主题：iphone是超女 -- 小小曾

我本来对我的Treo750m相当满意,现在还真有些看不上它了.什么时候一定弄个iPhone好好满足一下.

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.”

First:

Newsflash, the iPhone is going to be a success. That was largely guaranteed when the 31,000th article was written about it (no exaggeration). There are very few single phone models that sell more than a million units (we’ve only had something like 3 to 5 of ours do that), and the iPhone probably has already done so (or they will soon). There’s no way to look at this as anything but a success for them.

There are a lot of components to selling a product, and making people interested in buying it is one of them. You have to appreciate how amazingly good Steve Jobs is at this. Let me say that again, 31 thousand articles written about the device before it was even released. None of them paid for by Apple. Be as cynical as you want. Talk about “reality distortion fields” till you’re blue in the face. This is an impressive achievement and I bow to his skill.

Second:

Newsflash, Apple will be a player in the phone market for a long time. Believe it or not, I view this as a good thing. Microsoft does better competing with others than with ourselves. There are a lot of examples of this in our history, but the canonical one is IE. When we were competing with Netscape, we rocked. When Netscape died, we seemed to grind to a halt (yes, I know it wasn’t that simple). Then, when Firefox appeared, we started making cool browsers again. Look at the phone market. We’ve beaten PalmOS. We’ve beaten RIM. Nokia completely dwarfs us, but we’re growing much faster than they are and are taking share. We’ll beat them. It may take 5 years. It might take 8. But we’ll beat them. And, at that point, we’d be in the situation IE was in after they beat Netscape. But, now we’ll have Apple to provide competition for us. They’re fundamentally better at the game we play than Palm, RIM, or Nokia is. And that’s a good thing.

Third:

Viva la revolución. I read an article about Steve Wozniak showing up in line at the Apple store and cheering about the iPhone “revolution.” At first I was pretty disgruntled about this. What revolution? The device does nothing that hasn’t been done before. Are they really claiming that snappy graphics make for a revolution? But I’ve come to realize that there is something incredibly revolutionary about the iPhone. But it has nothing to do with the device itself. The revolution is that Apple is manhandling the mobile operators. AT&T, the company, is an afterthought with the iPhone. They don’t enable the phone. They don’t gatekeep updates. They clearly don’t have any say in what goes onto it. Is this a chink in the MO armor? Will this someday translate into us getting more freedom with them as well? Will we someday be allowed to distribute security fixes directly to customers? Will we ever be able to say, “You don’t make Apple submit to this requirement, why should we?”

Apple’s greatest weakness is working with partners. It’s our greatest strength. I don’t want to play Apple and start walking over my partners the way they do. But if my partners start saying, “Gee, I sure like working with Microsoft more than those Apple people,” that’s a good thing. And if Apple forces some of my partners start saying, “You know, some of these requirements aren’t as important as we thought,” then Apple’s is a revolution I can get behind.

Let me give you two examples. 1) WAP. We once spent an entire release cycle adding WAP support to our browser. We could have spent that time making our browser better, but the MOs insisted that we make it compatible with junky, less capable browsers instead. I don’t know if AT&T told Apple to add WAP to Safari, but if they did, Apple told them to pound sand. 2) The GSM Global Certification Forum spec. GCF is a compliance document that all GSM phones need to pass. Its 5134 pages long. I’ve just spent the last few weeks scrambling to fix a failure in test GCF 31.8.1.2.3. This is a test about changing the Call Barring password. You type in your old password, your new password, and your new password again to confirm it. In Windows Mobile, we do a string compare of the new password and the compare, and if they don’t match, we put up a message box that tells the user to retype them. That behavior causes us to fail GCF certification because 31.8.1.2.3 requires that we send both passwords to the network so that it can do the string compare. Insane, right? Well one of the top five cell phone manufacturers, a company that has shipped hundreds of times more phones than Apple, is being told that they can’t ship phones in Europe if they don’t pass all GCF tests, including this one. Apple probably fails half of the GCF tests. But I’ll bet they’ll still ship.

Fourth:

iPhone positives. I’m not sure if this device will ever be measured on its merits. But if it is, here are some of things I like about it. The UI is snappy. There are a lot of reasons why they’re snappy and we’re not, but I’d say the biggest is that they made being snappy a priority where we didn’t. I’m sure that, in the past, passing GCF tests was more important than being snappy. We’ll see if it still is in the future. The screen is really pretty. It’s bright and inviting, and has nice icons. The web browser is very nice, especially with the effortless and instantaneous zooming. Zooming on our browser follows the desktop model, which really amounts to, “The screen is big enough, but you may want to change the text size if your eyes aren’t good enough.” Clearly that’s not appropriate on a small screen device. Apple does a much better job here. The screen has more pixels than most of our devices do. We do support a larger resolution than Apple’s, but the screens are expensive and few devices use them. A device in the hand is better than a theoretical one in the bush. Kudos to them for putting a big screen on the device. The device is nice and small, roughly the size of my Dash, but they’re pulling some impressive battery life numbers from it (reported, I haven’t personally confirmed the battery life). Nicely done.