12:15 pm, 2 Jul 07
iphone
This weekend I played with a friend's iPhone.
As far as phones go: it's maybe an 8/10, where my current phone is a 2/10.
As far as making any material difference in my life: a phone is at most 2/10, even a perfect one.
As far as phones go: it's maybe an 8/10, where my current phone is a 2/10.
As far as making any material difference in my life: a phone is at most 2/10, even a perfect one.
I hope Apple's knack for making things pleasant raises the bar a bit.
(I don't think I could live without syncing from gcal to my standby screen, though. I'd forget to go anywhere.)
You'd think given all the attention that life begins and ends at "what is shown to you on an LCD screen".
It's not the first device to do what it does (though it may be the first with a built-in enhanced Google Maps UI), but it does them really well — in terms of usability it's way beyond the competition. Even the phone functionality has major improvements like random-access voicemail.
The Google Maps app is going to be really useful for me. I tend to get nervous about driving to places I don't know, and about getting lost. It also incorporates a white/yellow pages so I can look up nearby stores/restaurants, which is a common thing I used to use my Sidekick for, but was very frustrating with its rudimentary web browser.
You can get up in the morning, can't you. :P
(I guess I have a theme going here.)
IOW: I'm annoyed how much of a frenzy our culture gets into over consumer goods in general, and apple-the-brand-and-religion is among the worst offenders.
Alan Kay said of the original Mac that it was the first personal computer worth criticizing. I'm biased, but I think the iPhone is in a similar position. Or as in the unofficial slogan of Mac OS 7.5: "It sucks less!"
The hype has been kind of annoying, but Apple's hardly to blame. They showed off the iPhone once in January (because the FCC would soon blow its cover anyway), and then basically kept mum for months. All of the hype was self-sustaining based on that initial demo. And even the marketing of recent weeks has been incredibly content-laden compared to what you typically get. What other TV commercials can you think of that are basically demos of how to use the product's features? And the in-depth videos on the website were pretty much a user-manual in a box, that answered a lot of questions even before the product launched.
I think rather than jumping to the conclusion that Consumers = Idiots, it might be better to conclude that people would really like their cellphones to work better. Or don't think of them as cellphones, think of them as computers. Who says a computer has to be the size of a laptop or tower? Isn't improving the usability of computers important?
But being flooded with exhortations that the world revolves around advances in consumer electronics -- or computing in general -- is ridiculous. It doesn't. Computers are a blip. A tiny marking of the passage of time, no more significant than the erosion of a rock or the falling-over of a tree.
I don't think people are idiots, we're just often in need of perspective.