You can sit through multiple Steve Jobs keynotes about the iPhone. You can view all the demos on Apple’s site, and watch an infinite number of commercials. You can even read detailed reviews (like PC World’s). But in the end, the best way to understand the iPhone is to spend time with one. Which is what I’ve spent much of my time this weekend doing. And as I have, I’ve been taking notes. Lots and lots of them… This is by no means an exhaustive list of every iPhone pro and con. I’ve tried to steer clear of simply repeating widely-reported factors like its lack of 3G data and limited compatibility with standard headphones. And my comments skew heavily to Safari, since that’s the app I’ve spent most of my time in.
So consider this my stream-of-consciousness brain dump on things—much of them kinda subtle--that’ve made me think “Cool!” or “Ugh!” or “Hmmm” during my first 43 hours with an iPhone. I’m not done exploring this phone by any means; as I learn more, this list may grow. But here it is as of Sunday afternoon…
1. One of the things doesn’t come across in photos of the iPhone is just what a well-built device it is. The quality of the materials in impeccable, and it feels solid and luxurious—a Lexus in a world of phones that feel more like econoboxes. And if my colleague Eric Butterfield’s stress-test video is any indication, the iPhone is a lot sturdier than some people had feared. For me, all this makes the $500-$600 price at least a little easier to swallow.
2. Even the buttons—the Home one, the power button, the volume rocker switch, the little slider for putting the phone on mute—feel solid in a way that phone buttons usually don’t. As frustrated as I am by some of the decisions that Apple has made about this phone, I’m also impressed by the attention they paid to little details that nobody else in the phone industry seems to care about.
3. Judging from my experience, worries that the iPhone would prove to be a thumbprint magnet were unfounded. If I examine the screen carefully when the screen’s turned off, I do see smudges. But they’re undetectable when the phone’s one.
4. With that in mind, I wish Apple would use whatever the iPhone screen is made of to make notebook displays—my MacBook screen gets far dirtier, which is kind of mysterious given that I don’t touch it.
5. I can’t comment from personal experience about one colleague’s fear that makeup will rub off on the iPhone as you press it to your ear to make calls.
6. The iPhone’s printed documentation is pretty darn skimpy—the safety-warnings booklet has as many pages as the primary booklet, and a lot more detailed. The online manual-which, oddly, you get to through iTunes—isn’t bad; you could print it all out, but a pocket-sized device calls out for more comprehensive portable docs.
7. The way you swipe your finger across the iPhone’s screen to unlock it is so clever that it was the very first thing that Steve Jobs demoed when he unveiled the iPhone back in January. But if you carry your phone in a way that minimizes jostling, it can also be superfluous—in part because Apple intelligently put the phone’s on/off switch on top of the phone, where it’s less likely to get pressed. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I wish you could turn “Slide to Unlock” off.
8. Lots of folks have pondered whether the iPhone can be used as a BlackBerry-like business device, but it’s so far from being businessy that the conversation isn’t worth having. I’m not just talking about whether it supports push e-mail—I’m talking about fundamental matters such as the fact that it doesn’t have a to-do list of any kind.
9. Apple has spent so much time stressing the idea that the iPhone runs OS X that it’s striking to use the device and realize that it’s an OS X whose basic interface is very different from that of the version you get on a Mac. There are no drop-down menus, and apps have clearly been built on a principle of eliminating all choices and options that aren’t vital to the task at hand. (You can’t change a single setting within any of the applications, for instance—all configuration is done in one giant Settings application.) In some ways this is a virtue—this is a far more streamlined device than a Windows Mobile phone, or even a Palm one—but the minimalism requires some adjustment on the part of the user. At least this user.
10. The iPhone’s big screen is one of its principal virtues, but its 480 pixels of vertical resolution result in a user interface that takes some getting used to. In iPod mode, for instance, the “Now Playing” button is in the upper right-hand corner, while most of the other controls are at the bottom of the screen. I feel like I have to move my hand around a lot to get to everything, although I suspect you’d get used to this with time.
11. Much of the iPhone’s user interface is brilliantly obvious, but there are some features that you might not know about unless you read that iTunes-based documentation carefully or stumble across them. Such as the fact that double-tapping on a column of text in Safari automatically zooms in so it fills the screen. Very nice.
12. However, when you’re zoomed into a text column and scrolling through it, you may find that the column tends to drift off screen if you don’t scroll precisely. I’d like to see some sort of “snap to column” feature that would keep that from happening.
13. The iPhone’s screen is so big and beautiful that the phone cries out for the ability to be used as a video-capture device. Whaddaya want to bet that we’ll see an iPhone with a built-in iSight camera at some point?
14. Web browsing aside, one of the best things about the iPhone is that it’s fast—it never displays an hourglass or spinning beach ball, and doesn’t need to. But I’ve occasionally run into odd latency issues. For instance, on Friday night, some e-mails took a few seconds to display. Right now, they all load quickly. Odd—maybe there are memory-management issues?
15. I was excited about the possibility of using the iPhone to access Web-based apps like Google Docs and Meebo, but they’re not really functional, and it’s clear that iPhone Web apps will need to be designed for a small screen. I think a lot of services will make that happen, and it’ll be extremely cool. But for now, many of the sites I go to most often just won’t work on the iPhone. So much for Apple’s claims that it gives you “the real Internet.” (The fact that it felt obligated to build special client apps for Google Maps and YouTube was all the evidence we needed that major chunks of the real Internet won't work on an iPhone without help.)
16. The font that the iPhone’s notepad app uses is goofy looking and hard to read, and you can’t change it, change its size, or zoom in on it. You also can’t highlight a chunk of text in order to delete it, and (as has been widely reported) there’s no clipboard for cutting and pasting. For all these reasons, I’d put a real word processor high on my iPhone wish list.
17. Speaking of fonts, Safari desperately needs a font size-changing option—not unlike the ones in desktop browsers—that would let you retain column widths while pumping up type. Without it, you sometimes need to choose between fitting an entire column of text onscreen and displaying it at a size that’s easy to read.
18. I didn’t really appreciate just how pervasive Flash is on the Web until used a device with an otherwise serious browser that doesn’t support it. The iPhone should be plenty powerful enough to run Flash. Which means that Apple should be begging Adobe to port Flash to the iPhone.
19. The iPhone cries out for an external, physical keyboard as an optional accessory. There’s no reason why existing keyboards such as those manufactured by Think Outside shouldn’t work, if iPhone drivers are written. But that would assume that Apple will permit keyboard companies to write drivers, and I’m afraid Apple would see doing so as an admission that the onscreen keyboard isn’t perfect.
20. The iPhone is surprisingly lefty-friendly. Most stylus-driven PDAs were clearly designed for the right-handed majority—since they place scroll bars on the right side of the screen, like a desktop application, us southpaws cover up the screen with our hands when we touch the stylus to the screen in order to scroll. But with the iPhone, the entire screen is a scroll bar.
21. The onscreen keyboard works in both portrait and landscape modes in Safari, but there’s a basic keyboard conundrum: In portrait mode, you can see lots of Web page, but the keyboard is skinny and hard to use, and in landscape mode, the keyboard is wide and comfortable, but it covers up most of the Web page.
22. When you tap most of the keys on the onscreen keyboard, they zoom in for a moment, which is a helpful cue that you’ve pressed the right key—or the wrong one. But for some reason, the backspace key doesn’t pop. It should.
23. Safari's Backspace should also be moved further away from the Done key. When I try to correct errors by backspacing, I sometimes compound the problem by accidentally hitting Go and thereby sending Safari off to try and visit a URL I haven’t even finished typing.
24. When you go to Safari’s address bar to enter a URL, it still shows whatever URL you’re currently at. You can tap a little “x” to erase that URL in order to type in a new one, but that seems like a needless extra step.
25. Logging into sites via Safari can be a hassle, since you need to spot where the login and passsword fields are, then zoom into them. I think Apple could help by implementing a feature which autodetects these fields and auto-zoom to them.
26. Even better, it could add a password manager that remembered logins and passwords for you.
27. As things stand, entering passwords can be downright painful. You’re probably going to make mistakes, and since the password’s asterisked out, you can’t verify how you’re doing. Safari badly needs a “don’t asterisk out passwords” option.
28. At first, I wondered why the Safari keyboard doesn't have a www. key, like its .com one, to save you some typing. Then I realized that the www. is almost always superfluous. So here’s a tip—if you want to go to PC World, for instance, simply type in pcworld.com.
29. Every time you go to a new page in Safari, it takes you back to the mode which squooshes the page down to fit the screen, rendering it illegible. You oughta be able to tell Safari to stay in a zoomed, readable view.
30. Safari really, really needs a Save Page feature that lets you store a page locally for future reference. If you simply bookmark a page, the iPhone will need to reload it every time you return to it. And that’s assuming that you have connectivity at all.
31. Safari’s tabbed browsing, which lets you hop between thumbnails of up to eight pages, is very nicely done. But when eight pages are in this cache and I click on a link, I get an error message telling me I need to delete a page to make room. I’d much rather have Safari keep my most recent eight pages, silently deleting the oldest to make room for new ones.
32. God gave us hands that aren’t particularly well-designed for iPhone use, since the digits we’re most dexterous with—our index fingers and thumbs—are relatively meaty and therefore difficult to use for precise typing on the iPhone’s onscreen keyboard. I never realized how little control I have over my pinkies until I tried to type with them.
33. I’ve repeatedly heard people theorize that women with long nails will like the iPhone, presumably because a nail would allow for precise typing. Actually, nails are an obstacle to successful iPhone use—the screen only works if you press finger flesh to it. The shorter your nails, the easier this is to accomplish.
34. So far, I’ve completely failed at thumb-typing on the iPhone—my success rate is maybe 20 percent. But simply typing with one index finger goes surprisingly quickly.
35. That doesn’t mean, however, that thumb-typing is out for everyone. A female colleague with daintier hands than mine is already pretty proficient at two-thumbed input.
36. The iPhone’s built-in dictionary does indeed help a lot with typing—even if you make several typos in a word, it may be able to figure out what you mean. So far, I’ve found that I can type fastest if I stare at the keyboard rather than the characters I’ve input, blasting through a sentence rather than worrying about errors.
37. But the dictionary doesn’t help at all when you’re typing in URLs in Safari. I wonder if Apple considered including, say, the top 25,000 Web sites in the dictionary or providing other means of getting to them without typing their names?
38. I can’t just drag music from my iTunes library into the iPhone, like I can with my Shuffle; I’ve got to put it in a playlist, then sync. Not a disaster. But not ideal.
39. In theory, Safari should feel sluggish when you’re connecting via EDGE, and snappy when you’re on Wi-Fi. In reality, I’ve found browsing speed to be unpredictable. Sometimes EDGE is surprisingly brisk; often, Wi-Fi seems sluggish. And Safari via Wi-Fi never feels as fast as browsing the Web on a laptop—maybe it takes time to squeeze down pages for the iPhone’s display.
40. One of the basic things about the iPhone user interface is that—for the most part—it’s ortrait-oriented when that makes sense, and landscape-oriented when that’s more logical. The notepad, for example, uses portrait mode, since that provides room for both the keyboard and your note; YouTube is in landscape mode, for the largest possible video screen. In theory, having to rotate your phone for different apps sounds like a hassle, but I immediately began doing it without giving it any thought at all.
41. When the iPhone notices you’ve moved it from landscape to portrait mode or vice versa and reorients the screen automatically—which it does in Safari, for instance--it’s amazing. But my unit, at least, sometimes fails to rotate. And that’s amazingly annoying, since (as far as I know) there’s no way to force it to do so.
42. It’s obviously not a coincidence that both the front of the iPhone case and the “desktop” of the home screen are black—the phone’s screen is so rich and beautiful that you almost can’t tell where the screen ends and the case begins. Pretty cool. But I still wish you had some control over the color scheme.
43. I also wish you had at least some degree of control over where apps appear on the home screen. Ideally, you’d be able to shuffle the icons around and put them wherever you pleased.
44. Just because the iPhone has a dock connector like the ones on other modern iPods (except the Shuffle) doesn’t mean it’s work with your accessories. I plugged in my excellent, somewhat pricey Kensington car adapter, and got a message on the iPhone screen saying it wouldn’t work. And it didn’t. I’m not sure why this is so, so I don’t know if I’m irritated with Apple over it.
45. It’s a safe bet that there will be iPhone-ready equivalents for an array of accessories that aren’t iPhone compatible. But will they work with other iPods, too? I don’t want two Kensington car adapters. And I bet the world will be full of people who own and use both an iPhone and an iPod.
46. The iPhone’s Mail app only works in portrait mode—you can’t rotate it into landscape format. That might be because replying to mail in landscape mode wouldn’t work very well—the keyboard would take up too much of the screen. But reading some HTML messages in portrait mode is close to impossible—they’re too wide to fit. So Mail really needs a landscape mode, even if it’s view-only.
47. The Photo app could also be more landscape-friendly. It displays individual photos in landscape mode, but the thumbnail browser is portrait-only. Given that most photos are horizontally-oriented, Photo shouldn’t force you into portrait mode at all.
48. As you use the iPhone and come across things you wish Apple had done differently, and discover what it hasn’t done at all, the full impact of the company’s decision not to let third-party developers write apps becomes depressingly clear. With a Palm OS, Symbian, or Windows Mobile device, you get access to an array of third-party apps that let you customize your phone to within an inch of its life. But for now, at least, the iPhone will mostly be what Apple thinks it should be. For me, that’s the single biggest downside of this wildly ambitious, inventive device.
49. Here’s something I still don’t know: Whether I’m going to keep the iPhone as my primary mobile device. This phone has so much going for it, and so many gotchas, that it amounts to a bundle of contradictions: It’s both the most powerful phone the world has ever seen, and one of the most limited. I’m guessing that most of the gotchas will go away over time, as they did with the Mac. But I’m still deciding if I want to be along for the ride…
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