thoughts and observations
Posts tagged iphone
Six weeks with the iPhone 3G
Nov 18th
About six weeks ago, I became eligible for an device upgrade on my AT&T wireless account. I headed down to the AT&T Wireless store by Pac-Bell park and (eventually) walked out with a shiny new 16GB black 3G iPhone. Nearly 18 months ago, I paid the same amount for the HTC TyTyn aka 8525, a Windows Mobile 5.0 phone. My, how the mobile world has changed.
As someone who works in the mobile industry, I had been tracking the release of the original iPhone, along with a variety of other developments like Android, RIM’s new technologies, Symbian S60 devices and even Palm’s attempts to keep up. Apple was winning the press game and got a lot of attention for their device, and I can say after considerable usage, rightfully so. In terms of a combined personal and professional mobile device, it is clear to me that the iPhone is the most enjoyable device to use out there. Certainly, there are problems and it is by no means a perfect device, but Apple seems to have struck a good balance between control for good user experience for mainstream users and openness for 3rd party programs. (By openness, I’m just referring to the availability of an SDK, and a decent one at that. All the legalese surrounding it and the treatment of 3rd party apps as second class citizens on the device are up for debate.)
Pros
Outstanding battery life on EDGE
iTunes <-> iPhone end to end ecosystem for music management is great. No need for an iTouch or any separate music device.
Top notch 3rd party apps really have a good degree of polish and are very usable. I still haven’t paid for a single iPhone app but have found plenty of useful applications.
PIM (contacts/calendar) sync is very easy to do with iTunes (though it still doesn’t really make sense that you go through music software to do this…)
Call quality is superb. No dropped calls, very clear voice quality.
The form factor is great, I really appreciate the rounded edges when this phone is in my pocket. The HTC phone was a brick that constantly bulged from my pants pocket and not in a good way.
The glass screen has kept me from installing the protective plastic skin I bought for the phone since glass is so scratch resistant as compared to most plastic screens.
Cons
Special cable for charging the phone. I really liked being able to use any mini-USB cable to charge my old HTC phone, which were just laying around at work or at home. Firewire charging also isn’t compatible with the new iPhone, which means I need to modify my car stereo setup to bring that capability back.
Cut and Paste would be more handy than I had anticipated when I read gripes about this being missing.
No background processing and no push updates for 3rd party apps (yet) really limits what the iPhone can do when you’re not actively using it. Mobile devices should be constantly working for you, not just when it has your attention.
Battery life on 3G isn’t as bad as I expected based on what I had read, but it can be an issue. I’m probably exclusively on 3G once or twice a week when I have high data usage needs and waiting for that to come down over EDGE isn’t a judicious use of battery.
Speakerphone really isn’t loud enough as compared to other devices.
Since the iPhone treats phone capabilities as an “application” on the device, there are too many button pushes/screens to get through to place a call. Double clicking the home button to get to your Favorites is a nice touch though.
The cost of the data plan + 200 text messages is a bit outrageous. They know they can get away with it so they do. The rumored tethering plan at an additional $30/month is just insane.
I wonder how much of the transition eye candy really inhibits the performance of the phone. It’s nice, don’t get me wrong, but I frequently see very stuttered animation for the transitions. If this can be cleared up with future updates, then it’s just an optimization problem. If not, it’s clear that there is overburdening of the hardware platform and they should have scaled the transitions back accordingly.
Inability to treat the iPhone as a USB hard drive/memory stick out of the box. I know there are a variety of paid iPhone apps that help with this, but it should work like this out of the box. Apple should have implemented an appropriate file system separation to facilitate this given how much storage these devices ship with.
AT&T does little to make using this phone on their network special. I think this is a key shortcoming that caused them to take the bad tasting medicine of a very expensive exclusivity agreement. Just take a look at how much AT&T paid Apple last quarter.
SmartTags exists in Mail.app in Leopard, but not on the iPhone mail client. This would save me some hassle in saving people’s email addresses, phone numbers and physical addresses that I get in email or text. How many times have you received a txt/email saying “meet me at X address” and you just want to click on that address, load up Maps and calculate directions from your current location?
Final Thoughts
Clearly, there are many things to improve and fix on the iPhone. That said, I’m happy with my purchase, can swallow the extra expense for data over my previous $15/month all you can eat + 200 text messages package and look forward to what’s coming next for this device.
Speaking of DVRs…
Oct 10th
I’ve really been digging my AT&T U-Verse service and I’m glad I signed up. The set-top box that comes with the service has a DVR capability supporting roughly 120 hours of recorded TV. I hope I never fill it up because slugging through that much content would be a real pain.
What AT&T U-Verse Does Well
Schedule DVR online
You can schedule your DVR online by logging into your AT&T U-Verse account. It’s not particularly easy to find and should be much more conveniently exposed. I have it setup as a secondary tab on my Yahoo account’s portal homepage (which I rarely ever use). This feature has proved to be extremely convenient and useful. Katie will ask me to set something up while I’m working in our office and I don’t have to head over to the TV, turn on all the entertainment system devices and add the recording. With just a few clicks on my computer, I’m done.
Decent UI
For anyone who has used Microsoft’s Media Center over the years, the color scheme, channel guide presentation and other widgets will immediately seem familiar. It’s a pretty decent UI that has clarity and makes good use of overlays. It could still use some work and my opinion is hindered by not having extensively used a TiVo. That said, I’ve rarely found myself at a loss for how to navigate to what I need to get to on the device.
Compact packaging and silent performance
Media in the home has been suffering from “YASTBS”, aka Yet Another Set-Top Box Syndrome, and TV service is no different. The box for AT&T U-verse is aesthetically pleasing, occupies a very small footprint compared to my old Comcast box, and performs pretty quietly inspite of having a hard drive inside it. The one thing I wish they added was a clock on the front that also doubled to show the channel you’re on.
Channel flipping speed
One of the big knocks on IPTV used to be the time it took to change channels. I can say without a doubt that channel changing is significantly faster on my U-Verse service than it was on my “digital” Comcast service. I’d say it takes 20% of the time to change channels on U-Verse as compared to Comcast, so that’s a huge technical and user experience win for AT&T and Microsoft.
Storage space
For some people, 120 hours will seem like not much and I’m sure it’s a small fraction of that for HD content. But for now, as I am stuck with a big old CRT SDTV, 120 hours of SD recording capability is more than ample and I find myself adding roughly one series per week to follow.
Areas for Improvement
In spite of several things that are done well by U-Verse, there are still some nagging things that need to be improved.
Streaming over the network
AT&T is happy to stream content to other set-top boxes throughout your residence they provide you (at an additional cost). The kicker is that the set-top boxes need to be connected via cat5 (no wireless) and you can’t use any other device, including your laptops or desktops. This doesn’t really make a lot of sense. If they’re worried about people ripping content off the DVR, they could just as easily stream to some DRM-friendly media player that you install on your laptop/desktop.
Streaming to your mobile device
I recently got an iPhone 3G and would love to be able to stream TV off my DVR a la Slingbox. This would be a very slick feature that addresses the need of “what I want, when I want it, how I want it” that many mobile video solutions are lacking now.
Better free “On-Demand” library
Comcast had a pretty solid On Demand library, with lots of network TV content. AT&T needs to beef up their library significantly to compete in this area.
Combined billing nightmare
So if you are an AT&T U-Verse customer and a AT&T Wireless customer, you can combine your bills so instead of dealing with two payment systems you can just pay one bill and be done with it. What they neglect to tell you clearly is that if you do this, it will take 2-3 billing cycles (read: 60-90 days) before your bills are synch’d up. This means you can go on your merry way, paying the AT&T U-Verse amount until BAM! 2-3 months of wireless bills are stacked up and billed to you at once.
That in and of itself kind of sucks, but it gets worse if during that period of time, you become eligible for a phone upgrade and decide to take advantage like I did earlier this week. You cannot qualify for discount pricing on your upgrade if your wireless bill is in a “past due” state. Guess what? With combined billing, it will happen inevitably as AT&T Wireless removes the option of directly paying your account from the online account manager. You need to directly call some AT&T office and have them post a payment to that account and even then, there are no guarantees it will be applied properly or show up in a timely fashion.
I spent a good 4-5 hours on Monday dealing with AT&T, either on the phone or in the store getting this situation resolved. Even then I was not able to get both my lines upgraded, just one. Any time I would have saved over the course of the year with combined billing was more than wiped out and in the process I ended up over paying my wireless account two or three times over to ensure it was not past due.
DVR settings
There are 3 similar but not obviously clear settings for recording a series. They are record “New Show Only”, “New Shows and Reruns”, and “New Shows and Reruns Once a Day”. It turns out the middle setting is the most optimal to guarantee you get new recordings of shows like The Daily Show and Colbert Report, which air multiple times per day, but in different descriptions of “new” and “re-run”. This should be cleared up and made much simpler for end-users so they don’t have to learn with a trial by error.