主题：iphone是超女 -- 小小曾

Fifth:

iPhone negatives. There are the typical things that many people have noted, severely limited phone capabilities, an atrociously bad keyboard, a horrible email client, bad contact lookup. The thing is supposed to be a phone. What are the two primary things you do with a phone? Dial it, and look up a contact to dial from. Both of those actions are harder on the iPhone than just about any other phone on the market.

But what surprises me is the UI. Apple is supposed to be perfect at this. I found the UI to be inconsistent at best. For instance, in many places sweeping your finger up and down on the screen scrolls it vertically. In some places, sweeping it right and left scrolls it horizontally. But in others that doesn’t work. Take the calendar. If I’m on the day view, I can sweep up and down. But if I want to go to tomorrow, I can’t sweep right and left. Worse, to go to tomorrow I need to touch a very small triangle about 1/3 of the way down the screen. One of the things you do to make a UI navigatable by finger is to make all of the hit targets large. But the next day target is too small. How could Apple of all people get that wrong? Or, say you want to go to a day three weeks from now. Hit the “month” view and tap the day. But that doesn’t take you to the day. It just highlights it. Now you’ve got to tap the “day” view again to see that day. That’s the kind of mistake I expect a first time UI designer to make.

Sometimes you navigate by sweeping your finger anywhere on the screen. Others you need to touch a button. But the buttons you sometimes need to press end up being all over the device depending on the app. This is bad on two levels. First, you have to search the whole screen for them, and second, being used to one app doesn’t make you proficient in another. How could they possibly get something like that wrong? People have gushed that Apple made a device that’s “menuless.” No they didn’t. They just broke the menus into a bunch of buttons and spread them all over the device so that you don’t know ahead of time where they’ll be.

I really disliked needing to stretch my thumb all over the place to do basic navigation. On typical phones you can do all navigation by parking your finger near the DPAD and moving it small amounts.

I browsed to a website with a lot of text. I effortlessly zoomed the window so that the column width fit perfectly. Awesome. But, now when I want to scroll it, I need to put my thumb over the text I’m reading and move it. Every other phone on the planet has had some sort of offscreen scrolling mechanism (usually a DPAD or a scroll wheel) that lets you scroll without putting fingers in front of the text you’re currently looking at.

There’s no real sense of “back.” I started entering a new calendar entry, but needed to get some information from something else. So I navigated to that other thing, got the information I needed, and tried to go back to the new calendar entry. The only way I could find to do it was to launch the calendar app again, at which point my half entered entry was gone.

The much ballyhooed acceleration sensor doesn’t work very well. I turned the device sideways and nothing happened. Trouble was, I wasn’t holding the device vertically when I did it. I had it tilted at a fairly natural 45 degree angle. You have to move it up to vertical before rotating it if you want the acceleration sensor to work. You might say, “So what? That’s not hard to do.” But this is a $2500 phone that sold 500,000 sight unseen because it’s supposed to be perfect. Couldn’t they have done a better job with the acceleration sensor? I’ve used a lot of devices that switched between landscape and portrait and, while none of them were so cool as to switch by “magic” all of the worked every single time I tried to switch. I’d rather functional than magically half-baked.

“So, what? They’ll get better.” Yes they will. See my second thought. They’ll be around for a long time. But if it had been Microsoft, not Apple, who released the iPhone, we’d be laughing stocks. Which brings me to my final thought.

Sixth:

Holy double standard, Batman. When we decided to enter the embedded space, we wrote, from scratch, a new operating system designed for embedded devices. We called it “Windows” (CE), but it was still it’s own thing, separate from the desktop product. Yet everyone said, “Stupid Microsoft, you can’t just take your desktop OS and shove it onto an embedded device. Embedded has special needs.” Now Apple literally takes their desktop OS and shoves it onto an embedded device, and everyone praises them for it. That’s … frustrating.

I see them making a ton of mistakes that we also made over the years. People lambasted us for those mistakes, but they’re giving Apple a free pass for them. For instance, how many times have people here said, “It’s a phone, stupid. It should be a phone first”? At best, the iPhone is a phone third. I’d say it’s a phone fourth. But I predict this is suddenly not going to matter anymore. That’s also frustrating.

Imagine if Microsoft came forward and said, “Here’s a phone, but you can’t even begin to use it until you’ve hooked it up to your PC.” We’d have been laughed out of GSM World Congress. But that’s exactly what Apple is doing.

To use your phone you have to hook it up to iTunes? Where are the “network externalities” people? Do people think Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in media players? They’re not even being covert about this. At least, with us, you were able to use other browsers. There’s no way to use an iPhone without iTunes. Why is this okay?

And, finally, to the person who back in January proclaimed, “Finally, a phone that works,” I find it very frustrating that people are saying “Oh look, the phone part doesn’t work very well, it must be AT&T’s fault,” but, even though we have less control over the device than Apple does, whenever a call is dropped or the network doesn’t work they say, “It’s Microsoft’s fault.”