I watched this video from Reuters via the Herald showing a tech commentator demoing the iPhone. Watched is the operative word – I don’t have sound on my laptop at the moment (can you believe…) so admittedly I have no idea whether he was saying “this is really cool” or “this is a bit naff.” Anyway it seemed to me that a lot of his button presses on the touch screen missed and he had to do them again. I had wondered about that because I’ve noticed that on touch screens I’ve used: they can’t react to absolutely everything or they’d react when you place the device down or wave it around, so it seems you have to press harder than is intuitive.
Also I noticed he seemed to flip his iPhone back and forth between landscape and portrait mode a lot. Because of the no-sound situation, I couldn’t tell if he was just fiddling or actually having to do that, but now that I read this it appears the landscape mode isn’t totally seamless – sure it looks groovy when the image automatically redraws when you change orientation, but the keyboard isn’t there. Terrific.
As I already have a phone which has an MP3 player, web browser, video player and still/video camera, there doesn’t seem to be any cause for me to be getting an iPhone any time soon. Appleites will say “the interface, the interface, the interface” but frankly, if it’s only half done, you can keep it.
And that’s what I find every time I dip my toe into the Apple pool. I dislike the Safari browser too. And as for iTunes, don’t get me started. They seem to take out all the complicated interesting bits, and leave you with the boring stuff. And because they think it looks nice, we’re supposed to prefer it. Bah.
