iPhone
A reflection on what I’ve been reading and watching about the iPod.
Scrolling through contacts
This has been mentioned before – but the scrolling through contacts suggests a potentially repetitious task. I’m very used to, and fond of, entering the letter of the surname or first name of a contact and having Nokia’s address book quickly filter a list. As more businesses push to get their details into user’s address books, numbers of contacts is likely to blossom in the near future. This suggests that groupings of contacts could become more useful for handling long lists on smaller screens/limited input devices. The scroll-only approach could be taxing.
Another note on the flick-scrolling demonstrated here [at about 1 minute], is the potential for flicking past contacts. I’m surely nit-flicking now tho.
Browsing
Cameron Moll raised an excellent point about data charges and zoom browsing – that’s a five dollar page view right there. In Australia telcos have made some major pushes around online mobi services, mobile web etc – but most every user I’ve spoken to has the heeby-jeebies about what it’s going to cost them. I myself, was issued a please explain re the bill on my work phone recently. (I couldn’t really explain it, either. I don’t know how so much money is racked up through data charges and subscriptions.)
Zoom browsing – I haven’t experienced it much on the Nokia S60 browsers (based on Webkit, as is Safari), but I know I don’t like horizontal scrolling on the web, and I feel like there’s an element of that in zoom browsing. I also don’t mind the vertical approach to mobi web pages, and have wondered if Ajax-y expanding stacks/lists would be a good next step. Although Barbara Ballard once wrote that content is absorbed less effectively when reading from small screens – this would be interesting to explore with users.
What the zoom approach offers though is the overview of the page, and the view of your content in context of the site, wchi can be important. I find I often like to know where I’m going next on a site before I start reading an article or commit to clicking a link – like entering a supermarket in a hurry and plotting the path through the frozen goods-toiletries-snacks sections.
Location Based Services
Can watch those Google map POI icons rain into place time and time again. Undoubtedly, the screen will make looking at Aerial or Satellite maps a joy. (Again, data charges will provide the hangover for that party). Think there’s any way to remove that Pin from the Eiffel Tower?
Cameron Moll again: the lack of a GPS unit limits the context power of the mobile device. This could be partly compensated for by cell positioning capabilities from telcos and good applications, but i think text entry is always going to be a big part of LBS, and it may be that the text entry on the iPhone is killer.
No buttons
Off-screen buttons are few – and the lack of tactile response to on-screen buttons has been noted as a drawback. Someone mentioned the other day that they can easily text single handed with little visual reference to their phone – they can touch-text through feel and multi-tap or T9. This would have to be re-learned. That’s ok, the limited input methods available now were always going to have to change, but is the touch screen only approach a great leap forward? To an extent, this will depend on the app you’re using and the learned behaviours associated.
Revolutionary Device
I feel like standing up for Nokia, for Symbian, for Sagem … ok, maybe not Sagem. But I think that the revolutionary aspect will potentially be in the experience that Apple can deliver.
Most of the features are available already, and i was more excited about the Nokia N95 mapping app previews than the Google maps preview. As mentioned above the browser features are available in the S60 browser and Opera has a host of killer features, including Small Screen Rendering that may prove to provide a better window
onto websites designed for large screens. I haven’t seen any Calendar or Address Book previews, but I’d be stoked if iCal and Address Book were working together – that’d be a small revolution in everyday functionality.
Brian Fling suggests that Nokia may have had a hand in the iPhone, as they’ve worked with Apple previously and they hold the expertise that Apple would have needed for some of the development. Makes sense – let Nokia contribute features expertise and allow Apple to cook up the most desirable experience on a handheld.
So hail the experience (at least of watching the previews on youTube), and wait and see how the iPhone looks in ‘08 when it arrives in Australia.
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