phones have Flash Lite. I'm waiting to hear from a friend at Adobe if its a platform issue. My guess again is that this is because of SMS billing. Integrating flash means services like Meebo which can proxy AOL/ICQ.

III. Wanna bet Skype will never make it onto this phone?

IV. The iPhone only syncs playlists. This is a BIG issue for me. iPods let you drop tracks , create playlists, do whatever the hell you want. the iPhone seems to work like one of those phone-with-itunes , you create the playlist then sync it on. This is ridiculously annoying.

V. The calendar sync sucks. When you sync your calendar, this happens: all selected calendars are merged into a meta-calendar for the iPhone. New events on the iPhone are synced back to the mac based on a pre-selected calendar. The calendars should have been kept separate-- my ical events pull in a lot of context based on the calendar they appear in. Stuff like "meeting w/A" or "launch version 2.0" -- am I talking about FindMeOn or RoadSound ? On iCal i know. On iPhone I don't.

VI. This phone seems to do everything but... offer custom ringtones? Why do I have a weird feeling that this is being blocked out so AT&T can sell their own , through a widget ringtone store ?

VII. The iPhone does not have a Terminal. No *nix shell?!?! Thankfully , again, another open source project -- WebShell http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mressl/webshell/ -- which lets you run a ssh proxy on a webserver ( you https onto the webserver, then ssh onto the remote *nix/bsd box. not ideal, but relatively safe if you control the intermediary box ).

VIII. The iPhone keyboard is a PITA. Someone make a plug-in external keyboard -- I'll buy it ASAP. Using the keyboard isn't as annoying as I thought it would be , its not that hard to type and not too-many mistakes are made by the proximity recognition on the virtual keypad. BUT, and this is a big BUT , letters are on one screen, numbers and symbols are on another. To type in an email address, you do letter, letter, letter , switch-screen , @ , switch-screen , letter letter , switch-screen , dot , switch-screen suffix. Its a fucking hassle.

IX. A lot of the Apple responses to why stuff isn't on the phone has to do with AT&T having network security concerns. I question that. There shouldn't be much difference at all to running an app on the iPhone and putting an AT&T wireless card in your PCMCIA slot. If there is, then I question Apple's judgements in design - as they could easily have isolated the network features.

What I'd like to see

I. Support multiple iCals
2. iChat
3. Flash Lite
4. Read pdfs.
5. Click & Save-As on photos in the web browser -- then the chance to assign that photo to a contact , mail/message it , or save it for pulling off a sync list.
6. The ability to use the phone as a data drive, like on the ipods

Those are my gripes today, they'll likely stay until the software gets updated or exacerbated into something more ridiculous.

Posted by Jonathan at June 30, 2007 7:39 PM

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