Reality Check
NOW: iPhone-friendly pages!
No BS was invoked during the preparation of this report/review. Added ideas (12/5/07 & 6/9/08).
Opening the packaging that encloses the iPhone shows -- once again -- how thoughtful the Apple design effort truly is. The box is simple, uncluttered and clever. You "lift" the tight-fitting outer sleeve up off the inner, nested container. It takes a few seconds, and the effect is a distinct anticipation-generator.
Once open, the iPhone itself lays in a clear plastic tray, floating it above other interior contents, but allowing you to see beyond into the depths of the package. Unambiguously, you are simultaneously drawn into the package and given the iPhone on a crystal platter.
The lid-sleeve you just removed contains a shock-protecting layer, allowing the iPhone to be the first thing you see. It's wrapped in the Apple-customary transparent overlay that peels off the physical device.
This is packaging at the A+++ (triple plus) level. I don't know of another American company conscious enough to bring this and similar levels of customer satisfaction to the act of opening / revealing the product you just bought.
Compare it to opening a new DSLR camera package.
- You would think that something that just set you back a grand or two would bring the product forth with fanfare and panache, but no such luck. My own recent experience opening most everything made by Canon, Nikon, Olympus and Sony shows me that the people who market these admirable devices don't have a CLUE about the customer experience of decanting them.
The Apple package conveys subtle extras. They respected their own product so much that they handed it to you in high tech packaging. You are being subtlely, subconsciously indoctrinated in your own regard for the product. Anything handed to you with such great care is likely going to be handled with your version of similar care.
I would be surprised to see a high percentage of these boxes tossed into the trash. Not that you are going to put the iPhone in it to carry the thing around, but what if you wish to sell it when iPhone2 comes out. Yeah, better put that thing up on a shelf for some future day...
Contact of the First Kind
Out of the box, it is dead weight. You turn it over and peel off its transparent scratch-proofing, possibly appreciating the iPhone's lines, clean surfaces and minimalist controls.
It's weight impresses most people. It feels solid, heavy for something so small and thin, like it was solid glass or a brick of aluminum. Nothing rattles. Fingers don't encounter controls that move in their seats. Everything feels zero-tolerance.
But it's dead. You can turn it on -- and the factory charge is nearly full -- but it's about as useles as can be. A default Earth globe fills the screen, but that will soon change.
Activation is by iTunes. Plugging the iPhone dock into your computer links the two and guides you through a self-explaining series of pages.
Caution: Read each page fully before clicking anything. You don't want to make a mistake here.
Because I have a .Mac account, an Apple one-click account and am a previous Cingular/ATT wireless customer and ATT home-phone service customer, I think the process was streamlined for me.
Horror stories from the non- or anti-gruntled customers start at activation, but that's par for the course with anything this intricate. Setting up a cell phone has never been a piece of cake entrusted to the layman, and that's why every other cell phone you've ever purchased was set up by a clerk in a store. That ends with the iPhone.
Activation Horror Stories:
My own activation experience was about a 7.5 on a scale of 10. It took a while for the ATT end of things to deal with the new phone, but eventually it came on line. Actual delay; about half of an hour. Still, I hear stories. A sample:
The Social Security Thing: You need a credit-approved account to operate a continuing service account like a cell phone. You need to flash lesser ID for home electrical power hook ups each time you move, but this is a LOT of agony for ATT (fraud, ID theft, grumbling customers, etc.), it would appear, so they demand knowing how to find and hurt you the easiest: through your Government ID. Rumors that they will break your legs over a phone bill are greatly exaggerated. But they can be unusually truculent in setting up the details for you.
Stories abound questioning the relative safety of supplying your SocSec in the Activation process, so some perspective may help.
- You can argue with live representatives about this at your discretion, asking them for THEIR SS number as you banter with them, but it's not going to get your iPhone activated.
Because of my prior history with ATT, they only asked for a four-digit verification, so the activation was security-issue free -- to that degree.
The Ported Number Thing: People are finding out how bad their prior providers truly were as they attempt to convey a treasured prior cell number into the ATT system. Progress is often slow, taking as much as TWO DAYS or more to transfer.
- Come ON, Verizon, Nextel, T Mobile, Sprint and others! Do you really want a bunch of former customers further bad-mouthing you to their friends as the hot new iPhone is being ogled? That's a double-whammy of bad word-of-mouth. Someday you may have good reason to want this process to go smooth as can be when you hold the hot new product. Possibly from Apple.
- To the degree that this porting of prior numbers thing is the fault of ATT and not the prior carriers, I extend profound apologies to those companies. The popular impression is that they have played games of "well, if we can't continue having your money, you can just wait until we are good and ready to release your number."
ATT Server Thing: With all the hoopla and hype leading up to iDay, ATT still didn't get it, and may never. By climbing in bed with Apple, they thought they could rule the iPhone roost, sit back and have things go along the lines of Business As Usual.
- Ever notice that "Fat Chance" and "Slim Chance" both mean the same thing?
ATT fell down. Hard. They were ill-prepared for the onslaught of new business, transfer business and customers that demanded Apple-like performance from THEM.
- "Hey, cut us some slack. We're not Apple!" they cried. Only to be told, "Yes YOU ARE!!! So get on the stick! I want may iPhone and I want it NOW! Don't give me your corporate ATT BS."
To their credit, they've been responsive. On Sunday, July 15 (07), they went off line to plug in new software for their servers, and when that conversion was finished, the rate of anti-gruntle went down.
The Confusion Thing: Even with all the well-designed pages in the iTunes activation process, it's possible to get confused and hit a stumbling block. The only advice here is to either involve a live human or carefully start the process over, if possible.
- ATT has "office hours" even though you do not. Inevitably, you will wish to speak to a live rep on Sunday or after "office hours." My thought: any credit card company maintains 24/7 contact. ATT: purchase a clue. Anybody holding my SS number hostage MUST be on point every second of the day.
Activation Tales II:
After setting up iPhone 1 on my Family Plan, my wife set up hers. This experience was a clear 10.3 on a scale of 10, with activation taking literally mere seconds. We blinked in amazement as the second phone seamlessly joined in.
It's ALIVE!
Activation follows a two-stage process, the first allowing you to fool around, but not to make calls, join the Edge network and use all the features, yet.
The iPhone becomes alive enough to set up. The first thing you will do is play with the Settings, Ringtones and keyboard. Snap some pix, make some notes and wait for full cell power to come into being.
On full cell capability arriving, the wider range of capabilities opens up. Now you are cooking.
3/19/08: Now you can CREATE your own ringtones in Garage Band. Easy as pie, simple as cake, creative as all geddoudahere.
Tip via David Pogue from a prof he now feels is a Genius: Make a special Silent Ringtone with, say, 10 seconds of no sound ahead of the first audio. Set the iPhone on Vibrate. Now Vibrate is all it does for the first 10 seconds. Then it gets noisy. Great for meetings.
6/9/08: Gen 2 iP on the loose: GPS/New apps/G3 for speedy internet. $199/$299 for 8/16GB.
The iTesters:
My wife and I spend a great deal of time on computers for many reasons, so we have followed the iPhone idea with interest since MacWorld January. She is a tough sell with technology, but the iPhone proved to be a breakthrough.
We assumed it would be Good and hoped it would be Great. Our prior phones had web-ablities, messaging, cameras and so on. 99.99% of their use was as a portable phone. It was nice to have mine sync with my car for hands-free conversations, but that's about as fancy as it got with me.
She decanted hers, and took it all the way through activation with a degree of enthusiasm virtually all other technology has never seen.
Others have documented this phenomenon in iPhone-newbies who historically demonstrated techno-wary, jaded attitudes. Apple has struck more than just a nerve.
iPhonistics:
The iPhone's features are so well coordinated that nothing seems forbiddingly strange or unapproachable. There's a definite feeling of "where has this thing been all my life."
It's clear that the iPhone isn't a cell phone. It's not a camera, either. And it isn't a Web Browser. It's an iPod, all right, but to call it any of these prior categories is to miss the essential truth: It's a New Animal with a personality, brains and a helpful attitude.
We individual humans are limited. We have limited vision, limited understanding and limited shouting volume.
Cell phones let us shout to any other phone from nearly any place we could stand. Digital cameras expanded our vision. Internet connections hand us omnicience and the ability to instantly seek information.
But in our own heads, we are just ourselves, doing this, seeing that, recalling memories and taking actions in a seamless flow of life in which all those attributes are part of the whole person. We don't isolate our own speaking and seeing abilities, but tech devices tend to focus on one idea per gizmo.
The iPhone takes these expansions on our limits and pushes our individual capabilities into a new, coordinated area. It's a whole person. With it, we can now listen for information, shout images and speech, organized our lists and notions in a single appliance, all while standing on the corner of here and there.
Working with the iPhone is more appealing and pleasant than any previous cell phone, pocket PC or organizer. For days or weeks, new users will be blinking in amazement as each new detail emerges.
- The way deleted images crumple and shrink into the waste basket.
- The way the iPod's novel lists, cover flow and features work.
- The way the eMail scrolls and bangs against its limits.
- The way coordinating images into Address Book entries works.
- The sounds and alert tone options.
- Typing with light taps, sliding into letters before a finger lift causes it to print.
The look and feel of iPhone features are designed to make you understand the relationships of things. As a picture is prepared for entry into the Address Book, for instance, you can scale, crop and position it until you like the result. On acceptance, it shrinks visually onto the Address Book page photo area. Some may think that this is eye candy, and no doubt it is sweet, but a more important thing is happening. Visually, you SAW everything happen in sequence. You instantly understand complex ideas as you combine these elements because the visualization of the process is so intuitive and sensible.
The entire Visualization industry is about one thing: Making better intuitive sense of things that can be seen. And the iPhone is the smartest thing I've seen in the Visualization industry. The fact that it's a product for the masses makes the achievement even more stunning.
Unlike prior devices, the iPhone has a multi-track mind. You can listen to the iPod entries and work with Safari, eMail, the camera and Maps at the same time. Not all at once, but anything you dismiss to go to another function is right where you left it when you return. The audio never hiccups. So the iPhone is giving you your own personal background music track while you do other things.
The Vision Thing:
A camera in your pocket is a Good Thing. Having one that takes many, many pictures effortlessly is a Better Thing. Having one that can print images 8 x 10 at museum quality is an Overdone Thing. Suffice to say that the iPhone camera is not overdone. It's a no-zoom snapshooter that makes a basic 1600 x 1200 pixel image exactly 1.92 megapixels large (commonly marketed as a 2-megapixel image).
Image quality is "Adequate." It's fairly sharp, colorful and flexible, streaming easily out of the iPhone into your computer upon docking, and the image contains better detail than you will see on the iPhone screen. While the image is in the iPhone, blowup is limited, showing soft contours on fine detail, but when that same shot is looked at in your computer, it will appear at least 50% sharper. Huh.
Color is vivid, but the contrasty image suffers in shadow detail and is rife with color noise in dark areas. It will shoot under limited lighting conditions, but expect gritty results. Outdoor sunlight images are about two clicks too contrasty to be called Good. Highlights bleach out and dark shadows block up. Correcting these flaws in Photoshop is possible, but dicey. Shadow lifts cause color noise to appear and there is no such thing as de-bleaching blown highlights.
Prints from iPhone shots will best be limited to 4 x 6 inches (100 x 150mm) and since there is no removable media, getting them out of the iPhone and into your local photo printing service is less than simple, smooth and/or convenient.
The lens port is close to the surface of the back of the iPhone, and although it is small, it WILL be grasped by fingers and the recess to the top layer of the lens is insufficient to hold back finger prints. Any finger contact will instantly add a "fog effect" to subsequent shots. The shallow mount also allows easy cleaning with a soft cloth, such as the one that came in the iPhone box. For best cleaning, dampen a Q-tip with a whiff of lens cleaner or eyeglass cleaner and swirl away the print.
Triggering the camera is through a finger tip button zone on the image screen. Delay is about 1/2 second, so decisive moment photography is not it's forte.
- Note to Apple: That volume rocker on the left side of the phone could become a shutter release when the camera is alive, ready to trip the shot. Who needs to adjust Ringer Volume in the middle of taking a picture? Nobody. So use the control as a more convenient shutter release. Punching the screen with a finger tip to take the shot is a lousy way to maintain camera body stability. Squeezing off a shot with the rocker switch makes MUCH more sense.
Nearest focus is about a foot away. I want closer.
In all, the camera is ...um... basic. The photo-handling options after you shoot are similarly ...um... basic. You can delete photos one at a time, but that gets old real fast. No facility seems to exist for deleting a whole folder of shots at once.
The internal Slide Show has some nice features. Watery, "ripple" dissolves can be used for transitions along with a few other options but no ability to re-order, hide or crop images for slide shows exists.
It seems that the software engineers that tackled the camera were not thinking as broadly as they might. Let's hope future cameras, processing and editing gets more attention to detail.
Still, it's handy to have a modest quality shooter in my pocket. We can wish for video and higher image qualities, but I've already gotten more shots out of the iPhone in a few days than in years of hauling around my previously camera-equipped cell phone. Which means that in my experience, this phone wins on points even though it is ...um... basic in so many particulars.
Panoramic Tip:
There's a right way to hold the iPhone to take panoramic, stitched images. You'll need Photoshop Elements or Big Photoshop (look for the Photomerge feature), or some other panoramic stitching utility to complete the idea, but The Grip is key for shooting.
Four horizontal shots, hand-held. Plus iNovaFX Photoshop Action "iPMCylinderEdge4" to clean up the edges.
The original image is just over 4000 pixels wide. A little hand retouch was needed to reveal the entire figure.
Time to take the entire series: About 11 seconds.
Grab the phone for a vertical shot with your index finger on the top and thumb directly under it. Vertical or horizontal, right-handed or left. This creates a pivot axis straight down through the camera lens. Image orientation will be sorted out later. The iPhone has no dedicated "up" except gravity.
Shoot image number one with a tap from a spare finger. Pivot the iPhone until whatever detail was on the edge of the shot becomes dead center. You've just moved it 1/2 picture left or right.
You can pivot to the opposite side the same way, or shoot a string of shots left or right of your starting place. Just make sure you keep your pivot-grip steady and don't switch off buttons as you work. The goal is to spin the lens around the same imaginary axis, thus avoiding parallax (lens offset in panning).
Five vertical shots, hand-held with no support. iPMCylinderEdge5 iNovaFX Action to tidy the edges.
The original was about 3650 pixels wide. No retouching.
No, the exposures won't be identical. PS CS3's Photomerge feature doesn't care. It figures all that stuff out automatically.
Funny how the 2MP image can become 10MP this way.
The Cylindrical option in Photomerge is my fave.*
*Here, I have used a special iNovaFX Action that cleans up the curvy edges of the Cylindrical image that Photoshop's Photomerge creates when left to its own devices. Photoshop assumes you will crop your shot out of the ragged-edged image it leaves in its wake. Those of you who know Photomerge CS3 will appreciate this. We filed down an extremely saw-toothed edge to make the full assembly more presentation worthy. When you get your hands on this Action series, you will find all sorts of neat things to do with it.
But you can't have it yet.This iNovaFX Action is in the coming Lights...Digital Camera...Actions! eBook which will be available on its own dedicated USB Thumb Drive
this winterright NOW!
SIM City:
iPhone v 1.0 exists pretty much in the naked open. Using its Wi-Fi in a Starbucks (or any open network) poses a possible security risk. That guy in the corner could be reading your eMail and certain passwords.
Today, its security features are basic and unsophisticated. For high-security use, it's not ready for prime time.
Yet. (3/19/08: Indeed. iPhone 2.0 solves this. Security features, control of any malware, ability to erase vital contents if stolen—Apple had all of this in mind before day one, and now the map to all that is out in the world.)
Pentagon, FBI, NSA, CIA and Justice Department officials should be slow to adopt it. Presumably Homeland Security already has zillions of them already active in Starbucks everywhere. But that's them.
One can easily invoke a pass-code to unlock the iPhone. It's faster to unlock than any previous four number-key PIN scheme I've seen, but on average, a stolen phone can be cracked in 5000 number tries (half the 10,000 combo range).
- For perspective, if the iPhone were completely cooperative, the average 5000 cracking tries at about 5 seconds per try would have eaten only around 6.9 hours of non-stop effort. And the thief would have needed to invest heavily in coffee to break the PIN. But iPhone pulls a delaying tactic. After five incorrect tries, it demands that you wait a minute before trying again.
If the very next entry is still wrong, it demands a 5-minute wait. Now trying to hack into its PIN has expanded to at least a month-long effort (5 minutes x 4994 remaining untried numbers [on average] will take around 420 hours, not including breaks and sleep).Camera images are immediately available to being sent in eMails. The iPhone formats a page with photo attached, meaning you need only supply a destination address and pithy comment, and a button press sends the illustrated eMail.
Since the iPhone v 1.0 is light on its security features, the Mac community has been at work seeking remedies. They have more of a vested interest in iPhones than the PC troops, but findings already benefit both. Check out this MacWorld article for initial clues into the evolving security options, frustrations and aspirations.
Presumably, either Apple-instigated or third-party instigated solutions will flow and security issues for transacting data wirelessly will fade. Stay tuned.
Bugs:
Stop It:
Here's the biggest, most basic flopper I could find: The Stopwatch is screwed up in its premise. My old adage is, "when the premise is kerfluft, the whole thing is kerfluft." I cleaned that up. Thus it is with the Stopwatch. Fortunately, this is such an outside-of-essential feature that its screwed-uppedness is not crippling in the least.
You can start it, hit the Lap button and get a string of Lap times (0.1 second accuracy only), but when you stop it, you just produce one more Lap time. HEY!!! WTF*, over!!! Where did the total time go? I wanted to time the WHOLE RACE, too!
Alas, it's not there. In order to see how long the whole time was, you would have to manually total up all the laps. No final duration of your process is tracked and reported at all.
Every other stopwatch in the world lets you see the lap time(s) and total time of stopwatch operation, but you can't do this with the iPhone Stopwatch.
I hope they fix this with some sort of update. They did not! I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs hasn't played with the split lap timing on his iPhone yet. Why would he? But when he does, eyes will roll. At least that's better than heads.
3/19/08: Maybe in 2.0?
*WTF in our parlance is "What the Fridge..." calling into question the relative coolness of an idea.
iPod iNsects:
Certain of my own music files do NOT play at all in the iPod functions. Most ACC files do fine, but some are not cooperating at all for mysterious, unclear reasons.
- This is with music I created initially as naked AIFF files, converted in iTunes to ACCs, so it's not a DRM thing. I'll add details here if I find a work-around.
- De-syncing and re-syncing fixed most of the errant files. Somehow it is possible to load in iPod material and not have it behave.
- Several podcast videos fail to show, playing audio only, and no remedy has yet been found.
- Seems fixed now. What was that?
Who Needs It?:
At my home, it's value is diminished. After all, a bigger computer, more capable eMail system, faster Internet and more talented range of programs awaits my touch.
But as soon as I step outside, the iPhone brings life. I was looking for a Radio Shack to find an adapter for the iPhone (knowing that whatever I found would have to be surgically altered to fit the headphone jack) and the Maps function came to the rescue. Search: Radio Shack, and a shower of pins sprinkled my map.
- The adapter that worked turned out to be a $12US Accurian in-line volume control headphone adapter. Trimming its plug to fit the iPhone with an Xacto knife was delicate, but relatively easy. Its 4-foot (1.1m) cord stays rolled up, most of the time, but it adapts my Sony Studio Headphones (MDR 600s) to the iPhone for breathtaking audio.
The people who are going to get the most out of an iPhone are generally moving around a lot, connecting with others by eMail and phone throughout the day. My world depends heavily on contacts by eMail and phone, but my writing confines me to laptop or desktop. Writing on an iPhone is not for the long form-oriented.
3/19/08: Apparently the Grand Vision of this thing is sinking in at a grass-roots level. It's not a Phone. It's the i part that is the Big Deal. Something like 70% of all mobile Internet traffic is coming via iPhone users. Not Palm, Blackberry, Nokia, Ericson or others. And now the iPhone is more than about 30% of the new phone sales, too.
Limits and Negatives:
The earphone jack is intentionally narrower than those that fit prior devices. This is probably to limit the items that plug into it to those which pass ear and microphone standards.
Some suggest that the fact it doesn't fit most 1/8'' stereo plugs is a boneheaded move. I think not for two reasons:
- A hole in the iPhone case that would have fit the prior headphone jacks would be too big, too nasty and too uncool.
- They couldn't sell you a new accessory if your old ones fit.
Most stereo plugs can be surgically trimmed to fit, and Apple adapters are available to let your earphones listen to the iPod. Apple's ear buds are a tad better than the ones that came with my previous iPods, and the in-line mic and switch are appreciated.
Several things are missing from the iPhone that you and I will want in iPhone 1.5-3.0.
- Live, moving video. iGaggle (video phone on the go, see the first page of this).
- Faster non-Wi-Fi internet access. Or producer pages like this one that read well on the thing without heavy image burdens.
- Better camera image quality.
- iPod bugs removed. (Seems better now than in 1.0.)
Some have complained that it doesn't let you change out the battery. True enough, but you can power the iPhone from any power accessory designed for iPods, including $30 batteries, car power adapters and USB data cords.
One thing it doesn't do: iPod functions don't feed audio out to previous versions of car FM transmitters that connect by the wide docking plug. If you have a car version that supplies power to an iPod, it will charge the iPhone, but not listen to it. Audio out must be from the headphone jack. Cleverly the iPhone detects the incompatible device and tells you that "It wasn't designed for iPhone."
Oh, and another thing it doesn't do: Doesn't work with the iPod FM tuner. Grm.
Email Intrusions:
A weak area is eMail. The iPhone has no spam filter, so every Russian, Japanese, Canadian Drug, Body Part Enhancer, Weight Reducer, Lonely 23 yr. old bored girl, mortgage broker, bogus eBay account manager, phisher, Nigerian prince, and scammer will be in your in-box.
Deleting a file is simplified, but weeding is tedious.
So my mac.com account is all I track with iPhone eMail.
Concludings:
If you don't get one now, you just may, later. The future will reveal V3, V4... V10 and so on. This is just the beginning, but Apple has shown in one mighty stroke that
- A: It's the OS, Bubba. Not just a pile of uncoordinated features.
- B. Visualization counts. Anything that shows a relationship helps the user understand what just occurred.
- C. Most of the world has stared this collection of problems in the face for over a decade without getting even close to Apple's first attempt.
- D. The look-alikes, rip offs and fakes are already happening.
- E. The competition looks pretty limp.
- F. iPhone Gen 2 is faster, better, cheaper, smarter and more biz aware.
They can improve on this, but geez, it's an A+++ already -- just like its packaging -- compared to the previous products that have pretended into these fields.
Sure, other phones do the Web. Sure, others have better cameras and video. Sure, others have tactile keyboards. Sure, others have GPS. Sure, others cost less, but not one of the competing portable devices bring so much to your fingertips in ways that will be constantly employed, experienced and enjoyed.
Where other products give you a bunch of "things" in their softwares, Apple has given us a single thing with many related talents.
The OS X Future:
Hopefully, many of the features, behaviors and visualization tricks in the iPhone MUST show up in the coming OS X Leopard. I've gotten so used to the inertial scrolling and easy sizing/framing of images that a Leopard without these would seem like a step back.
6/9/08 As D'Pogue has commented, there are now three world-class (possibly four) development platforms out there: Windows, OS X and iPhone (and possibly, Linux).
Open note to Apple: Ahem! Where's the pocket videophone we promised ourselves?:
