On Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:36:55 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <[email protected]> wrote:
"Steven Schveighoffer" <[email protected]> wrote in message
Then I guess 99% of phones are evil?
99% of phones? Certainly not.
99% of *cell* phones? Absolutely, yes. Service provider lock-in is one of
the primary reasons I've never bought one.
Yes, that's what I meant :) I thought we were talking cell phones here...
And OMG, you've never bought a cell phone? Why are you punishing yourself
;) I suppose with the attitude you have towards them it would just raise
your blood pressure carrying it around...
Your lack of experience with cell phones does not give any boost to your
position...
I also have co-workers and friends who use jailbroken iphones on other
GSM networks.
In an allegedly capitalist society (or "mixed-economy with capitalist
leanings" as the case may be), no one should ever have any reason to
devise
or use such hacks for such a basic freedom as consumer choice.
Huh? Why should verizon go out of its way to allow you to use its phones
with other services? Maybe you don't understand capitalism...
I could never do that with most of my verizon phones.
Verizon is one of the worst cell companies out there anyway.
[purposely ignoring]
Besides, who switches phone service providers within the life of a
phone?
No one, but you're overlooking the *reasons* that doesn't happen:
contract
lock-in and hardware that's not built to last.
Contract lock-in only happens if you want to buy a phone cheap. If you
absolutely don't want a 2-yr contract, you can pay full price for the
phone.
These days, hardware is not built to last no matter what it is. And it's
because people don't *want* old hardware. As a manufacturer, you have a
choice:
1. build something that's more expensive, but outlasts its usefulness or
2. build something that's cheaper, may not last as long, but lasts at
least until the next gen version is available.
And I like to buy things once and keep them as long as possible (my stereo
has an input for laser disc to give you an idea). But cell phones and
computers change so fast that the hardware is obsolete before it's broken.
Not to mention that the two biggest service providers are incompatible
with eachother, so you couldn't switch between them even if you wanted
to.
If there's a fundamental difference in protocols (as opposed to the
artificially-created incompatibilities), then yes, of course that's fine.
Yes, Verizon uses CDMA and AT&T uses GSM. Different protocols, different
chips required.
However, outside the cell phone world, such situations are likely to
result
in dual-use devices
There were some phones like that. Nobody cared ;)
E. A die-hard Apple fan I know recently showed me his beloved iPad.
Accurately setting the text-cursor was nearly impossible. But that
would
have been an incredibly simple fix: Use a screen that worked with a
stylus
or fingernail. There's millions of them out there. Even if that would
have
prevented multi-touch (and I don't know that it would or would not
have),
after using the multi-touch, I felt it added no real value other than
a
"gee-whiz" gimmick factor. Stylus/fingernail support would have added
at
least some real value.
Your friend is doing it wrong.
Well, I was the one using it and noticing that.
I can accurately set the cursor whenever I want using the magnifying
glass.
See an example here:
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781430231295/typing_numbers_and_symbols
That's nothing more than a workaround. How is that *not* worse than being
able to just use the tip of your fingernail?
Be....cause... it's better? At least I think it is :) What if you don't
have a long fingernail? Even if you do have a fingernail, and are using
an old-style screen that could detect the fingernail, it's probably going
to be more inaccurate, and without a way to tune into the right position.
I've had two old-style touch screen phones before this. They suck. They
break, require calibration, and require a stylus. My samsung phone got to
be so inaccurate that I pretty much avoided using the touch screen as much
as possible. I'll pay the price of lost accuracy when positioning a
cursor in order to avoid having to pop out a stylus to press on-screen
buttons.
And once you get used to it (the cursor positioning), it's fast.
G. A *phone* without tactile dial buttons is just plain wrong. What is
it
with Apple's long-standing war against tactile feedback? It detracts
from
usability and the only thing it adds is high-tech-gee-whiz-gimmick.
What do you need tactile feedback for?
See, now I just can't even fathom that kind of stance, so it's difficult
for
me to argue against it. For me it's just a fundamental thing: With
tactile
feedback > without tactile feedback, by a large degree.
ok then :)
You get audible feedback, and the phone number buttons are extremely
responsive.
Plus, if you want to dial without looking at the phone, you can use
voice-activation.
That hardly makes it better to not have tactile feedback.
I guess. It doesn't really bother me to not have tactile feedback.
One thing I can say for the iphone, it's *very* reliable that when you
push a button it registers. So the assurance that "yes you are pushing
the button" isn't usually necessary. The sounds also help.
Blackberry tried a touch-screen with tactile feedback, it sucked.
Which is exactly why it's idiotic for Apple to make the entire interface
touchscreen. You do that and you lose tactile feedback and you can't
just
hack it back in. If you took my Palm Pilot, replaced the
up/down/left/right
and app buttons with touchscreen input, that would be a step *backwards*.
You'd gain nothing but a questionable "cool factor", and the UI would
just
simply be worse.
But PalmOS is not iOS. I've had about 5 palms, starting with the palm
III, and I like the apple interface significantly more.
H. What's there to protect the highly-prominent screen?
The screen is made of pretty durable glass. Like all touch-screen
phones,
it's highly advisable to get a screen protector for it. I don't get
what
your problem is here, do you want a screen or not? If you do, then what
possible way could a manufacturer design a destruction-proof screen?
Put
little airbags around it in case you drop it?
Oh, please, it's not that difficult to come up with ways around it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laptop
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Advance_SP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_phone
So you mean, it should fold? You can just say that you know :)
Palm III also had a plastic cover. I eventually left it off, it was kind
of annoying.
Just a different style I guess. Most smart phones have a outward facing
screen these days, even the touch-screen ones.
Note that with a folding device, it's probably *less* durable because the
folding part can break, and wires can more easily come loose. Less moving
parts == more reliable.
Or a different approach:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_PC#Convertibles
And other things can no doubt be thought up, especially if Apple is as
clever as people claim they are.
Or hell, a built-in or even just pre-packaged protector.
This is *far* from an insurmountable obstacle.
No, but its *far* from a failed design also :) Protecting the screen from
breakage by having a hard cover detracts from the usability. Besides, I
think the phone is pretty darned durable, it's not a cheap feeling thing.
I'm not going to throw it against the wall, but I wouldn't do that with a
folding phone either. I also have a rubber protective case on it too (but
the screen is exposed).
I. I don't give a crap how thin they can make it. But Apple seems to
think
I should care. Heck, I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on
something that I'll constantly feel I'm about to accidentally snap in
half. But that's exactly how I felt with the iPad.
This is petty :)
In and of itself, maybe. But thinness typically necessitates other design
compromises, all for a "benefit" that is, as you say, petty.
What compromises? What is it missing that could be there if it were
thicker?
I can't speak for the ipad, but the iphone feels more durable than any
phone I've had. Maybe you'd prefer this phone:
http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20100829/BIZ/708299922/1005/biz
I don't understand what you mean. According to that it's even thinner
than
Apple's stuff.
It's a larger phone, I thought that meant it was thicker. I guess I
didn't read it well enough. Nevermind.
But it does make me think of another thing: a perfectly flat rectangle
(with
a touchscreen on the side against your head) is a rather awkward form
factor
for a phone (and I have tried such phones, like my sister's Palm...umm,
the
other WebOS one that isn't a Pre).
Pixi
My phone is far more comfortable:
http://www.uniden.com/products/productdetail.cfm?product=EXAI398
again, *shrug*. It's pretty comfortable to me.
Note that the ipad directly competes with e-Reader devices, so they need
to appeal to those people too.
That still doesn't necessitate "as thin as conceivably possible".
It doesn't necessitate it, but it does score points with that crowd.
People want a thin book-sized device to read all their books.
Now if only iBooks had some decent material...
J. What happens when the battery gets old and won't hold a charge?
When I was looking at getting a palm pre as a verizon customer, and I
discovered that palm pre doesn't support voice dialing, I mentioned I'd
just be switching to AT&T for the iPhone. The Verizon guy identified
the
battery issue as a reason not to get one. So I looked up the details.
I
think apple provides a $100 service to change your battery. I don't
know
the details, but I think they just swap out your entire phone. If they
don't swap out your phone, that's crappy, but I can't complain yet
because
it hasn't happened to me ;)
$100 is pretty steep, but most phone batteries cost $40-60, so it's not
unreasonable. I think by making the battery internal they can make it
more powerful and make the device smaller (sorry, some of us like the
small size ;).
I honestly find the vast majority of cell phones to be *too* small.
Problematically so. (And yes, I *have* used a number of cell phones,
even
though I've never owned one) Small is obviously good to a certain
point...but...well, only to a certain point. Sorry, but some of us don't
like super-small ;)
You might like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Cm8MFqxWw&feature=fvst
I agree, smaller isn't always better. But I mean smaller as in, if it was
an external battery, then it would have to be larger than you would like.
The iPhone size isn't too small.
I also have read if you don't care about your warranty or your warranty
is
expired, you can buy an actual iphone battery online for about $20 and a
kit for $10 more so you can change it yourself.
Which only goes to prove that the typical $40-100 you mentioned above
*is*
exorbitant.
Yes, I feel it is too. They got you by the balls also, since if your
battery is dead, you have one option.
Furthermore, there is absolutely *no* excuse for a company pushing a
device
that you actually have to *hack* just to change the damn battery.
Well, I think the excuse is the size. Which doesn't fly with you, so I
guess you're right.
That's a lot of issues for something that's supposedly well-polished.
Wait, most of these aren't actual problems, but just design decisions
you
disagree with. In fact, only one is a bug (the iphone 4 antenna
problem),
which has already been addressed.
I didn't say it was buggy, I said it wasn't polished. A big part of
polish
*is* having solid *design decisions*. Many people seem to think polish is
just gloss, glitz and gimmick.
No, polish is making something behave the way it should behave. This
includes fixing bugs and usability issues, but not "designs you don't
like." For example, the cursor positioning is a usability issue that was
solved by polish (I don't think it was in the original iphone). Because
you don't like the solution doesn't mean it's not finished in 99% of users
minds. I don't think anyone complains about that.
"I hate how they think they're so cool because their devices are thin"
isn't even a problem, its just a form of name calling.
My stance did *not* amount to that, and I've added another reason above.
Well, I did misunderstand your stance, but my point is that "thin is
better" *is* a major selling point for most people. Apple is trying to
sell as many phones as possible, not as many phones as possible to Nick
S. It also diminishes the substance of your other arguments. It appears
that apple could make a perfect phone and you'd still not want it, which
means the rest of your points could just be overblown gripes.
Note that for all these "problems" you mentioned, the iphone's good
features are *really* good. Even the tiny details have thought put into
them. One example: I listen to music at work with the enclosed
headphones
(w/ mic and volume control inline on the wire), and I listen to it low,
so
I can hear when other people want to talk to me. When I get in the
car, I
have to turn the volume on the iphone all the way up to normalize the
input to the stereo.
I noticed that once I set the respective volumes, I didn't have to
change
them -- the iphone knows the difference between the two headphone types
and auto-adjusts the volume to the last setting. It's one of those
features that is trivial, but just make the iphone a pleasant
experience.
Yea, I never said there wasn't anything good about it. Hell, I'll even
admit
the iPad was a lot better than I expected. I'd still never buy one
though.
Oh, I completely forgot, there's another iPad issue:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/ipad-fails-networking-101-how-to-earn-it-a-passing-grade.ars
The guy I know that has an iPad, he was at a hotel once where there just
happend to be a bunch of other iPad users on the hotel's WiFi network. It
brought the whole network to a crawl - slower than dial-up from what he
was
saying.
I think they've fixed the network issues, but I'm not sure. I remember
reading articles about how some colleges banned ipads because they would
take down the network :) Definitely not a problem you want to have out of
the gate, but this is a bug, it gets fixed.
I'll tell you a few things that I've found annoying:
1. I disabled downloading graphics in emails (as everyone should), but
in
emails I know are not spam, I want to download the images. There is no
button for that...
Lack of basic settings, features or any sort of customizability.
I wouldn't go that far :)
Oh, one other thing that's annoying, but I think it's because of pressure
from the phone companies who want to charge you an extra $15/month for
"enterprise access", it doesn't read ics calendar appointments unless you
use microsoft exchange. That is *extremely* crappy and pointless.
2. A couple times, the phone had a hard time connecting to a wireless
network that it previously had no problem with. It mistakes a bad
signal
with a bad password, so it asks you for the password. If you don't hit
"cancel" and just hit "ok", it forgets the password that it used to
have.
I then have to go look up the password as it's some hex string.
Lack of polish, and frankly, sounds downright rushed.
Yes, it needs polish here.
3. The calendar app doesn't allow you to jump ahead quickly by months or
years. This is annoying when setting a future appointment. You can
quickly scroll via the day, they should give you wheels to do the month
and year also.
Very *blatant* lack of polish. Jumping by month/year is just plain
obvious
for any calender app.
I know, right?
It's exactly these sorts of appallingly *obvious* things that Apple
constantly gets wrong anyway, and in fairly large quantities, that make
me
say "Apple's sense of 'polish' is little more than gimmicks and graphic
design." Showing attention to detail on one or two things here and there,
but then utterly failing on the basics (consistently) - that's not
polish.
Well, it's just that they haven't got to it yet, or maybe they don't feel
it's as important as other issues. If something is 99% perfect and you
want to point out the 1%, I guess you're entitled to it. But if
everything else out there is only 90% perfect, then it's just pointless
griping. It's a phone, it calls just fine (best in-call interface by far
I've seen), it surfs the internet very well (best web browser experience
on a phone I've had by far), and has lots of attention to detail. The
frilly petty stuff isn't what makes the phone bad or good. My opinion is
that the obvious stuff *does* work well, it's the niche stuff that has
issues, and they are issues I'm willing to live with.
Compare this to my list of issues with Windows mobile 6, you will find
they haven't even opened the polish can yet :)
BTW, I'm done with this, because I think it's getting way way too long :)
Good debate, see you on the next one.
-Steve
