Many products induce love/hate feelings. On the one hand, you love the product and cannot imagine being without it. On the other hand, its limitations and idiosyncrasies drive you crazy.
Here is my love/hate list for the iPhone after using it for a month:
| Love | Hate |
|---|---|
| that the iPhone is leap forward as a mobile computer, an amazing multi-purpose communicator, information appliance and PDA | It’s a step backwards as phone, with garbled phone quality, dropouts, poor battery life with no swappable battery. |
| the low price of the device | the high price of the service |
| being able to gobble megabytes of data without extra charge | being charged even more text messages (about $1310 per megabyte) |
| the sleek form factor | that the sleek form factor comes at the expense of a small battery, exacerbated by there being no official way to extend it on those long days away from the grid. |
| no physical keyboard option
the thought that Apple’s/Jobs’s legendary obstinacy will put it off indefinitely, despite clear need and clear demand. |
|
| the cute little charger | having to diligently plug it in every night |
| the app store, which is letting a thousand high quality flowers bloom | Apple’s self-serving restrictions on what apps vendors may create. No VoIP or tethering (i.e. sharing data with a laptop) No extensible app frameworks. |
| GPS and Google Maps | to turn-by-turn GPS apps unless controlled by Apple. The thought that it’ll proably be a subscription service.
(and the lauded Google Maps UI is pretty quirky.) |
| the marvelous touchscreen, and flexible touchscreen-based UI | the resulting modality and extra steps it takes to do the most frequent operations |
| the beautiful UI |
the very frequent crashes. |
| the high-speed processor | the sluggish performance. (With this grade of CPU, launching the core apps should be instantaneous, and typing should be lag-free.) |
| being able to leave my trusty Palm PDA behind. | having to leave the wonderfully streamlined Palm UI behind.
the painfully inefficiency of the iPhone’s calendar and contact manager. |
| Being able to leave my casual-use camera behind | not being able to leave the Flip behind. |
| Very good web browsing experience for a hand-held | no Flash support. (Yet.) (Even my Chumby does Flash) |
iPhone Behavior love/hate list
| Love | Hate |
|---|---|
| it switches between WiFi, 3G and EDGE networks seamlessly | It’s not actually seamless. WiFi gets caught on café networks that look like they are open but which in fact require login. That restoring data access requires a laborious process to disable WiFi.
when you return to base, you have to remember to manually switch WiFi on again. |
| Perfect synchrony with my calendar and all 2,500 contact records. | having to connect the iPhone to sync to my laptop, when they’re on the same WiFi network.
the thought that WiFi synching may never happen, since it reduces the need for MobileMe. |
| Being able to snap a photo and email it to anyone instantly. Awesome for sharing experiences. | It’s slow, and it often crashes. |
| The pristine quality of video | The very limited number of video formats supported.
That Apple may never support the others since it conflicts with their QuickTime plans. |
| The wiggly animation when you are rearranging icons in the launcher | the built-in game known as the app launcher. See if you can get the icon where you want while leaving the others where they are!
(Moving one icon rearranges all the subsequent ones, making getting things where you want like a game of whack-a-mole. So much for spatial permanence and getting used to where familiar icons are. (Design to steal: when dragging and dropping icons, only move the icon in the destination slot, not all of them. Also: let the user have gaps in the layout if they want.) |
| Countless clever, creative innovations in the UI | having to flick through a long list or web page. Although a scroll elevator appears momentarily when you flick, but doesn’t let you drag it. Doing it over and over in public makes me feel like a flicking idiot. |
| the finicky, error-inducing slot machine spinner UI. (grrr. Less cool, more usability please.) | |
| having to use two hands to do tasks which on the Palm or Blackberry take one. Having to free up a hand to use two fingers to pinch to zoom. | |
| Sometimes the button to “accept and go back” is in the top-right corner, sometimes it’s on the top left. You have to stay on your toes. | |
| If it times out and goes to sleep when you are reading something, you still need to swipe to reawaken the device and continue where you were. There should be a grace period here where for 15 seconds or so, powering back on requires no swipe. | |
| The slide to unlock is too finicky and is difficult to do with one hand, sometimes requiring three or four tries.
(Shouldn’t double-pressing the home button, which is already recessed against inadvertent presses in the pocket, should suffice.) |
|
| Gratuitous up-front animation when applications launch and close, that only reduces the user’s throughput. (See: UI Friction) | |
| Threaded IM chats | No indication of number of characters left in the message being typed.
No indication of the number of messages left on my monthly plan. |
| Being able to plug the iPhone and run the free Pandora app for hours when company is visiting | (nothing but love for these great apps) |
| Being able to connect with friends on Facebook when I’m away from my computer and actually have time to do it. | |
| Being able to efficiently catch up on RSS feeds with the amazingly responsive NetNewsWire | |
| The world’s knowledge in my pocket (aka. free Wikipedia app) | |
| Visual voicemail | Not noticing that I missed a message, because it doesn’t blink at me like every other phone. |
| best onscreen keyboard yet is about 80% as good as a physical keyboard. | doesn’t let you undo its suggestions once you implicitly affirm them by continuing on to the next word
(design to steal: let the user tap erroneous words and show suggestions including what was actually typed) |
| SMS messages pop up over whatever else is going on, with the full message. Nice! | SMS messages you dismiss continue to show as unread. You have to go to the SMS app to clear them. (In contrast, alarms let you clear them from the alerts themselves.) |
Both my love and hate lists are pretty long. But overall, I love my iPhone, and I’m not going back. No, you may not have mine. Get your own.
What is on your iPhone love/hate list?
Link to this article at: http://StealThisIdea.com/articles/iphone-love-hate/
See related article: The 1995 Palm calendar creams the 2008 iPhone’s
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Philip Haine is product vision specialist and product designer in San Francisco. He founded Obvious Design, LLC in 1997. He’s used Macs continuously since 1984 and the iPhone since August 2007.
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