So I didn’t even last 7 days - I bought an iPhone on Thursday thanks to the serendipity of window-shopping at the U Village Apple Store just as they got their “second wave” of iPhone stock.
Having used Apple products for well over two decades, I’m well aware of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. I know what to expect from 1.0 software running on 1.0 hardware. With iPhone, you can tell that Apple was very self-aware of their own history as well. What iPhone does, it does amazingly well. The screen is sharp (I was using it in full, cloudless, no-shade-for-yards sun without problem), hard to scratch, and very responsive as a touch interface. The apps work well, the connectivity works well, and I’ve had no problems with data input (then again, I’m not a hardcore long-practiced thumb typist of Blackberry or Treo vintage).
Apple hit it out of the park. The nay-sayers will rightfully have egg on their face, and Apple is gonna sell so many of these its gonna be scary.
However, as Mike Davidson said, it’s “like someone assembled the finest orchestra the world, but decided to leave out the trumpets.” That is - what iPhone does it does very well. But there are things that it just doesn’t do, and they stand out like missing trumpets. One gets the impression that the product team chose to omit features for the 1.0 rather than half-ass them.
Rather than focus on what the hardware doesn’t do such as GPS, or 3G, or memory cards, I’d prefer to focus on what the software doesn’t do. Because that can be changed - and I’ll wager that much of it will be changed in future updates, especially considering that Jobs has already been talking up what an excellent software platform the iPhone is. So without further ado, here’s what I’d like to see in some future iPhone 1.x software updates:
]]>
Arbitrary Selection: There’s no gesture in iPhone’s 1.0 repertoire to select. The tap is a double-click, it opens/activates the object. The tap/drag is a contextual action - it gives you the insert-positioning loupe, or moves around on a zoomed page. The flick moves between items in a series. However, you can’t select an arbitrary object on a page in order to perform an operation on it - such as cut/copy/paste, Save Image to Photos, Save Sound to iPod, Apply as Wallpaper, Download, and so on. Arbitrary Selection is a gateway feature and is a requirement for other potential software features such as: Save Images from Safari/Mail, cut/copy/paste, or meaningful document editing.
Document Management: This is another gateway feature - required if you want to store/edit/view supported document formats (Word, Text, Excel, PDF). Images are managed in Photos, Audio and Video in the iPod application. But there’s no analogue for… well.. Documents. With iPhone 1.0, the only place for this is in Mail, with your documents as attachments. (The Notes application isn’t even the beginning of an answer here - see Gruber’s comments on Notes in his iPhone First Impressions). If you want to be able to save a linked Word doc from a web page, use a PDF as a presentation, or have a reference file on your iPhone - you need a way to manage all that. I don’t see it on my iPhone yet.
Full-Resolution Image Support: I haven’t heard this mentioned much. iPhone’s image support seems to be limited to 320x480. Images synced from iPhoto are downsampled to 320x480 (or 480x320). Take a picture with the camera and view it in Photos - zoom in and it gets jaggy well before a 2MP picture should be jaggy. Receive an image as a mail attachment - same thing, regardless of actual image size. Same thing for images viewed on web pages with iPhone Safari. I haven’t gone back to the video of the WWDC SteveNote, but I seem to to recall that he zoomed in deeply and got sharp images during that demo - doesn’t seem to work that way on the 1.0 release. There are certain uses where this really stands out as an issues - images of diagrams, for example. Such as iSubwaymaps.com.
After those big three - which have a fairly broad impact - these others seem more like one-shots:
Disk Mode: We’ll probably see this when Apple figures out Document Management. Whether it’s a Disk Mode, or a Sync Folder between your iPhone and your Mac, I want to have a way to move Documents directly from my Mac to my iPhone.
Video Capture: Don’t quite understand why iPhone doesn’t do this yet. Don’t want to use the CPU/power to encode the captured video to an acceptable format? Don’t know, but I’d expect we’ll see this one added.
Video Out: Wow, that support for PDF files is nice. Wouldn’t you love to be able to plug your iPhone into a projector and make a presentation? How about show your videos or view your photos on a television like you can on your iPod? Yes. Video out, please.
Stereo Bluetooth Support: You’d need a stereo bluetooth headset that also has a good microphone on the market first - so look for this feature to hit when Apple has a product.
iChat: Perhaps omitted as a sap to AT&T (sell more text messages), or axed to make a clean 1.0. Seems a no-brainer.
MMS: Another one of those features that must have been chopped to make a clean 1.0, I’d expect to see it sooner rather than later.
Games: This will come when (not if) Apple creates a real SDK and method of iPhone Application certification.
]]>
I have a pair of Sony MDR-G72 headphones - they fit my big-headed small-eared noggin well, have good sound, a "just right" cable length, and fold very neatly. They’re about 5 years old, the earpads were worn to disintegration, and I was warring with my love of the old ‘phones versus having an excuse to buy some new goodies.