My First Week With iPhone

Wow, I haven’t written a post on this blog in forever. Maybe I should redesign it…

What have I been up to:

…And for the last week, I’ve been playing with my iPhone.

As an interaction designer, I think there are some things that I value or notice more than other people might. I wouldn’t call this a review, but here are my comments after experienceing iPhone for the first week:

  • The iPhone is amazing. It’s a joy to use. Everything on the screen is beautiful, as is the phone itself. Everything in the whole UI is in perfectly-rendered Helvetica.
  • The visuals and the smoothness of the animations are far beyond what I had previously expected. Nothing lags for even a moment, ever. When you flick to scroll a page, it moves as if you were touching something real. When Steve Jobs said that the iPhone is 5 years ahead of anything else on the market, it reminded me of Arthur C Clarke’s quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And having magic in your pocket is really fun.
  • The camera is placed on the back of the phone in exactly the distance from the top and side edge such that it forms a perfect wide rounded border, with the inner radius (the size of the hole with the camera) smaller than the outer radius in the correct proportion (see image).
  • The vibration is quiet, unlike a lot of phones, and quick. Other people in the room don’t hear it. But when it’s on silent, it still plays sounds for alarms and timers, which is exactly what I want it to do.
  • I can’t figure out for the life of me how they ordered the items on the apps on the home screen. There are four at the bottom, those are the big features, Phone, Mail, Safari, iPod, that’s fine. They probably wished they could have squeezed SMS on there, because notifications from text messages are just as important as missed calls and received email messages, so it ended up in the top left, that’s okay. But then it goes Calendar, Photos, Camera, YouTube, Stocks, Maps, Weather, Clock, Calculator, Notes, and Settings. It’s like: Mac/iLife apps, then the camera, then entertainment, then Maps in the middle of three other things that are kind of like Dashboard widgets, and then notes, and then settings makes sense as the last thing. You got me. If I was adding one more app, like a feed reader, I wouldn’t know where to put it except “at the end, but maybe before settings.”
  • When it’s locked and you have to slide your finger from left to right (which I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of doing), they have a tiny little lock icon up in the status bar, which is completely unnecessary. The only time you see your wallpaper and the big digital clock and the “Slide to unlock” button is when the phone is locked.
  • The keyboard is great. Obviously you don’t feel yourself push a button, but it’s not like you ever accidentally type two keys when you meant to push one, you just sometimes use your big thumb to push a small button and you don’t reach to quite the right position and you type the wrong one. A lot of the time, it fixes it by itself when you hit the spacebar when you’re typing real words, and it’s not too bad to fix it when it doesn’t. The placement of the keys and which keys they decided would be on the second or third screens of letters (punctuation, numbers, symbols) was done outstandingly well. Also done incredibly well was when to turn on Shift by default, when to take you back to the letters keypad after which punctuation marks, and the replacement of the spacebar with slash and .com buttons when you’re typing URLs. It’s not just an on-screen keyboard, it’s the best on-screen keyboard ever designed for this size screen.
  • The one place I’m making errors is in calling people and in Contacts, because when you’re in your Favorites or in Recent Calls, it’s one click to call someone, but when you’re in your full list of Contacts, you click to show someone and then you click again to call them. But when I’m calling people who aren’t in my favorites, half the time it’s from the Missed calls section (because they called me) and half the time it’s from Contacts because I just looked up their number, and I’ve done it incorrectly both ways; I’ve called people back accidentally in one click when I meant to see if there was more information about their call or if they left a message, and I’ve put the phone up to my ear and waited for it to ring before realizing that I had only clicked on a contact to show their info, not clicking the second time to actually call them.
  • Browsing the web is great for me. I’ve checked lots of Mariners scores, I’ve been reading my Bloglines, reading news, checking movie times, reading Twitter, and checked out every Google app I could think of. Docs & Spreadsheets actually worked better than I expected that it was going to, because I didn’t know how it would support frames. But you can load your list of documents, and you can view any document or spreadsheet that you’ve got.
  • I’m pretty much only reading my personal Gmail on my iPhone now. If you send me a message, I’ll get it within 15 or 20 minutes. It kills me that all my sent messages get sent back to me as if I had just received them, though, even when I just sent them from the phone. I think it’s a Gmail issue, or should be a Gmail option that could be turned off.

More blog posts to come, hopefully. Maybe I should set up something so that I can post from my iPhone.