Regarding some of the points in my iPhone round-up from yesterday, David Pogue has some answers to those questions and a whole lot more in his iPhone FAQ. “Is it ambidextrous? -No.” What does that even mean? As a lefty, am I out of luck? (via df)
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kottke.org posts about Apple
iPhone round-up
By now you’ve all heard about the iPhone and read 60 billion things about it, so I’ll get straight to it. I’ve been tracking some of the best points from around the web and jotted down some thoughts of my own.
Caveat: Evaluating an interface, software or hardware, is difficult to do unless you have used it. An interface for something like a mobile phone is something you use on the time-scale of weeks and months, not minutes or hours. There are certain issues you can flag as potential problems, challenges, or triumphs after viewing demos, descriptions of functions, and the like, but until you’re holding the thing in your hand and living with it day-to-day, you really can’t say “this is going to work this way” or “I don’t like the way that functions” with anything approaching absolute confidence. With that said:
- In his keynote announcing it, Steve Jobs said the killer app for the iPhone was voice. The thing is, many people you talk to who are are under 35 use their phones more and more for text and less and less for voice. Same thing for Treo and Blackberry aficionados. Does the text entry via the touchscreen work as well as text entry via a mini keyboard? The tactility of raised buttons provides a lot of feedback to the typer’s fingers that a touchscreen does not. (Jason Fried said: “When you touch the [iPhone] it doesn’t touch you back.”) Can you type on it with your thumbs? What about if your thumbs are large? I know people who can text without looking at the keypad and/or Blackberry keyboard, that’s out the window with the touchscreen. Can you dial with one hand?
The touchscreen text entry is the biggest issue with the iPhone. If it works well, the iPhone has a good shot at success, and if not, it’s going to be very frustrating for those that rely on their mobile for text…and every potential customer of the iPhone is going to hear about that shortcoming and shy away.
- The price is pretty high. So was the price for the first iPod. And the Macintosh. Apple will approach this in a similar way to the iPod…start with a premium product at the high end and work their way down to shuffle-land. It isn’t difficult to imagine an iPhone nano that just does voice, SMS, music, and a camera. (Or an iPhone shuffle…you press the call button and it randomly calls someone from the ten contacts the shuffle synched from your computer that morning.)
- I guess we know why iPod development has seemed a little sluggish lately. When the Zune came out two months ago, it was thought that maybe Apple was falling behind, coasting on the fumes of an aging product line, and not innovating in the portable music player space anymore. I think the iPhone puts this discussion on the back burner for now. And the Zune? The supposed iPod-killer’s bullet ricocheted off of the iPhone’s smooth buttonless interface and is heading back in the wrong direction. Rest in peace, my gentle brown friend.
- How long before the other iPods start working like the iPhone? I imagine a widescreen video iPod with touchscreen but without a phone, wifi, camera, etc. will be introduced at some point after the iPhone comes out in June. Without the need for the clickwheel, the shape of the video and nano iPods becomes much more flexible. If they can cram all the memory and electronics into a smaller space, the nano could be half its current height with a touchscreen.
- What’s really kind of sad about the intensely exuberant reaction to the iPhone is that the situation with current mobile phones are so bad in the first place. It’s not like we didn’t see any of this coming or couldn’t imagine the utility of the iPhone’s features. Visual voicemail is a good idea, but the reason Nokia or Motorola didn’t introduce it years ago is that the carriers (Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc.) don’t want to support it despite its obvious utility and ease of implementation. (T-Mobile sends my Nokia phone a text message every time I get a voicemail…what could be simpler than sending the number along with it and shunting those messages to a special voicemail app on the phone to see a list of them? Listening to them out of sequence would be a bit harder, but doable. Blackberry announced they were doing this back in 2005.) Integrated Google Maps, email, and search makes obvious sense too. As for the touchscreen, we’ve all seen Jeff Han’s work on multi-touch interaction, Minority Report, and Wacom’s Cintiq, not to mention the mousepads on the MacBooks and the iPod’s clickwheel. The Japanese are pretty unimpressed with the whole thing.
What *is* fantastic about the iPhone is the way that they’ve put it all together; features are great, but it’s all about the implementation. Apple stripped out all the stuff you don’t need and made everything you do need really simple and easy. (That’s the way it appears anyway…see above caveat.)
- Regarding the above, a relevant passage from a Time magazine article on how the iPhone came about:
One reason there’s limited innovation in cell phones generally is that the cell carriers have stiff guidelines that the manufacturers have to follow. They demand that all their handsets work the same way. “A lot of times, to be honest, there’s some hubris, where they think they know better,” Jobs says. “They dictate what’s on the phone. That just wouldn’t work for us, because we want to innovate. Unless we could do that, it wasn’t worth doing.” Jobs demanded special treatment from his phone service partner, Cingular, and he got it. He even forced Cingular to re-engineer its infrastructure to handle the iPhone’s unique voicemail scheme. “They broke all their typical process rules to make it happen,” says Tony Fadell, who heads Apple’s iPod division. “They were infected by this product, and they were like, we’ve gotta do this!”
- From the video, it looks like it take four clicks (after unlocking the phone) to make a phone call. For everyday use, that seems excessive. I hope there’s going to be some sort of speed dial mechanism…with my current phone, pressing “2” and then “send” calls my wife (which I can basically do without looking, BTW).
- I don’t know what the state of the art is in voice recognition these days, but I’m a little surprised that’s not an input option here. To call someone, you say their name (my current phone does this). To text someone, you speak the message and they get the text on their end. Speaking “Google Maps, sushi near 10003” would have the expected result.
- Or maybe drawing graffiti on the screen with your fingers and other gestural input methods? You could have different swipes and taps as a speed dial mechanism…swipe the screen from top left to bottom right and then tap in the lower right hand corner to call mom, that sort of thing. Or Morse code maybe? ;)
- The OS X included with the phone obviously isn’t the version that’s running on my Powerbook right now. John Gruber proves that footnotes are often more interesting than the referring text and offers this little tidbit:
Several people have speculated that the iPhone’s version of OS X is actually a preview of what we’ll be getting with Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X.That is to say the core operating system at the core of Mac OS X, the computer OS used in Macs, and “OS X”, the embedded OS on the iPhone. More on this soon in a separate fireball, but do not be confused: Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing, although they are most certainly siblings. The days of lazily referring to “Mac OS X” as “OS X” are now over.
- Lance warns us of the dreaded version 1.0 hardware from Apple.
- My favorite thing about the iPhone is the Google Maps integration. I would use that at least 4-5 times a week.
- Will phone numbers and addresses detected on web pages in Safari be clickable? Click to dial a phone number, click to look up an address with Google Maps, that sort of thing. Update: There’s a video online somewhere (anyone?) of a demo that shows a URL in an email and/or text message that’s clickable. (thx, Deron)
- The resolution of the screen on the iPhone is 160 ppi. People who have seen it close up report that the screen is extremely crisp and clear. Apple displays have been higher than 72 ppi for quite awhile, now but not as high as 160. How soon can we expect 160 ppi on the MacBooks?
- Double the width of the iPhone and you’ve got the iTablet. 640x480, a bigger virtual keyboard to type on, etc. Just a thought.
- My friend Chris suggested that it should ship with a dock that hooks directly to a monitor. Attach a keyboard and mouse to the monitor and voila!, you’ve got the world’s smallest portable computer.
- iPhone trademark dispute between Apple and Cisco: booorrrrr-ring.
- This is one of the biggest questions in the hardcore technology community: will Apple allow 3rd party development of widgets and apps for the iPhone? Right now it seems like they might not, but there’s a lot of speculation in the absence of information going on. It sure would be nice if they did, but Apple doesn’t have a good track record here. I bet the Dodgeball and Upcoming folks are looking at the integrated Google Maps and wishing they could integrate their apps in the same way. (And Flickr too!)
- Games! A no-brainer. Probably lots you can do with the motion sensors and proximity detectors, not to mention the touchscreen. Although the touchscreen does make it difficult to see and control the onscreen action at the same time. How would you play Pac-Man on the iPhone?
- Available in more than one color? Probably a few months after launch…or it could be right away.
- Parallels running on the iPhone was a joke, folks. Just pulling your ARM.
- Don’t you think that maybe every company should fire their founders after a few years and then hire them back a few years later? I mean, how crazy is it that Apple birthed the Apple II and the Macintosh — each a significant achievement that taken alone would have sealed Apple’s reputation for innovation in the history of computing — and then fired the guy that got them there, stumbled badly enough that they were heading for mediocrity and obscurity, and then brought Jobs back, who spurred a string of successes that has nearly overshadowed the company’s earlier achievements: OS X, the iMac, the iBooks/PowerBooks/MacBooks, the iPod, iTMS, and now the iPhone. It’s insane! Not to mention fun to watch. Perhaps Google should fire Larry and Sergey with the idea that they’ll take them back in a few years when they’re a little older, a little wiser, a little more seasoned in business, with a new perspective, and possessing an enormous amount of motivation to prove that their dismissal was a bad move.
- My favorite comment from the Digg thread about the model iPhone I made out of cardboard: “Nothing says you’ve never kissed a girl like toting around a paper iPhone.”
- From the Time article, a quote from Steve Jobs about how Apple does business: “Everybody hates their phone and that’s not a good thing. And there’s an opportunity there.”
- Interesting thoughts from Adam Baer in the wake of the iPhone announcement:
Apple has figured out a way to retain a hold on hearts and minds in a business previously based on bytes. I applaud its designs, I worry about its tactics and what they mean for the future of marketing and group think. A group that wants our devotion but doesn’t need the press, doesn’t want the press, can’t keep the press off its backs, is a group that’s more interested in mind control than in improving lives with its products.
- Some miscellaneous links: Watch the MacWorld keynote with the iPhone announcement. Fortune piece on how Apple kept the iPhone a secret for two years. David Pogue got an hour of hands-on time with the iPhone. The Digg post of the announcement got almost 20,000 diggs, more than 1,400 comments, and nearly crashed my browser when I went to look at it.
And that’s enough, I think.
iPhone running Parallels
The iPhone runs on OS X, right? So theoretically, shouldn’t you be able to run IE for Windows XP in Parallels?
Comparison of the iPhone with other smart phones…a nice companion piece to the comparison of my cardboard iPhone to various iPods, mobile phones, etc. So far, the market thinks that Apple’s got something good on their hands: Apple stock was up $7.10 today while RIMM (makers of Blackberry) dropped $11.16.
The Apple iPhone
Apple’s new iPhone looks like a thing of beauty. Widescreen touch interface, no buttons, runs OS X, useful widgets, integrated email, Google Maps, Google/Yahoo search, visual voicemail (see who voicemail is from before you call), SMS, Wifi, etc. etc. Oh, and it plays music.
A lot of people are wondering just how big this thing is. Using the technical specs from apple.com, I grabbed some cardboard, scissors, and glue and made a scale model of the iPhone. Here it is:
My hands aren’t that big (I can barely palm a basketball on a good day), but it still seems to fit pretty well. How does it stack up against similar devices?
Here’s the iPhone vs. my current mobile phone, the Nokia 7610:
iPhone vs. a 5G iPod:
Thickness of the cardboard iPhone vs. the 5G iPod:
1G iPod shuffle, 3G iPod, 5G iPod and the iPhone:
iPhone vs. a TiVo remote and a Wii remote:
That’s all the gadgets I could find on a couple of hours notice.
I also dug up something I wrote a couple of years ago in the gigantic text file I keep on my Powerbook of ideas for kottke.org posts. 99% of the stuff in that file is completely dunderheaded, but I have to say I hit close to the mark on this one:
true convergence of phone + mp3 player will happen when someone solves this user experience puzzle: physically not enough room for two optimized interfaces (one for calls, one for music) on same small device. possible solution: no buttons, replace with touch screen that covers the whole front with one-touch switching between modes…
Once we’re able to get our hands on it and use the interface, the iPhone could turn out to be a disappointment, but they’re heading in the right direction at least. More thoughts soon.
(Like this story? Digg it.)
MacWorld 2007
Yesterday a weird smell descended on New York City, a miasma of natural gas odor. Today you might sense a low hum emanating from all over the Earth, localized in households whose inhabitants spend unhealthy portions of their paychecks on consumer electronics. Geeks the world over are vibrating in anticipation of Steve Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld starting in, oh, 5 minutes. Since I too am slightly vibrating and won’t be able to get anything done for the two-hour duration of his talk, I’ll be following along here, sipping from MacRumors’ live coverage. (Gizmodo, Engadget, and Twitter have coverage too.)
As an appetizer, here’s a few of the less hysterical predictions for what Our Fearless Leader is going to provide us with today:
- MacWorld Expo 2007 Predictions from John Gruber at Daring Fireball.
- Jason Fried’s Apple phone predicitons (I especially liked this one).
- Macalope’s predicitons.
- Some thoughts from Steven Frank.
- Regarding MacWorld 2007 by Dan Benjamin.
Ok, here we go….
- BREAKING NEWS: Attendees still taking their seats!
- Started. Gizmodo is stumbling badly. Zero updates.
- Sales updates. Apple now sells more music than Amazon.
- The Zune has 2% market share, the iPod has 62%. What brown can do for you, apparently.
- Apple TV in September. Not an actual TV, but a device that hooks to a TV. Here’s some specs: 802.11b/g/n, 40GB HD, 720p HD, component rca, usb2, ethernet, HDMI. Retails for $299. Shipping in Feb.
- New product: internet communicator, mobile phone, and widescreen ipod all in one. Steve is very excited about this one. Called the iPhone. No buttons. Multi-touch screen. (WHOA!) Runs OS X. Jobs: “Software on mobile phones is like baby-software.” It does all the stuff that OS X does. Calendar, mail, movies, music, podcasts, etc. Turns off the display and sound when you bring it to your ear to talk. It’s got an accelerometer (motion sensor) and a proximity sensor. 2 megapixel camera. Screen resolution is 160 ppi. Here’s what it looks like (photos from Engadget):
- Free IMAP email from Yahoo for iPhone customers. (Shot over Google’s bow.) And it’s “push-IMAP”…works just like a Crackberry.
- The iPhone has a full copy of Safari. Just browse away.
- Jobs just prank-called a Starbucks, attempted to order “4000 lattes to go”.
- Google and Apple pushing hard to partner. “Merging without merging.”
- Apple doing stuff with Yahoo too.
- Apple’s stock now at +$4.51.
- iPhone ships in June in the US. $499 for 4 gig, $599 for 8 gig. Available only with Cingular as the carrier. (Can you unlock?) Can purchase either at Cingular or Apple stores. Have to sign up for a 2-year contract.
- RIM stock is down more than 8 points. RIM makes the Blackberry. Palm, Motorola, and Nokia are all down as well. (thx, eli)
- Apple is changing their name from “Apple Computer, Inc.” to “Apple, Inc.”
Interesting (and probably fake) photo of Apple’s alleged iPhone, which phone has no buttons…only a screen and a mousepad.
10 Zen Monkeys has an interview with Gina Smith about iWoz, her book on Steve Wozniak. “Another misconception that bothered him was the idea that he and Steve Jobs had designed the Apple I and the Apple II together. The sole designer of both those computers was Steve Wozniak. The sole designer.” (thx, david)
Pesky OS X bug: Powerbook/MacBook/MacBook
Pesky OS X bug: Powerbook/MacBook/MacBook Pro freezes when using Cmd-Tab. Has anyone else ran into this problem…or even better, a solution? It’s happened on my Powerbook every 2-3 weeks since I got it about a year ago…and 3 times in the past two days.
Kevin Smith’s iTunes Celebrity Playlist got rejected by Apple because his comments were too long. “This is a great playlist. Too great, actually. We don’t have the space for comments that run that long.”
Why the functionality of MsgFiler isn’t automatically built into Mail.app, I don’t know, but I’m definitely coughing up the $8 on this because my life primarily consists of moving email from one folder to another. (via df)
Update: See also Mail Act-On. (thx, brandon)
Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM, and United are integrating the iPod into their airplanes, so that you can plug in to charge and view movies on the seatback video screens. How about some standard 120V AC power outlets instead?
Update: KLM and Air France say that there’s no formal deal between them and Apple. (thx, maaike)
New version of MAME for OS X that works natively on the Intel machines. MAME is an arcade emulator that lets you play arcade games on your computer. (via df)
Intelligent design of playlists
Merlin Mann recently wrote two posts about managing your music library using iTunes Smart Playlists. His suggestions for making music-only playlists (for those that have a lot of podcasts & audiobooks in their libraries) and the “sure you really like that?” playlist are especially helpful. One of my recent favorite Smart Playlists is helpful for discovering good stuff that I haven’t listened to in awhile:
The Last Skipped bit is in there because while listening to this playlist, I found myself skipping stuff I didn’t want to hear and that rule gets it out there so that it doesn’t come up again. An item on my Smart Playlist wishlist is the ability to measure popularity acceleration (basically, something like “gimme the most played over the last week”), but there’s no way (that I can find) to ask iTunes how many times a song has been played in the last x days.
Several more Smart Playlist suggestions are available at smartplaylists.com and Andy Budd.
Students, enter Apple’s Insomnia Film Festival, where you’ll have 24 hours to make a 3-minute film. (thx, undulattice)
On the perfection of Tiffany’s “little blue box” and how other luxury labels have failed to follow its seductive packaging lead. While Apple isn’t strictly a luxury brand (they’re more of an everyday luxury brand like Ikea or Muji…the luxury of well-designed items but without the price), but they definitely pay a lot of attention to their packaging. (via nickbaum)
Sam Brown has written a nice remembrance of his recently deceased Powerbook G4. “Last fall it got to the point where i thought that my powerbook had finally died for good. so i went to the apple store to purchase a new computer. only to get home and find out that the powerbook still worked. it just took it an hour or more to turn on once you hit the power button. so after that i was very careful about turning it off.” (via mark)
John Gruber’s latest piece contains a keen insight on Steve Jobs and his legendary reality distortion field. “Jobs, in my opinion, is a terrible liar and a poor actor. When he’s able to convince people of things that aren’t true, or that are exaggerations of the truth, it’s because he believes what’s he saying. The reality distortion field isn’t something he projects willfully; it’s an extension of his own certainty.”
MacRumors has live coverage of the “September 12
MacRumors has live coverage of the “September 12th Apple Media Event” (exciting name!). Announced so far: new smaller iPods (but with more storage), iTunes 7, and games for sale at the iTunes Music Store.
Profile of Walter Werzowa, the man responsible for the Intel Inside theme. More here about tiny music makers, including the Windows 95 startup sound by Brian Eno, the THX theme, and the Mac startup sound.
Quick review of Apple’s Mighty Mouse. My scroll ball wheel thing had problems after a month as well. And side squeeze = hand/wrist pain waiting to happen.
Preview of Leopard, Apple’s newest version of OS X, due out in spring 2007. Some of that demo stuff was *really* corny; reminded me of the first demos of OS X back in the early 00s. Thoughts?
Update: Watch Jobs’ WWDC keynote.
MacRumors is updating this page live at WWDC. (WWDC is an acronym for Apple Is Announcing Cool New Stuff Today).
Google Trends: Ubuntu vs. OS X. Ubuntu pulled ahead in early 2006, but it still has a way to go to catch “Mac” though. The trend predates the Pilgrim/Doctorow switch…I wonder what it’ll look like after that.
List of the 10 most beautiful OS X apps. Newsfire is a well-deserved second.
US college students won’t download music provided by their schools even though its free because they can’t take it with them after graduation, won’t work with Apples, and can’t play on iPods. That’s not really actually “free” then, is it?
More on the Apple Ubuntu switch
Now that the Mac/Ubuntu switch story has made it around the horn and back again (thanks for the non-link, Slashdot!), I want to clarify slightly what I meant by my assertion that Apple should be worried about “two lifelong Mac fans switching away from Macs to PCs running Ubuntu Linux” and that “nerds are a small demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal mine with stuff like this”.
Mark and Cory’s switching is not going to send large numbers of Mac users scurrying for Ubuntu, no matter how well respected they are in a small community. Two is not a trend. But it may cause people to briefly consider that 1) the Apple experience isn’t all that it could be, and 2) if you want a potentially similar experience, there’s a non-Microsoft option available to you. And once that seed is planted, well, you know where that metaphor is going. (I’m also aware of a few other people who are pondering the same shift independently of Mark and Cory.)
In the late 90s/early 00s, Apple got their act in gear with OS X and their iMacs, Powerbooks, G5s, and iBooks. People who cared deeply about their computing experience (you know, computer nerds) took notice of Apple’s rededication to producing great products, switched to Macs, and thereafter the Macintosh gradually became a genuinely credible option for programmers, web builders, graphic designers, journalists, students, and grandmothers. Not cause and effect, but the so-called alpha geeks noticed something happening and reacted before everyone else did. So when you have two people who care deeply about their computer experience and who were dedicated Apple users for non-superficial reasons switch entirely away from Apple for equally non-superficial reasons, it may be wise for Apple and the rest of us to take notice that they did so and, more importantly, why.
If I were Apple, I’d be worried about this. Two lifelong Mac fans are switching away from Macs to PCs running Ubuntu Linux: first it was Mark Pilgrim and now Cory Doctorow. Nerds are a small demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal mine with stuff like this.
Update: Tim O’Reilly muses on the Ubuntu switchings.
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