Cognitive Friction

I finally got my iPhone 3G. I picked it up two days ago and it’s a white 16 GB model. So after all of the agonising I did over the wait, was it worth it? I think so. Here are my first impressions.

More storage is better

Well the first thing I have to say is that I am glad I got the 16 GB model. I read one forum comment from a guy who wondered why anyone would want all of the space on the 16 GB iPhone, which reminded me of that spurious Bill Gates quote that 640K of memory ought to be enough for anybody. Give us the memory and see what people do with it.

I have about 5.5 GB of music and other audio files in iTunes, which took up too much space on my 8 GB iPod Touch. With the 16 GB iPhone, I have ample space for all of that audio, plus video, photos and other data. Currently I’m using about 9 GB of the available space. I can see why the 8 GB model is less popular. If there had been a 32 GB iPhone 3G I’d have bought that, and I’m sure this can’t be too far away on Apple’s iPhone roadmap.

Using the phone

I love the phone functions so far – making and receiving calls is a breeze and the sound quality is first rate. I have suffered a Sony Ericsson T630 for several years now, waiting to replace it with a device just like the iPhone 3G. That phone was one of the most unusable devices I have ever owned, so using the iPhone feels like liberation from an occupying power.

Contacts and Favourites on the iPhone are great to use and the SMS interface is excellent. I haven’t been able to use the visual voicemail, which O2 does not offer in Ireland, but I understand that’s on the way by the end of this year. I’d say that one day, all phones will be made this way, except that it seems redundant to say so. Anyone can see that Samsung, Nokia and the rest are busy getting iClones onto the market as fast as Korean factories can turn them out.

The iPhone as software platform

The iPhone 3G isn’t just a phone. If it was, I may not have bought it, Apple fanboy though I am. No, this is the mobile computing device that I have longed for ever since my Palm III died back in 2000. It wraps my phone into the much more important hand-held computer I want and it doesn’t come with a relentless focus on the Enterprise and Exchange server, which every other likely candidate phone in the past 7 years has been saddled with. The iPhone does that stuff, but isn’t married to it, which suits me just fine.

So far, I have downloaded the following apps from the App Store:

• Twitterific – the free version.
• Wordpress – which might induce me to post more often.
• Omnifocus – a nightmare to get WebDav sync working, and almost useless until Omni Group release a stable version of OmniFocus 1.1.
• Evernote – which will be great when the bugs get fixed.
• NetNewsWire – RSS feeds on the bus, Yay!
• Super Monkey Ball – why not?
• Comic Touch – gotta love the guys at Plasq.

And this doesn’t touch on the mail app, bookmarked iPhone enabled sites that I use a lot and all of that good stuff. I can see myself leaving my Laptop behind more, as I often bring it just for mail and other communication channels.

Battery life and other impressions

When using 3G, the battery does get drained in a manner that reminds me of my 4 year old polishing off his orange juice with a straw. But then, I have the phone plugged in to my computer most of the time in the office and at home, so it hasn’t been a problem as yet. I can see that it might be problematic when traveling.

There are also lots of little habits that I need to change now that my iPod and phone are one and the same device. I used to wrap the headphone cord around my iPod touch, but I can’t do that with the iPhone as it needs to be ready for immediate use if a call comes in. So yesterday, I left the headphones with the mic on my desk and went off site – no podcasts or music on the commute home as a result.

I’ve just been carrying the iPhone around in my pocket, and I’ve been thinking about getting a case. Most of the cases on the Apple store that have received good reviews are out of stock, with 2-4 weeks listed for delivery. I’m not sure whether to buy something I’m not sure of or to wait and see what gets released in the second wave of case designs. If anyone has a recommendation, I’d be happy to hear it.

The GPS is fun, and may prove useful to me yet. This morning, I enjoyed tracking the progress of my bus along the Chapelizod bypass on Google maps. Useless, but nerdy fun. I can see myself using it for directions – I used to print out google maps before I left the office for a meeting, now I can do that on the way and see where I am in relation to my destination. Sweet.

So my first impressions are very positive, and it seems well worth the wait. I’ll try to blog again after I’ve lived with the thing for a few more weeks and see how it’s going then. But right now, using the iPhone feels a lot like holding a piece of the future, and I can’t see how I could go back to a less capable, less beautifully designed device.

I have noticed a couple of interesting developments at two of the leading companies in the user experience design field: Cooper and Adaptive Path. Both companies seem to be taking a decisive step into the wider design territory occupied by companies such as Ideo and Frog Design.

On July 9th, Adaptive Path announced that they had selected Michael W. Meyer, a former executive at both Ideo and Frog Design, as their new CEO. About the same time, Dan Saffer started blogging about physical computing and his experience of learning electronics. In his first post, he says:

Over the last several years, Adaptive Path’s business has expanded from mostly web work to a mix of web, mobile, medical devices, and consumer electronics.

Interesting. The second thing that got my attention was that Cooper made an appointment on July 14th, making Michael Voege, also from Frog Design, their Director of Industrial Design. Making the anouncement, Dave Cronin at Cooper said:

Some of the most exciting and challenging products we’ve designed here at Cooper have involved a physical component. We admit it, we’re greedy: we want to do more fun projects like that.

So what? Well I think this marks a sea change in the field of user experience design. I have long admired Ideo’s work and wondered what the difference was between what I did for a living and what the people at Ideo did. The answer seemed to be simply that I designed for software, a material with no physical properties, whereas at Ideo they designed both the software and the hardware. I’m sure that at Cooper and Adaptive Path, people have been looking at the iPhone and at Microsoft’s Surface and have been thinking that these types of physical computing devices with complex behaviours and innovative interfaces are where all of the interesting future action will be in our field. They are positioning themselves to take advantage of these kinds of opportunities. Now that’s the sort of move I wish I was making myself.

In my last post, I threw the rattle out of the pram over my disappointing experience trying to buy an iPhone 3G on the day it was launched. As of today – almost a week later – I am still stuck with my crappy Sony Ericsson T630. Last Friday the O2 store said that they would call me when stock came in, perhaps by Tuesday. Well that was two days ago, so I made a few polite inquiries today. Here’s what I heard:

• A guy in Car Phone Warehouse told my friend that they expected a nationwide delivery of new stock in two weeks time, consisting of just 700 phones, which is exactly what they received at the 11th July launch.
• O2 and CPW are pissed off at Apple for oversupplying the States and starving the rest of us for stock. I don’t know, though, it’s unsurprising that Apple would look after the US first and let the rest of the world suffer any initial stock shortage.
• I called the O2 store where I placed my pre-order, and they expect some stock today or tomorrow. How many phones and what spec. they will receive they wouldn’t say. Those will go to whoever’s next on the preorder list.

So I may get lucky and get a call this evening or tomorrow, if my number comes up. After that, I’m on holiday and out of the country for most of the next two weeks, so I’ll have no choice but to wait until early August.

In the interim, I’ve been downloading some apps from the app store to my iPod Touch and having fun trying to sync OmniFocus across my Macs and the iPod. More about that experience in a later post.

Updates

Friday 8^th August: I got my iPhone! Read my first impressions.

Wednesday 6^th August: So I called into the O2 Store today and inquired about my iPhone. The staff told me that the waiting list had been cleared and that I should already have gotten a call to collect my phone. I had received no call. They checked the store room and found no phone waiting for pickup – I had somehow been overlooked. The staff took my details again and have promised to call as soon as they can source a phone for me. Bummer, but at least it’s getting fixed. I knew taking a holiday was a bad idea.

Friday 18^th July: I see that stock did arrive into the O2 retail stores yesterday and was used to clear pre-orders not yet filled. An O2 forum administrator posted this to the iPhone stock thread:

Some stock was made available yesterday for customers who had pre-ordered but not received a iPhone. Some more will be on the way soon.

So my number didn’t come up yet. I bet they try and call me next week when I’m on holiday, Sod’s Law says this will be so.

Science fiction author William Gibson said The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed. The same could be said of Apple’s long awaited iPhone 3G, which launched last Friday. Although I had pre-ordered a phone at the start of the month, I came away empty handed.

iPhone 3G - still waiting

I turned up at O2’s Henry Street retail store at 8.00 am on the day of the launch. They normally open 9.30, but the O2 website publicized a 9.00 am opening. By 9.00, there was a line of about 20 people, including me and my colleague Ciarán but the store didn’t open until 9.35. The manager unlocked the door and stood there to advise people with no pre-order that they would not be getting phones today. I had heard on the grapevine earlier that morning that this store had exactly 11 models in stock, a report that proved spot on. Those levels of stock were typical in Irish stores: 10 phones here, 14 there. Pathetic.

At the counter, the assistant showed me her pre-order spreadsheet. It had 11 names at the top highlighted green – those getting a phone that morning – and about 20 names below that highlighted red. I was about halfway down the red list. No phone for me. I changed my pre-order to a 16 GB model and was told I might get my phone Tuesday, maybe, they’d give me a call. Folks with no pre-orders were told they’d have to wait two weeks, maybe more.

I was disappointed, naturally, I’d been waiting two weeks since I prudently pre-ordered my phone to pick it up on launch day, and took time off work to stand in line. Worse, folks who didn’t pre-order at all, but went to stand in line early at Car Phone Warehouse, were lucky enough to get their phone that day.

It’s not the end of the world, I know, but I feel Apple handled this launch really badly. The predictable but unmanaged server load, the resulting activation debacle, the poor levels of stock, all add up to a really bad user experience. In fact, I’d say Apple’s handling of this launch sucked, and to prove it I ran a poll over on the forums at the maccast.

9 out of...er...9 said the iPhone 3G launch sucked

As you can see above, most people (55% as of 14^th July) also reckon this launch sucked while a further 33% were less than happy. So what’s the fall out for Apple here? Probably nothing. Personally, I can’t wait to get my phone and will probably forget how much I griped about the launch as soon as I pick it up. Watch this space.

I was buying the excellent ScreenFlow application from Vara Software yesterday and that old chestnut, the mandatory post code field, came up again. For some reason, whoever coded their purchase forms decided it would be a good idea to ensure that:

• You must enter a post code, even if you don’t have one.
• It must not be one character long
• It must not be too many characters long

What’s too many? I would guess that it’s the maximum length of a British post code or American ZIP code, or some such arbitrary length. Filling this in was a pain – here’s how it played out.

First, I can see the field is mandatory, so, I try entering a hyphen, figuring that it’s the least effort and if anything actually gets posted to me, that’ll look the least silly on the printed address.

Error! you have foolishly attempted to enter one character, this is verboten!

OK. Time to send these people a message. But wait. That is verboten also.

By this stage I am trying to model the mentality of the coder of this form:

Hmmm. What boundary conditions can I imagine that would enable me to validate the text in this mandatory field? Well, I know there should be more than one character, because I can’t conceive of a post code system that uses just one character. And if I set an upper limit to the number of characters in the field, say the length of my local postcode, I’m done. Excellent! What a diligent programmer I am.

Do you know the worst thing? After all this careful validation, he accepts two hyphens.

So, effort was expended in ensuring that only nonsense that falls within rigidly defined parameters is acceptable. AAARRRGGGH! Maybe I just get riled up too easily. But these little details are so easy to get right, there’s just no reason to get them wrong.