I managed to completely miss Jeff Atwood’s (pent-up) love letter towards the iPhone product, platform and experience. He argues, and he’s right, that the platform is good enough to kick ass, and that the hardware is starting to catch up with the promise of the software. (We won’t get there until we get better multi-tasking, but that requires yet more hardware; more resources, more battery and quicker computation. I’m guessing next year’s model will take some decisive steps in the right direction. Conceptually, the 3G S is a mere patch.)
Two years ago, I’d just tried the original iPhone myself:
The iPhone is not perfect. A first for any phone this side of, oh, 2003?, it doesn’t have MMS at all, so you can’t send images or audio to other cell phones without being convinced the other cell phones have set up email clients. As we all have heard, 3G would really be better for data transfer speed. And about four to five of the bundled applications are crap – the specific group varies depending on who you ask, but it generally includes the Notes app. And what kind of PDA has a YouTube client but not copying and pasting, or the ability to view Excel Office Open XML documents but not an accessible file system?
I am telling you today to shut up for a few seconds and stay for the ride. It is pretty much impossible to make the kind of conclusions I make about the iPhone’s UI and its role in making this sort of thing available for the first time to ordinary people without also making the comparison to the original Macintosh. It was far from perfect when it came out, which led a lot of people to discredit it. Within three years almost all of the “but it doesn’t have/do X” concerns were gone, and within ten years it had swayed every other competitor. I believe something similar is going to happen. It’s not a coincidence that the iPhone owners are – AT&T handcuffs aside – generally satisfied.
Except for the “accessible file system”, which was a bullshit substitution for “some sort of shared-ish general storage system”, every one of those things have been fixed. (I didn’t mention conventional Bluetooth file transfers, which is just about the only thing left to add to the platform itself.) They’re even slowly wiggling out of the AT&T handcuffs.
Two years. What’s happened in two years for everyone else? Some other companies have gotten around to providing an iPhone-like — and by that I mean usable — experience, but most still think that this will blow over. There’s a time and a place for simple phones with simple keypads and simple functionality, but they haven’t even really gotten that right. (That might sound a bit ridiculous since some of these companies have been making mobile phones for 40 years now. My point is that if you want a simple phone, you have to get a cheap phone, and if you want a good simple phone, you have to get an expensive phone and avoid the rest of it.)
I think it’s time to settle once and for all that ordinary phones (non-smartphones) are like DOS. They are a sequence of drilling down into textual menus, sometimes represented by 12 colorful icons or with four or five tabs, but it is still menus. It is perfectly serviceable for some tasks, and it’s not a broken approach, but for most tasks, we can do better. Dialing numbers or picking people to dial from a list by typing is maybe the only task these interfaces do graciously.
Once in this narrative, it just keeps coming. The Palm Pilot was the Xerox Alto. Ahead of its time, defining some of the core concepts of what a mobile GUI could look and feel like. Windows Mobile was… well, Windows. No one loved Windows until Windows 3.11, and that took eight years. The first undeniably good Windows was still wretchedly dual: Windows 95 was stuck between 16-bit and 32-bit, famously unable to be taken seriously as an OS by some people because of some DOS gunk at the bottom of the stack. Now everyone’s trying to patch Windows Mobile out of suckiness with their own abstraction layer on top, and any month now it might even start working.
Not everything’s a perfect fit to this mental model, but you have to agree that there are similarities. The two biggest changes are that Apple made a late entry and snagged substantial market share (like their MP3 player entry with the iPod) and that Palm came back with something that theoretically could beat everyone if well executed.
Jeff makes an interesting prediction: “I believe the iPhone will ultimately be judged a more important product than the original Apple Macintosh.” I agree with that and I hope it’s obvious why; the original Mac was a platonic product that eventually saw success with some professionals and developed at the pace of the industry, and the original iPhone was a platonic product that immediately went for market share and developed aggressively. I still get jeers for owning an iPhone, but there are fewer and fewer with any real substance to them because most of the gaps are being filled. Most of them are centered around the premise that I should own a Windows smartphone just because it’s Windows, which seems exactly like the kind of argument these people like to stick to owners of Apple products in general.
Since this is an iPhone post, I have a quota to meet around a certain subject (bear with me). The real shocker in Jeff’s post isn’t that the iPhone OS is less messy, or that having many apps is good, it’s that the oligarchy of the mobile phone market neutralized Apple’s flaws. Jeff is, like me, pacified with what the phone offers him, but he shouldn’t be happy with why that is. The carriers use pricing models fit for Kafka. They collaborate with mobile phone vendors to lock you into their platform under both their and the carrier’s control scheme. That this balance is apparently shifted towards the mobile phone end seems like a good development, until you realize that the carriers are working to reverse this and that you’re screwed either way.
Jeff ostensibly cares about software freedom in that he calls Macs expensive Mac OS X dongles. Mac OS X is infinitely more open than the iPhone OS in that while they don’t want you to install any of them on an arbitrary device, you can develop and use whatever you want for Mac OS X. Is his excuse seriously that the mobile phone market is already so far down the crapper that he doesn’t have to change his position?
