This is Just Plain Nuts

I shouldn’t give this guy more airtime than he deserves. But give this a read:

Apple iPhone Doomed To Failure

He tells you it’s doomed, but I never really see him explain exactly why. Because it’s Microsoft? I don’t think so. Wasn’t Vista supposed to take over the world? What happened there? I can’t tell you the number of meetings where directors or VPs would ask us “how are we going to deal with Vista?”. They did this because they believed the media, not to mention they just were kind of knee-jerk reactionaries. In the end, it wasn’t much of anything to worry about. Don’t get me wrong, I like Vista much better compared to XP, but it certainly didn’t have the impact Microsoft was hoping for.

It seems to me that while Microsoft is definitely getting better at their UI, they never quite match the level of quality that Apple puts out. Take a look at the Windows Mobile 7 info and mocks here It doesn’t look too bad actually, but some screens are still too cluttered. In general, with Microsoft designs, they look good at first, but they wear on you quickly. For whatever reason, Apple’s designs tend to stay attractive for a lot longer. And user interaction on Apple products is always consistently better as well.

Apple also has such a lasting effect on the markets it enters these days, and some it doesn’t. Remember when the iMac came out? So many copycat machines and designs were influenced by it. Not just computers, but everything: wastebaskets, etc. Everything starting coming in tons of colors. Then the iPod arrived which really took off when the store came into being (again, Apple was the first to even try selling music online) and now the iPhone. Already LG has to tout a touchsreen that looks remarkably like the iPhone. I’m sure they started on that the second Apple announced. The point though is that Apple changes the game with many of the things they do. For example, the iPhone has visual voice mail. The most amazing thing about that fact to me is that they managed to make AT&T budge. Wow. Meanwhile, the rest of the word is still pressing 7 to delete. Enjoy. ¹

The point is, now that the iPhone is out, the bar is raised: people are now going to expect phones to be that cool and slick to use. Anything else is just kind of ordinary at this point. I bought and played with a Nokia N95 recently, and while it was feature-rich (some features put the iPhone to shame), it just wasn’t very pleasant to work with from a UI perspective. I just sold it on eBay because it just felt like a step backwards in ease-of-use.

While the first article I linked to sounds like an Apple-hater, I might be sounding like an Apple-lover. That might be partially true, but there are plenty of things I don’t like about the iPhone, or wish it had. It’s just that for my usage the positives far outweigh the negatives.

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1. Oh, and the visual interface that’s on the Treo 700w for voicemail is just graphics buttons for the touch tones. So you’re still pressing 7! ↩

Issues in 1.1.3 iPhone Update?

Since downloading 1.1.3 for my iPhone the second the servers came back on release day, my phone has been experiencing some oddness. In particular it really seems like there’s some sort of memory corruption issue going on. I say that because I’ve experienced the following in the past few days:

• The button to hang up a call was completely missing after one phone call. It was as if the image resource couldn’t be loaded.
• The Edge symbol was a solid white square once
• I tried to click the arrow next to someone’s name on the recent calls list and it wouldn’t respond. I then noticed that the lock icon was displayed at the top of my screen. I tried to lock and unlock the phone, but it was stuck for a while. Finally it came back.
• Today my phone rang but the screen was black. The home and top buttons did nothing.

This is certainly all odd behavior and it sounds like something might have broken. 1.1.2 was running fine for me.

I need to stop the complaining

Since my last eBay post, I’ve finally found an option which seems to stop most of the bad people from being able to bid on my items. Since then I’ve been able to sell 3 or 4 things without incident (including my camera). I’ve also noticed they’ve created a new streamlined version of their seller form, which is a welcome addition. Of course, I still needed to use the older form so I could make sure those options I just mentioned were set. The issue with simpler interfaces is you never know what the default settings are going to be.

But in general, I’ve looked back at my blog and found a few posts of me just complaining about whatever corporate entity was ticking me off at the moment. I’m going to stop that (even though they are bastards :-P) and start just posting normal, hopefully helpful blog entries. I’ve always said I’d like to post simple code snippets and helpful factoids like that. Time to start. Um, soon.