First Impressions on the iPhone

After much internal debate, with the launch of the iPhone 3G, I finally decided to take the plunge and try a non-Blackberry again.  The items that tipped the scale for me were really the software, not hardware changes.  Big changes that made me try out the new gadget from Cupertino:

• Full Exchange ActiveSync support
• New application platform
• Already existing top-notch web browsing

So, after years of Blackberry (BB) use, and a few of Windows Mobile use (mostly awful years for the later) what are my “first impressions” (well my first two months impressions) of the phone?

Before I dig into gripes, let me say after two months I’m pretty impressed with the phone.  It has plenty of room for improvement, but for the breadth of tasks it offers to solve, there is little in the industry that can give it a run for its money¹.  I still feel that the Blackberry is a better pure email/texting platform, but the iPhone makes up for its shortcomings in these areas by offering top-shelf capabilities elsewhere that BB users only daydream about.  Some that I would now find hard to go to living without:

• Ability to look up anything on the web at any time and not worry about if it’ll be readable on the screen².
• Twitteriffic – I follow tweets far more now than I ever did prior (very few folks I follow are important enough to follow using SMS alerts, but many I still like to read when idle – also as more and more folks post URL’s in their tweets the point above comes into play).
• HP12C calculator emulator – A 3rd party application, from Stone Meadow Development, that is quickly becoming a serious dependency for me (and a great example of a unique to each person “essential app” that the App Store platform opens up on this platform).
• Pandora’s music streaming application – Though the hot rumor is that Pandora may not be long for this world, I hope that’s not true because this app is fantastic.

What I’m Not Talking About

Also before we get started, I’m not going to use this post to discuss all the various issues and patches and new issues that the entire online community already seems to have hashed and rehashed to the point of babble.  There are plenty of folks out there documenting the failings of the radio, the issues with 3G, and the bugs in Exchange support.

I’m also not venturing into the pros and cons of the new iPhone SDK, App Store, Apple policies/TOU agreements, and related issues that are so important (rightfully so) to 3rd party developers on this newly open(ish) mobile platform.  Some of these topics I may cover in later posts, but not here.

iPhone Challenges

In order to understand the gripes I have, it’s important to understand how I’m using the iPhone on a daily basis.  Running atop v2.0.2 of the OS, I use it to connect to my corporate Exchange email, calendaring and contact system.  As part of this connectivity, my corporate IT requires the phone use the iPhone’s screen lock with a four digit PIN to unlock the phone.  Finally, I almost always am connecting to the network using EDGE (not 3G)³.

And so, without further delay, here’s my initial list of issues:

Contact List is not for serious users - While the iPhone contact list isn’t as bad as say that offered by folks like Motorola, it’s a far cry from the RIM contact list in the speed and efficiency provided to get to a key contact and then take action on it (email, phone, text that contact). 

First, performance is ridiculously bad.  I haven’t gotten a chance to tinker/debug to see if this is a result of the contact list being tied to an Exchange account⁴, however, I can tell you it’s just shy of too slow to be useful.  When you bring up the list (tap on the contact app from the home screen or goto the contact button in the phone app) the screen comes up quickly, but all input is paused for a good 10 count and sometimes longer (and no, I don’t have a billion contacts – my list is at 93).

While the addition of search was intended to make finding contacts in a large list faster, it falls short on its mission.  Similar to starting the contact app, starting to search can be slow in the extreme.  Add to that the poor UI thinking on the app (too may taps/steps to do a search) and the whole experience feels teeth grindingly sluggish.

Simply, the UI is not optimized for fast “muscle memory style” action – something I argue is a big value to heavy communication behavior users. 

As an example, to bring up the contact on a BB:

1. Open the contact app (which can be via a single hardware key click).
2. Start typing the contact’s name (first or last, and partials all work to help narrow the results real time: typing “st sch” brings up “Steve Schreiber”).
3. Hit enter if there is only one contact showing in the search list or select the appropriate contact if more than one in the list.

On the iPhone, here’s the same set of steps:

1. Open contact app by tapping the contact list app from the home screen.
2. If the last time the app was used the list was not at the top of the contact list, double tap the very small system bar at the top of the screen to page to top of the list (the only place where the search box is available).
3. Tap on the search box to get the on screen keyboard to come up.
4. Start typing the contact’s name (partial matching also works similarly for the iPhone – this is nice).
5. Tap on the contact name (even if only one is matching).

It doesn’t look like a lot more steps, but it feels like it.  Combined with the sluggish performance of the app itself and it’s painful⁵.

SMS is too slow & too unreliable - While not nearly as bad as contacts, the SMS application is also plagued by slow GUI behavior.  There is at least a 5 count pause from starting the app to when UI control is returned to me.  Judiciously clearing conversation histories has not seemed to affect this start time.

Further, the app could easily be optimized for fewer steps to do tasks.  As an example, when entering a “conversation” (a thread of SMS messages to/from a given contact) it’s not crazy to assume the user will want to send a text.  However, this is not the default.  Instead, to send a text, you must click on the input box at the bottom of the screen to bring up the input keyboard and begin writing your message (a needless tap).

Finally, I personally have experienced some disturbing message loss (or at the least high delivery latency) when using SMS.  I used the same account with a BB for over a year with no such issues, so I must assume it is something to do with the device.  I routinely use SMS as a form of IM when trying to meet up with friends, etc. (a use pattern that the Apple UI would seem to encourage since it takes the form of a conversation the same as their desktop IM client), so my expectation is near instantaneous back and forth trading of messages.

However, I’ve found a few of the folks (yes, it does seem to happen with some people more than others) I text with will often not receive my messages for minutes after I send them (and I often will receive ones from them with similar latency).  Also, in some instances, though less frequent, messages have never been delivered at all.  The end result of this flaky behavior results in me often wondering if someone is not responding because they’re busy, or because of my device not doing its job⁶.

Control over alerts is non-existent - Often referred to as “profile” behavior (e.g. the ability to create sound/vibration alert assignments for given user settable “mode”), the iPhone makes almost no allotment for this reasonably common functionality.  While many platforms don’t let you create new profiles or limit to some degree how much customization you can do in a profile, the iPhone is the most bare bones that I’ve seen in a smartphone.

First, there are only two alert modes for the iPhone: Ring (sounds on) and Silent (sounds off).  The user is allowed to configure if they want vibrate alerts on in either mode, both or none.  There is no ability to create additional modes/profiles beyond the two provided (and mapped to the hardware switch above the volume controls on the side of the phone).

Second, there is no ability to configure any sounds for the device other than the ring tone for phone calls⁷ and incoming text messages.  All other events that would trigger an alert are stuck with the Apple default tones.  These events include: new voicemail, new mail, mail sent, calendar alerts, lock sounds, and keyboard clicks.  The user may turn these individual event’s sounds on/off, but that is the only control provided.  For all events, there is no control provided for vibration alerts.

This means that when the device is configured to vibrate only (my primary mode for using my devices) you cannot differentiate between a calendar alert, a new email, and a new text message (phone calls vibrate more than once, but all others are single vibrates). 

In addition to the daily device-in-pocket issue, if you use audible sound alerts, but you find the default Apple sounds to be undesirable (either because you don’t like them, or more likely because for you, you can’t hear the damn things – a common complain especially for the barely audible new email sound), you’re out of luck.

In contrast, BB provides the ability to assign different multiples of vibrate (or custom sounds) to all the major messaging events you’d want to know about.  BB users are also allowed to create as many additional profiles as they want and have the ability to differentiate alert sounds/vibrations on a per-email account basis – thus enabling my “weekend mode” I’ve discussed before.

These limitations are frustrating.  While simplicity is a trademark of Apple products, and I’m all for the “less is more” world of thinking, I believe that these limitations have taken simplicity to such an extreme as to begin to needlessly cripple the device.  When you pair this issue with the next gripe, assessing if a given incoming alert is something you need to take immediate action on is needlessly complicated.

Locked screen event alerts are too spare - Because of the limitations of the audible/vibrate alerts and the fact that I’m required to use the screen lock, I have had some disappointment with the on-screen event alerts.  These alerts show up as little “bubbles” on a locked screen (before you bring up the PIN unlock keypad).

First, the iPhone provides bubbles for:

• Calendar events (showing what calendar alarm has fired with its subject)
• Incoming SMS messages (complete with the sender name and message text)
• Missed phone call number (complete with name if it’s in your contact list)
• New voicemail

What’s the major other communication event that would happen while the phone is in your pocket that *isn’t* represented?  That’s right, new email.  You don’t even get a bubble telling you “new email” (let alone who from, what account, a message subject or text preview, or how even just how many unread items are now in each account).

So, my phone buzzes in my pocket, I pull it out, click on the screen and there is nothing.  Luckily new email is the only event that doesn’t have a bubble, so I can assume that I received an email, but there is no additional data for me to decide if this new message is worth me unlocking the phone, navigating to the email app, and then looking at what is the new message – or if it will wait until later and I can just put the phone back in my pocket⁸.

This brings us to the problems with the calendar event reminder bubble.  At first, this seems wholly adequate, however, once you log into your phone the event is dismissed.  If you were too quick on the draw to parse the reminder bubble when you pulled the phone out and typed in your PIN, then it’s gone forever – needless to say, this completely eliminates the ability to “snooze” an alert.

Finally, the bubble design really falls down when you’ve had multiple events happen without unlocking the phone.  Then the phone starts to prune these down.  A text message goes from preview to from and a numeric indicator of how many messages (seems reasonable), missed phone calls similarly have number/contact with a numeric indicator, voicemail just has a numeric indicator.  Calendar events just fall apart, the phone keeps trying to truncate them until their largely useless (and of course, you can’t see a richer version post-unlock as noted).  An, of course, there are no indications for how many emails happened.

I’d love to see this area reevaluated by Apple with focus on better locked screen quick glance-ability for all communication types.  Perhaps starting with their rich bubble to start (and expanding it to support email and to differentiate email accounts), that ages out and then goes to icons to indicate messages/types pending.  Add in more robust calendar alert UX and the value would be much increased.

Calendar invite model (at least with Exchange) confuses -  The entire calendar/invite model seems forced and inconsistent on the iPhone. 

First, when you receive a meeting invite – which appears in your “calendar inbox” – and you tentatively accept it(“maybe” reply in iPhone parlance), the invite sticks around effectively forever in your calendar inbox as a “maybe”.  This makes no sense.  Maybe is just as “done” a response state as accept or decline (both of which remove the invite line items) but doesn’t get the same treatment⁹.  If, after replying “maybe” to an invite, you try to clean up your calendar inbox by deleting the left over maybe-responded invites, the items are removed from your calendar (definitely not the intended behavior).

Next, there seems to be a very weak linkage between the calendar inbox and the “real” email inbox items.  In Exchange, meeting invites arrive by email (effectively such invites are a special type of email).  In a desktop experience, of which Outlook is the dominant Exchange client, a user receives invite emails in the same inbox as their correspondence emails.  When you open an invite in your inbox, you’re presented with controls to accept/decline/tentative and, once a response is issued, the invite email is removed from the user’s email inbox.

However, with the iPhone, this model gets a bit confused – in part due to the creation of two inboxes to achieve the same goals.  When an invite arrives, it arrives in two places; the email inbox for the Exchange account and the calendar inbox. 

If you open the invite in the email inbox it just looks like an oddly formatted message, with no buttons or even a “jump” to go to it’s mirror entry in the calendar inbox.  The user is left to wonder what do to (ex: can I delete this email and then go to the calendar inbox to accept the meeting, or will that delete the meeting entry in the calendar inbox?).

If you open the invite in the calendar inbox first, then it is clear that there is a meeting request pending, and it is also clear what response options you have (albeit with the odd “maybe” response behavior noted above). 

Further, I have noticed that when the phone has a spotty network connection – or if it’s intentionally disconnected in airplane mode – the iPhone’s client software makes no formal “link” between the calendar inbox entry and the email inbox entry.  Specifically, if you are disconnected and accept a calendar inbox item – the expected behavior is that the client software is smart enough to remove the corresponding email entry from the email inbox.  This is not the case, unfortunately, and again you’re left with an entry in your email inbox you’re unsure if you can delete.  I suspect this happens because Apple is leaving the linkage/reconciliation of the two items to the Exchange system (Exchange sees a meeting accept response and will remove the corresponding entry from your email inbox even if the client software was too dumb to).

The net effect is that the entire calendar invite system feels very fragile when paired with Exchange.  As a user, I’m constantly worried that something isn’t working right and I’m unintentionally mucking up my own calendar.

Accelerometer driven landscape/portrait viewing of webpages doesn’t work consistently - I find that when reading a page, I’ll put the phone down at my side for a moment, bring it back up and find that the page has gone from portrait to landscape.  However, bringing the phone back to my eyes in portrait orientation was not enough force to make the phone reorient.

This then results in me comically tipping the phone back and forth and generally shaking it in frustration to try to get the accelerometer logic that was so easily tripped when I didn’t want it to re-trip now that I do.

Additionally, the entire orientation sensing behavior seems to often be a victim of hanging (like other user inputs) when the device is busy doing something else – say on the network. 

Finally, I almost never find the need to go into landscape mode for webpages.  I can clearly see the value for movie watching, coverflow and games.  But for web browsing is seems needless (and the elimination of landscape mode in email composition, where I’d argue it really could be useful, is baffling).  The ability to turn off accelerometer behavior for the browser would be very nice.

Some minor email nitpicks - I would greatly like to see the following addressed as they hit me every day: (1) I should be able to “reply to all” from a meeting invite so I can shoot off a quick email to let folks know I’m running behind/etc.; (2) I should be able to mark an email high priority; (3) Email should not inform me of it’s arrival until it downloads a majority (if not all) of the message – I routinely am informed of an email arrival when I have a weak network connection and, when I go directly into mail to see its contents, find the little spinning “busy” symbol going where text should be.  ActiveSync (the MS protocol that Apple licensed to connect to Exchange systems) allows for full body downloads, the iPhone should support them and not alert me until such downloads are successful; (4) “Getting more” content for an email is, in general, not nearly as seamless as on the BB.  I find myself waiting and watching the device screen a great deal more.

Copy/Paste is MIA - As I had feared in earlier posts, the lack of copy/paste is hugely annoying.  While I don’t want to use it constantly, when I do hit a situation where I wish I had it, it is usually because there is no other way to go forward.  Without a system-wide clipboard, the user is beholden to hoping that the developer(s) of the given app they’re using has thought through every possible use scenario one might have for the data (highly unlikely).

The Unexpected

Finally, a quick highlight of some items that have turned out to be pleasant surprises with the iPhone:

• Battery Life – I had expected this to be awful.  Especially true in comparison, since my BB use was heavy and yet resulted in routinely running on 6 days with a single charge.  While the iPhone is certainly *not* as good as the BB in this category, it’s not nearly as bad as Windows Mobile devices I’ve had before. 

  As I noted, I usually have my iPhone in EDGE mode (my BB was also EDGE).  When using it this mode, and trying to hold myself to using the iPhone just as I did my BB (lots of email & texting, the rare voice call, and a few brief Google queries) the iPhone was able to make it just shy of 48 hours on a single charge. 

  Of course, mine rarely makes it that long in daily use, but I attribute that to my using the iPhone in a far larger array of uses than I had my BB (not the lease of which is much longer browsing sessions which chew up battery by keeping the screen/backlight on).

• Soft Keyboard Surprisingly Functional – Again a fear I had written about, the software-based keyboard has proven to be a far more reasonable replacement to my BB keyboard than I’d expected.  While I can, in no way, go as fast as I could on my hardware keyboard, it works much faster and more accurately than I had assumed.

  The key (no pun intended) for me was to just let the auto-correct software take over.  Stop trying to read as you typed and course correct for your bad typing.  Instead I two thumb type and go as fast as I can.  I’d say > 90% of the time things turn out OK.  Where things tend to fall down is on extremely short words (to, do, go) that the software doesn’t have enough keystrokes to narrow down its guesses.

• Phone+iPod Actually Useful – I had never felt I needed my phone to be my music player.  I always have my phone on me, but I’m not the type of person that feels like they need to be listening to their own personal soundtrack anytime they’re not talking to someone, so the value of always having my music was a bit lost on me.  In short, having a top-notch music/media player in my phone was, for me, at the bottom of the list of reasons to buy an iPhone.

  That said, now that I have it, I find myself using it far more than expected.  Of course, I use it where I normally would’ve used my iPod (plane and bus trips being the big areas here).  However, I also find myself using my iPod in my car far more than I ever did (because I always have it on me) and using it to show friends, etc. a new video podcast or a new song – something that I rarely did before (again because I didn’t have my iPod on me all the time).

To close, I have a lot of complaints with the iPhone, but even given them I can honestly say I’d buy it again.  Luckily almost all of my major issues can be dealt with via software updates.  Apple does seem very committed to upgrading their iPhone customers regularly, so I can only hope that many of these challenges are addressed in the future¹⁰.

1In contrast with the Windows Mobile platform that has always been about breadth over depth (“it’s a platform play damnit!”).  Where I’ve always contended that the mobile market was not the right place for breadth (I’ve always argued that targeted devices that solved discrete use cases really well would always have more success – the whole “jack of all trades, master of none” problem), the iPhone is the first breadth play that has made me reconsider this bias.

2 True this doesn’t include the oft argued lack of Adobe Flash on the iPhone.  However, I cannot think of any major site (content or web app) I use daily that has instrumental use of Flash as part of its experience.

3Partially because I don’t want the battery drain of 3G, partially because of all the already hashed networking issues that the iPhone + ATT’s 3G network seem to have (almost all the complained about flakiness seems to disappear when you run EDGE only), partially because I’m in Michigan half of the time and 3G support there is spotty at best, and partially because the only activity that seems to seriously benefit from 3G is web browsing (though you loose data behaviors when you’re on the phone on EDGE and that can be annoying in rare situations).

4As bloggers like John Gruber have claimed that early v2.0 poor performance has since been fixed with the dot upgrades, I’m not sure if their expectations of performance are just much lower or if they’re not seeing the same problems because almost universally these folks aren’t using Exchange support.

5Not to mention being the brunt of many jeers from my BB toting peers who are already off into a phone call by the time I’ve gotten UI control of the contact list returned to me.

If startup time + a simple UI enhancement (defaulting to search input as the start up behavior) were addressed, I think a lot of my perceived pain with contacts would be eliminated.  If Apple doesn’t like the default to search input for the main default, then make it an option – please, I’m begging here.

6No, this isn’t a “broken device” issue – I’m on my 2nd 3G iPhone (the first one had a screen flaw) and both exhibit the problem.  Also, it’s not a signal strength issue – this behavior often happens at 100% signal strength in downtown Seattle on EDGE.

7You can have a custom ring tone per-contact for incoming phone calls.

8For all events, BB’s keep a count of all the unread events that have happened and note these in little “counts” that are always visible (even if the phone is locked).  So, if you remember your counts, you at lease can divine which email account was just messaged.

9True, for tentative responses to invites, the user may want to return to that invite and re-reply with accept or decline in the future.  However, one can easily do that by just finding the maybe event on the calendar (a gray dotted outline event), opening it, and hitting the appropriate reply button.

10To be honest, I’d even pay a nominal fee for such upgrades going forward.  To date, Apple has given such updates for free to their phone customers.  However, I know how expensive it can be to write and maintain software.  If it takes an annual fee to Apple of something like a couple/few dollars to keep a staff of folks highly focused on fielding and fixing customer issues, I’d be for it.  Let’s not forget, that Apple is one of the very very few vendors that make free upgrades to their in-the-field devices easily accessible and available to their customers.  (Even if they are available from a manufacturer like RIM or Microsoft, upgrades to their platforms are often fraught with a feeling of the customer being “on their own” with finding the upgrades and then applying them themselves.  The carriers rarely try to make this process easy.)