I've been meaning to write this for months... after switching to an iPhone last October I have some thoughts on the transition away from Windows Mobile. Most of my detailed comments are complaints, so before I continue, it's worth saying that I do think the iPhone is the best smart phone you can buy. It is, by far, the best answer the industry has come up with for this class of device. That said, it's more fun (and potentially useful) to complain:
- Touch Screen - I remember shopping with my parents for a car in the late 80's. One of the cars we looked at was a Buick Riveria with a touch screen in the center console. It was cool, but since it lacked tactile feedback, you had to be looking at it to use it. Flash forward 23 years, and you can replicate this experience in the palm of your hand, for better or for worse.
- 'Ambient Information' - The phone does a poor job of making inforation ambiently available. To see your next appointment, you need to open the Calendar unless the reminder has already displayed. (This could go on the home page.) To be notified of a new e-mail, you need to unlock the phone and look at the home page. (This could be a LED on the case.) As notifications build up, they wind up truncated and incomplete, presumably so they can fit in an artificially small box on the screen.
- Portrait/Landscape - I wake up in the morning and want to check e-mail before I get up.. I grab the phone off the nightstand, look at the display, and it... switches to landscape mode. I'm driving down the road and want to skip a track, so I grab the phone (eyes on the road), put my finger in the general area where the 'forward' button is, and it... switches to landscape mode. Landscape is useful when you need it, and a usability menace when you don't. There needs to be better control over when it engages and when it doesn't. (In this case, physical buttons for skipping forward and backward among tracks might be nice too... Buick ultimately dropped the touch screen entirely, and modern cars with navigation tend to also offer physical controls for key functions.)
- e-Mail - I have two e-mail accounts set up on my phone: personal and business. It takes five taps to switch between them. A unified view would be nice. (A list of the union of all inboxes, color-coded by in-box). An easier way to pick an in-box would be almost as nice.
- Large e-mails - By default, large e-mails are only partially downloaded to the phone and there's a button at the bottom of a one of these mails that lets you download the rest. Of course, once it does, it then zips you back to the top of the mail, so you have to manually scroll through the (remember, it's large) e-mail to get to where you were reading. Argh.
- Latency - Maybe a 3GS would fix this, but the phone seems very slow to change modes and update the display. I find myself continually waiting split-seconds for the thing to animate the transition from one display to the next. I'm asking a lot here, but I don't care... I use the thing most waking hours of most days.
- App Store Rejections - This is a problem, it sucks for app developers, and it won't matter to the success of the platform. The vast majority of customers will never hear that Apple censored a dictionary (!), and even if they did, it won't stop them from buying. In the short term, my guess is that Apple will make whatever minimal changes it needs to make to keep developers quiet enough, and the iPhone will continue to do very well. Phone buyers don't care enough about choice, and App developers will tend to always want to code for the platform where they have the best shot at making money, which is currently the iPhone. In the long term, my guess is that a lot more of this content will wind up on mobile web sites than through the store. After all, a website can be an icon on the home page, avoid the risk of Apple's rejecton, and also get to run on Android, Pre, and Windows Mobile.
- App Store - 25,000 applications on the site, and I might look at 10 or 20 before deciding to make a purchase. The way the store presents applications (controlled by Apple) has a huge impact on which apps succeed and which apps fail. Even if the rejection problem magically goes away, Apple still controls the horizontal and the vertical. (A lot like Google's control over the fate of websites...)
- Keyboard - After ten months, it's still tedious and error-prone for me. It works, but just. Apple should provide a keyboard layout that works like a Blackberry (or even T9) and trades off multiple letters per key in exchange for larger keys.
- Industrial Design - I love the way the phone looks and feels, so I wrap it in a tacky add on case to 'protect it'. So does most everybody else. Last I heard, good design was about making a product that looks good and works well. The rampant sales of cases implies to me that something is missing with the 'works well' part of that equation.
I do like the thing, and I wouldn't switch away, but it's far from perfect. Let's hope it gets better.