apple phone
I'm not particularly impressed by most modern mobiles. My previous phone had a keyboard cover which didn’t cover all the keys, so, as anyone with even a miniscule understanding of pockets and real world physics will grasp, some keys got pressed at random. These keys couldn’t be reassigned to do nothing. The effect: phone settings changed at random. Clearly someone didn’t put that phone through usability testing, did they, Motorola?
Many modern mobiles have unnecessary extra features that don’t work properly. For example, that phone had a camera (which I didn’t want), and infrared. Since it had the camera, I played with it. I took a couple of photos, and connected it to my laptop via the infrared. They connected, they talked, but the phone was unable to communicate anything but names, addresses & phone numbers. It’s as though Motorola hadn’t quite grasped the principles of information technology.
And what condemns the existing industry is there was nothing uniquely awful about that phone. It is just one of many examples of incompetent design. Existing mobiles do not exhibit joined up design; the technology feels to me as disjointed and messy as computer technology in the days of CP/M. It took IBM, and Microsoft, to sort that out.
I want to see how their iPhone survives daily use in a pocket. It has no keyboard cover (or does it?), so does it make random phone calls, or random setting changes? Actually, I'll be very surprised if Apple got that wrong. Does it survive in a pocket when its owner gets caught without a mac (sic) in a damned great thunderstorm? When it comes to Europe, will it connect it to any network?
I think it has the potential to be as good as the hype suggests; let's seem them prove it.
january 2007
chewed