A year with the iPhone
The iPhone is now around a year old, and into its second version. It arrived with a fanfare, and is loved and ignored in equal amounts. So was it groundbreaking or just so-so?
20 September 2008
The iPhone certainly has its sceptics – and on paper, it doesn’t measure up to many other smart phones. The camera is just 2 megapixels, it’s only just got 3G and, let’s face it, it’s not cheap.
But, if you’re willing (and able) to give one a try for a few weeks, you probably wouldn’t want to give it back.
What Apple has undeniably got right is the user interface – well, mostly right, anyway. Overall it’s a smart ground-up rethink of how phones should work. In fact, the interface is driven by the accurate realisation that this is a phone for only part of the time – and a small part of the time at that. So, features which are clunky and difficult to use on other phones (such as playing music, using a calendar or even a calculator) are a joy to use on the iPhone.
How many times have you tried to put an appointment into a standard phone and given up? The interface usually doesn’t work well: it’s far too slow to use and horrendously cumbersome. All that kind of thing is really slick on the iPhone.
The touch screen works well, too. It’s not perfect, especially if you have bigger fingers, but it’s pretty good – and better than having to stab a 6-pixel square with a stylus or navigate using a keyboard as is the case with other phones.
If you’ve been brought up on Windows-based PDAs, the setup is something of a revelation, too. It’s a quick process (though strangely through iTunes) that takes most of the hard work out of it for you. Setting up e-mail, which can be frustrating on many Windows Mobile devices, is a snap, for example. It just asks if you want your e-mail accounts replicated from your computer to your iPhone. That’s it – and to be honest, that’s the way it should be. All of that information for your e-mail accounts is already on your computer, so why should you have to enter it again, anyway?
The App Store is magnificent – and a runaway commercial success. Applications are cheap as chips, a snip to install and (among the dross) there’s some really useful stuff in there. Give it a year or so, and we could see mobile versions of many leading applications.
A day into using the iPhone and the penny really drops. It’s not a phone after all, it’s the smallest laptop you’ve ever owned. In most respects it works like a proper, real computer, especially once you start installing iPhone versions of your favourite productivity applications and other essential tools such as – er, the iPhone Facebook application. It’s when it is used in this way that nothing else seems to come close, and you feel, when you look at other so-called smart phones, that you’re looking back in time by a decade. Yes, the iPhone is different, but it’s different in a good way – it works the way a mobile device should. Almost.
There are some strange omissions, and some which stop it short of being as useful as it could be.
There’s no copy, cut and paste for instance. Apple says ‘it’s on the to-do list’ but really it should have been there in version 1.
Text messages work really well – they are displayed as a conversation. But you can’t forward texts, incredibly. Moving on from an incredible omission to an astonishing one, there’s no multimedia messaging either. Nor can you video call.
You can’t even copy files from your desktop computer to your iPhone to reference them while away, without third-party (and limited) software.
These omissions aren’t just inconvenient, for many people they are deal-breakers. It was wrong that they were not there in the first version of the phone and outrageous that they are not there in the second version.
But, on balance, the iPhone has to be regarded as a breakthrough device, if only because it has rewritten so many rules on how such things work.
It’s certainly caused a lot of ripples in the mobile phone market – and Apple was so far ahead of the field that it’s taking phone manufacturers a lot of time to catch up. Since the iPhone is expensive, and many other phones can boast similar (or better) feature sets, the fact that the iPhone is more usable is not enough to tear people away from cheaper deals.
But the rest of the market isn’t standing still and the upcoming competition is looking tough enough to wipe the smile off Apple’s face.
Almost with us is Android, a new phone OS that is going to give Apple a run for its money. The chief advantage of Android is that it is open source. Backed and driven by Google, it is nonetheless going to be easy for many phone manufacturers to implement and likely to generate a massive base of developers, potentially way bigger than Apple’s. It may not have Apple’s ease of use, but it’s looking better than Symbian or Windows Mobile.
Speaking of which, Microsoft isn’t likely to take phones from these upstarts lying down. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile may look yesteryear, but it’s robust and proven. If Microsoft can graft together Windows Mobile with its Zune technology, then it could well be back in the game, especially if it decides to make its own phones rather than licence the technology.
Leading phone manufacturers are all shaken by the iPhone – and Android is going to shake them harder. They’re going to have to work harder, as more people become impressed by graphically rich touch-screen interfaces.
So it almost doesn’t matter whether, one year on, the iPhone is a success. It’s done what was needed. Smart phones were cumbersome to use, annoying to set up and limited by their telephone heritage. Apple has shaken up the market, Android is going to shake it hard – and the end result is going to be good for us all.
