Waffle is winding down and will be revisiting some subjects in an apocalyptic manner.
Four years ago today, thanks to connivery and the collaboration of a helpful friend, my first iPhone arrived, the US GSM-only, first-ever iPhone model. In four days, the Swedish iPhone 4S will be launched, and there will be one on its way to my doorstep, with no roundabout twists.
During those four years, so many things have happened. To the iPhone from iPhone OS 1.0 to iOS 5, naturally, but also to everything, everywhere. It is useful to go back to someone who kept a lot of notes of their first impressions — unfortunately, due to severe future shock, I didn’t. We can take a lot from John’s observations.
There’s insecurity at the idea of touching a screen. Multi-touch had just blown our collective minds thanks to Jeff Han’s demo a few months prior and I remember thinking that it’s a shame it’s going to take ten years for me to actually play with this. I recall Swedish pioneer Neonode developing a phone optimized for finger touch (and with a smaller display), but in most other cases, the industry designed cursor-accurate interfaces for styluses and you either adapted or pecked with your fingernails in awkward poses. And the response time was “a few seconds”. And scroll bars were nailed to the edges, pixels wide. You’d better use the direction pad, or the occasional well-meaning jog wheel.
There’s surprise at being able to rotate the device any which way to go into landscape. In a world where many young and old people see their tablet as their first real computer, that’s obvious. But before iPhones, which screens rotated as their devices did? A bunch of high-end displays with special software support. Mobile phones and PDAs were still small enough for easy rotation and some of them had screens large enough that keeping two orientations was worthwhile, but none of them did. Some of the later Palm PDAs did, but the ones out in 2007 had a button for screen rotation.
There’s incredulity at missing concepts. No text selection, no clipboard (copy and paste), no app switching, no quitting of anything, no way to send something from place A to place B whatsoever except via the email client and no visible file system. There are also no apps except the ones you see on the home screen; 16 icons and a taunting empty row. Four years later, we have most of these things and we’ll get back to the ones we didn’t have.
There’s also revelation from using the keyboard. It’s not perfect but given the circumstances it works so well that it’s distressing when it doesn’t. An iOS 4 update a few months back extended the keyboard policy for surrounding viable keys to include the space bar for those letters that are adjacent. Swedish, unlike English, is a language with many compound words, and the over half-a-million iPhone users have been suffering from ridiculous, where-the-hell-did-that-come-from suggestions — often blithering nonsense. When iOS 5 finally shipped recently, I can attest to sinking blood pressure across many of my friends and family and a marked drop in damnyouautocorrect-esque messaging.
If you haven’t this year read an article about how Apple or Steve Jobs or an Apple product have been transformative, you probably never will. I won’t belabor the point, but when was the last time a mobile phone launched this many ideas that would later take hold? I can think of the first flip phones, the first phones with SMS and MMS and Bluetooth, the first phone with a call vibrator. The iPhone changed everything, and the last four years have changed everything about the iPhone.
Well, almost.
I was able to get my iPhone 4S directly from Apple without any carrier lock whatsoever and at market value. I’ve been awaiting this for a long time. I had to remove a bundled AT&T SIM card from my original iPhone and the reason it was bundled was because of the infernal US mobile phone market with poor reception on multiple carriers and competing standards which not only encouraged the carriers to carrier-lock their phone and buy a long contract but encouraged the customers to take the deal since the situation wasn’t going to improve anyway. Jailbreaking was the solution to unlock this first iPhone and use it in any way whatsoever.
The jailbreaking community did something amazing — they reverse-engineered an entire toolchain, built applications using the hidden APIs, improved the home screen and other integral parts of the system. Then they built an app store. You could download apps to your iPhone instantly. It was a hack, sure, but it was possible and they made it, starting from nothing. I’m not sure if people remember that this was the case long before the iPhone SDK was even originally announced.
Which brings me to Android. Android itself is a success by many metrics. When it comes to Android as a platform, I see glimmers of greatness in universal, simple concepts. But I still see using it and developing for it as a disappointing dud. Android’s role currently is to sit diametrically opposed to iOS in almost every aspect and that is a big shame. It gives the impression that there are only two ways to do things. Of these two ways, although I disagree strongly with the patronizing tint across app distribution, I still find Apple to be the compelling alternative.
It may be Apple’s right to assert that if their warranty’s to hold, iOS’s gears mustn’t jam, and your right to opt out of that only if you are prepared for the consequences. I still cannot for the life of me see why it’s in Apple’s interest to restrict me from choosing which applications I deem to be well-behaving and morally justified.
I also can’t see the point in tossing the need for document organization aside from separate silos to the wayside because of the failures of underlying technologies. I thought the way to get past whatever might have been failing file systems was to transcend them — to find what was wrong, keep what worked and work out a new model. Not to be chained to the ghosts of their mistakes; to design ruled by fear. iOS’s perspective of file management — aside from versioning — is like the TSA’s perspective of a nice plane ride.
But with these big caveats, Android’s consistent inability to put up an actual fight in hardware is maddening. Bringing a bigger screen isn’t enough if it means I have to lug around a bigger phone that’s still thicker. Having “higher resolution” by playing tricks with uneven or blended subpixels that cause the colors to change tint and waltz oddly across the spectrum depending on arcminutes of tilt won’t do either. I’m sure I could learn not to notice it, but there are hardware vendors that would rather sell me 3D. Google’s coming around to fixing bits and pieces of what’s wrong with it with 4.0, but it won’t force the hardware vendors’ hands to do their part instead of building in cheap gimmicks disguised as hardware advantages. Which is sad, because they are already forcing hardware vendors’ hands about Android. Just about entirely different things.
Going from iOS to Android on the basis of all these things is hard. It’s like going from someone who has a habit of kicking you in the nuts twice a year to someone who’ll poke you in the eyes once a week. That’s why I haven’t done it. You stick to the poison you’ve tried.
When I unpack my iPhone 4S, I’ll be doing so with joy. It’s another step of the long path to excellence and I will enjoy a better camera, better performance, maybe a better antenna and a reset battery. I will also do so with trepidation. If you asked me to sit and write down what I want in a phone, we’d end up somewhere different. But no one’s yet learned to make the open phone with the iron fist. No one’s come down on the sides of a responsible OS with apps of any topic that can talk to each other whenever and do whatever, as long as they supply a reason and you can constrain them. No one is eager to work out what really works for app management, document management, widget management, implement these in the right way for every form factor and stay this way. And there’s only a handful who if you ignore all this will at least prioritize anywhere near what I like; rather late and working than early, broken and abandoned; rather the right five things than the half-assed 30 things.
And in case anyone was wondering, as if there was any remaining doubt, I still advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.