more thoughts on the new mobile

I went with an iPhone with its new and improved lower price. Of course this forces me to use AT&T wireless and with a long service commitment.

The device itself shows great promise. User experience is way beyond any mobile device I've tried (I've used many, although this is the first I've purchased with my own money). It isn't perfect by any means and the other devices are so awful that it probably seems better than it really is.

The tight coupling of hardware and software is something that most companies just don't do. It would be great to have real competition in this area, but it just isn't going to come given the organization structure and comparative lack of talent on some critical areas of its competitors. I suspect we'll see some really interesting bits of hardware, but the ultimate user experience will be poor. To play in this game you need tight coupling of all components from the earliest days of the design process. Apple has its flaws, but they are the only consumer electronics company I know of that attempts this.

So some early comments

• It really needs an IM client. There are other solutions, but I'm terribly frustrated by the omission. It is just wrong if its omission is to force people to use SMS. IM != SMS....

• There are many inconsistencies in the UI ... this is probably an artifact of the maturity of the design and I expect improvements in the 2.0 version of the software

• Email search is needed (I know ... use a browser based service...)

• Figuring out how to carry the thing is frustrating. I haven't found a good case design yet (anyone know of one?)

• The touch interface iPod section is nice with pretty eye-candy, but the user experience is not as good as it could be. Blind use (commonly used by regular iPod users) just isn't there for example.

• The worst feature by far (ignoring being forced to use one carrier) is the glacial molasses-in-January EDGE wireless service from AT&T. Don't even think of using the web browser using EDGE unless you have pressing needs to see one page (I'm talking about 1-2 minutes for a NY Times page to render). Performance in WiFi is spiffy - so it isn't the device. If you really need on-the-go web, forget this until a 3G alternative arrives.

• It really needs GPS - a killer feature for a future iteration of the device

Comments

[dave]

I couldn't agree more on the IM client; while I share the suspicion that it's a ploy to avoid dinging SMS revenue, it's a feature I really miss from my sidekick. The absence of iChat on the thing is just too obvious an oversight to be anything but deliberate. The same is true for GPS; the google maps feature almost seems as though it were included to highlight the lack of GPS support.

As for cases, I went with the Waterfield sleeve. The way I figure it, any time I want to be interacting with it, I want it out of the case, so I mostly just want something to keep the phone from getting destroyed in my bag. Hasn't arrived yet so I can't say anything about the quality, but Waterfield's gear is generally awfully good.

Finally, on EDGE performance: my experience hasn't been nearly so bad. It took a few seconds to a few tens of seconds to load and render metafilter, for example. I suspect performance is extremely variable depending on which tower you're at and so on. One thing I noticed was that I could correct for really terrible EDGE performance somewhat by toggling the radio state using airplane mode. I'm not sure how general that trick is, but it seemed to get me reregistered to a less sucky cell.

[Steve Cisler]

So, how's the typing? I had problems with the tiny keypad when I tried it for a few minutes at a store.