Lost in phone, or another opportunity for iOS 7

Let me confess, I have been using Apple iPhone since 2008.
Back in 2010, my phone was stolen. A month later, we were moving to Australia and I did not buy a new one.

I have been using a Nokia phone for a year, it was a Symbian one.
Interestingly, I did not miss the iPhone. I was on the lookout for something new, something better.
It happened to be an hp pre3 powered by [ex Palm's] webOS operating system. But that's another story.

I tried to understand why I did not miss the iPhone, after all, I was a Mac user since 2001.
And I think I can explain why, at least to myself.

There are things in iPhone experience that simply make you bored.
The same old grid of same old icons, mostly static. Onerous App Switching functionality.

But now I also see things that actually enrage me, even if they used to do it subconsciously.

Let us talk about one.

Phones are many things to us now, but for me, they still must serve well as PHONES.

It seems that iPhone fell short on this, even compared to my first smartphone that I bought in 2004, the absolute flagman of the years and everything before the iPhone - Sony Ericsson P910i.

Consider unlocking your iPhone, you will see Phone and Contacts icons.
Inside the Phone icon, you will see Contacts tab.
Along the Phone app tabs, you will see "Favorites", "Recents", "Contacts".
As well as "Contacts" outside of the phone app, on the dock.
"Recents" tab is split in "All" and "Missed" categories.
Can you still follow me? :)

Guess what? THERE IS NO PEOPLE PHOTOS, NO USERPICS not in any of these multiple tabs. Huh?
All four tabs I have listed, have no people faces on them. Not even in Favorites!
To see a picture, you need to drill down to a particular contact! This is in 2013.

Many times we are trying to catch up with people on the go, while walking, some [unwise folks] even when driving.
No pictures does not help at all!
What is even worse, is getting stuck in "Recents"-"Missed" and trying to dial a number who you just talked to and said "I'll call you in a minute".

This is because Phone app remembers where you were last time, making navigation to where you want to be this time a process that takes more brain cells to coordinate their work, distracting from other things you're trying to do (unless you're sitting on a sofa playing the phone).

I took out my old SonyEricsson and checked the Phone application.

Always takes you to Favorites that have faces on them. Two-touch calls to Favorites are possible from wherever I am.


On the iPhone, if your favorite people are calling you then your Recents will look much like Favorites, but sometimes sans the guy you want to talk to now. Same-looking text in both tabs, no pictures. Frustration. No wonder they need Siri to help.

Finding yourself switching to less-often used tabs like Dialpad is OK.
Having to switch out of that rarely used functionality is not.

Another source of confusion is the double Contacts functionality.
Since there are two of the Contacts tab, and each remembers its own position, you will have to re-find (find again) the user that you have focused on, should you go to the "wrong" Contacts tab.

It took me some time to realize that in order to send an email, I have to touch the actual email address instead of reading all the button labels below in vain search for "Email" button, then trying to figure out whether "Send Message" button meant "email message".

There's simply not enough visual cues. Have a look at how it was done in the SonyEricsson.

One more thing about my ancient but greatly usable phone.
It seems to be the only 3rd party phone that Apple has written software for.


No kidding, Apple programmed for Symbian UIQ 2.1. Steve must have cared enough.

Here's a proof.

The iSync agent worked hand-in-hand with iSync Apple app for MacOS, making sure that bluetooth synchronization of Calendar, Contacts and such was impeccable. And it was, unlike my Nokia PC Suite experience.





Overall, with a couple of tweaks I hope that Apple will resolve these issues in upcoming iOS 7 - they just need more of that "attention to detail".
But maybe not - it does not seem to be about phone calls anymore...at least, this is not Apple's business.
Or is it?

New [i]MacOS X 10.7 Lion

Microsoft failed, when they tried to bring Windows Desktop to Mobile devices.

Will Apple succeed in bringing the iPhone [in]experience to Macs?

Is this the end of Desktop Paradigm as we know it, that was initially developed by Xerox @PARC, and later went into the backbone of Mac's success, thanks to Steve Job's genius vision and stamina?

The biggest "switch" is about to come.

Will iOS 4.2 fix slow iPhones 3G ?

In his latest keynote, 20-Oct-2010, Steve Jobs mentioned new upcoming firmware update of iOS to v4.2 which is expected to fix slow operation and occasional delays in UI of iPhone 3G with current iOS 4.x.

If that happens, that would be a major difference to an average vendor behavior -
everyone is so interested in selling the latest models and there's little impetus to help and improve speed of models two generations old.

Could this say that Apple simply cannot keep up with demand for iPhone 4 and decided to try and keep existing iPhone users happy, in the meanwhile?

In fact, here a good tip for the struggling iOS 4.x/iPhone 3G users out there:
1. Sync up with iTunes. Make sure a backup it taken.
2. From the Settings menu, do a hard reset, destroying all data.
3. Connect to iTunes and restore the backup. (Read help in iTunes on how to do that)

I did it last summer and boy it helped!
And then they stole my iPhone...

NB: iOS 4 seems to be picky about fragmented filesystem on iPhone 3G.
It could also be that verion 3 of "OS X" did much better around some flash system quirks. Anyway, a reformat helps tremendously. Especially if you don't load the whole lot of Apps back into your phone...
I think most of iApps out there are just fart.
After year of playing, I don't need more than 6-8 of them.

By the way, why is Cisco so quiet about IOS trademark infringement? Has Apple given each Cisco employee an iPhone? :)

Apple iPhone 4 "antennagate"

It's just brouhaha, fed by opponents.

It does not matter how many decibels we receive, what affects the call quality is SNR (signal-to-noise ratio).

Despite being at one bar, one could very well be able to make quality calls from a sensitive and well-designed radio module like iPhone 4's.

And - yes - they fixed the bar display with firmware 4.0.1.

iPhone 4G found

I like what I see and I wish they will not re-hash the design just to be original at the intro. I hope Steve jobs will not lose much hair due to the incident.

The new iPhone looks less curved, more metallic, is thinner, has front camera (better be using the new videocall codec I've aspired for!) and ... the style reminds me of a great NOKIA phone, E72.

I am skipping 3GS, going straight for 4G. You?

PS. Cheers to the German beer!

Apple IS going towards video calling, after all!

Exactly as I envisioned 8 months ago, Apple seems to be moving towards a new and worthy accomplishment - getting bloody unfortunate heretofore Video Calling to the masses.

There are news spread around, and for me - that's rigid proof enough.

It would be nice if they expand some 3GPP standards, in part of video codecs - and open those for everybody else.
Such move would give more installed base of "new" video callers, and more chances to "connect people", bringing benefits to CSP.

Knowing Apple's business tactics, though, I find it highly unlikely that they release such feature to non-Apple users.
Most likely only iPad/iPhone users will be able to visually connect with those new features.
Selling more Apple devices is of course more important than "unduly taxing" CSP network.
Apple's got to know by now - they don't like it!

We're about to watch enrollment of a "new" killer app for 3G, folks!
I told you there were only two major ones, and this one was woefully amiss from the great platform.

6 things I will still miss in iPhone 3GS

1/ syncing over wifi (or bluetooth)
2/ video call
3/ haptics
4/ themes
5/ USB storage mode
6/ flash support

I will miss those, but (!) I will enjoy the rest!

Ah, and MMS support is quite lousy in 3.0... Just an attachment (no background color, no text formatting, no multi-page animations, no sound attachments). A half-hearted attempt, driven by mass-bickering more than belief...

What's next for iPhone?

I have been watching Steve Jobs giving iPhone lauch Keynote 2007 and it just struck me - he was talking about Visual VoiceMail as "just an example" of "what's coming", and he assured the public that "this is just a first fruit" of cooperation between Apple Inc. and AT&T. He underscored that point, obviously it was important for him.

"The innovative Visual Voicemail feature lets you view all your voicemail messages at once, then listen to them in the order you prefer. Use the Play/Pause button to control playback of your voice messages. The scrubber bar even lets you replay portions of a message you find hard to understand"

In fact, the telecom industry, as a whole, has not been fast to adopt IT-led innovations, and Visual VoiceMail is not an exclusion from that.

(Reality Check: Of those coutries where iPhone is sold, how many have VVM now?)

It does not take much observation power to see that user services innovation rate is much slower in telecom than it is in IT. This only adds to user's attachment to the Intenet and aversion to mobile operator "innovations".

Nokia takes on that with it's Ovi services suite. But Ovi is completely IP-based.

Is there a space for innovation of telecom-based services?
Will Apple take lead in that?

As if that "left hook" from Apple's honcho was not enough, there was a second hidden punch, an uppercut done by Cingular's chief Stan Sigman who went on stage and, incidentally, talked on the same subject - how Apple innovated [their sleepy] telecom kingdom.
At about 6:30 down the show he talks about partnerships with Apple, and at 7:35 he mentions VisualVoiceMail, ominously uttering "and I promise - you'll see more of that coming down the road".

Now, hold on. WHAT could they mean?

Well, I have an idea.
It seems so that right now we are in need of "3G saviour", a killer app which would be the differentiator, a watershed, between old-style 2G networks and the new ones, "innovated and reinvigorated with some help of Apple Inc."
Of course, I hear you say, internet via 3G is so much faster!
Well, but WiFi on a 2G handset can give you better speed, not to talk of a wired computer.

And what about VideoCalls? "Yuck!", you'd say, "who needs those?"

Well, sure, like nobody "needed" internet on a handset before iPhone.
Remember, when there's no market, there's opportunity to create one - exactly Apple's business.

I'm very sure that further innovations in mobile networks must focus on this single feature - mobile video call.

First of all, video quality must be improved.
Current 3GPP codecs were developed during the 90s era - they are just pure crap by modern merits, even when compared to YouTube's FLV (Flash Video) compression.
Ripping and replacing them for H.264 or some proper codec would be the first great step to improve usage rate.
Of course, next comes into play the high usability of iPhone user interface.

If it's easy to use and the quality/price is great - people will use it.

Why would you not make a "killer app" (and a cash-cow) out of that?
iPhone could do it to mobile internet usage, it can do the same revenue increase with proper use of video calls.

It also takes some consideration to notice that video calls are of greater use to long-distance (like Paris/Rome tourists calling Moscow home) and business users (telecommuting, making it a corp policy to call workers with video).
While the former group makes it harder to implement (all CSPs must be capable to handle the new H.264 codecs), the latter group is much easier to harness (as was demonstrated by the Windows gang) - they are policy-driven. And policies are centralized...

Next gen iPhone would need a separate frontal camera for video call.
I was surprised when I did not see videocall demo by Steve at Keynote 2008, along with launch of iPhone 3G. There must be more to do, to be ready for such massive roll-out. New standards, RAN upgrades, new mobile phones...

Could this happen this year? Probably not, "thanks" to reduced budgets for innovations, worldwide.
But I secretly hope it's still in the iPhone's+AT&T roadmap.
Maybe LTE version?

Apple almost halves iPhone 3G production plans

Just a quick passing comment - let me speculate about the reasons behind
a slower sales of the Apple iPhone 3G.

1. Financial Crisis, of course.

On a more user-centric perspective:

2. Can it do video calls?
Steve did not include that functionality in his use cases demo. This does not create enough upgrade incentive for 2G users.

3. Still no MMS, no video recording.
This does not create enough upgrade incentive for 2G users.

4. No modem capability out-of-box.
This does not create enough upgrade incentive for 2G users.

All the value added in the new iPhone 3G was a higher speed, at the price of a faster battery discharge.

No wonder it does not go as far as expected.

I personally thought that iPhone 3G will be a revolution, at least a huge stimulus for 3G UTRAN usage, but, having omitted utterly important use cases (videocall, modem) Apple did not become the "3G Saviour"; neither they have stimulated existing iPhone users to upgrade, nor attracted enough of those people in the smartphone market, who were "sitting on a fence".

What will change tomorrow?

Today at 10am PST Steve Jobs will give a keynote at WWDC 2008 in San Francisco, USA.
Many people wrote about what products will probably be introduced.
I don't want to repeat that, let's try to imagine how (and if) the world will change, which triggers Mr. Jobs will pull again, like most every keynote.

Back in 1985 it was the Macintosh, starting the Era of "very human technology", with intuitive user interfaces and analogue control (via mouse). The all-in-one, take-anywhere design of computers.

If you remember 1997 - the introduction of the original iMac - you will understand that then it was the dawning of USB Era, the floppyless Era.

In 1999 the PowerMac Cube was introduced, thus "igniting" (Apple's own words) the Era Of The Compact Desktop Computers.
It seemed not very important back then, but we still see the continuity of that Era, even in other vendor's products.

What will be different this time? How today will change the world (OK, maybe just some markets, not the World? :)

One major change - 3G Mobile.
Yes, you could say Apple is "late to the party", full of other vendors and solutions.
But ask yourself and ask people - how much do we use 3G? How many people are really aware of the advantages?

Not really many, I witnessed. Besides the usual "internet is faster" there's not many people (in percent of the total mobile market) who get excited when they hear "3G". You hear? "The Internet is faster"...sounds like epitome to the TelCo World.

It's no surprise that many have tried, but still 3G is getting pretty low traction.
With iPhones, there'll be change.

Update: just noticed a post at here
There in comments I tried to analyze what's missing (I made a type in my name heh),
and there goes my explanation why Mr.Jobs spent so much on his flights last quarter...

iPhone user experience comments

iGot iPhone :)
And so I spent some time figuring out if there are some blunders in it's UI.
There were none. Good job Apple!
There are some functionalities missing, such as MMS or on-the-go media management, but I believe they are dropped by intent, to execute along a clear strategy.
Mac now is the digital hub. ("Oh, sorry PC, you too!")



The only obvious point I would improve is in the Mail client:
- if you happen to have many mailbox accounts (as you can see, I have three), you must go to each other Inbox separately, because the e-mail does not aggregate them into one place like Apple Mail on Mac does.
And so it takes 10 taps just to look into headers in all three mailboxes. This would be reduced to 2 taps if Apple chose to accept the Apple Mail's approach. Maybe this will be fixed soon, in the iPhone Firmware update 1.1.1.







<--- iPhone Mail









That's how Apple mail aggregates mailboxes --->


Another thing I noticed is that there's no task switcher aside from the Home Button, that would take you to the main program menu. Although this initially feels as a drawback, this way the user has only one way to start a program, and the icons are always fixed in the same places, which decreases time-to-launch for every program as the user becomes acquainted to their location on screen.


There are some 3rd party utilities that allow you to have alternative task switcher (SummerBoard). You press in the lower right corner and drag to the centre some analog of "Sun wheel" whith all the programs sitting on it's "rays". The further you drag, the bigger the icons. Moving along the circle selects the program icon.
There appears a separate button for lauching the selected application.
Quite innovative, but clunky and requires to use both hands for a faily basic task.



It happened so that Apple products had never had lack of style.
And this one is not an exception. The company has a track of setting trends for few industries already. All-in-one, translucent colors, USB, floppy-less, IEEE1394, OOP, media management and distribution, now cellphones...They are the true creative power, and have the guts to follow their vision, through the years.
To be competitive, just market share is not enough. One has to be as bold and creative as Apple, not just foresee the Future, but create it. And they made it.
Now the multi-touch UI is Present.

So if you are in UI field, or "just browsing", by all means check out this new level of usability.
I also welcome your comments.