Apple's Mistakes When Designing the iPhone September 04, 2007

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Alexis and I found a bunch of things that make the iPhone feel like a beta product, one that didn’t get adequate testing and quality assurance evaluation, at least by us.

#1: Security

In Microsoft the World we argued that security would be Apple’s principal weakness in the next decade.

The first iPhone security patch came out less than a month after the iPhone was released. Many people considered Macs to be more secure than Windows machines, although that isn’t true. Hackers, especially those backed by organized crime, have had a much bigger target with Microsoft and have spent most of their efforts trying to disrupt their operations. With the increasing market share of Mac OS and the fact that the iPhone is really a mini Mac (not a Mac mini), the iPhone now becomes vulnerable. The first hack found a loophole in the Safari browser where a malicious entity could potentially take control of your iPhone, read your mail, see your contacts, and make calls from your iPhone.

One advantage that Apple does have is their ability to update the iPhone through iTunes. So updates should be more automatic and users should be a little safer as compared to other cell phones where updates were more difficult. This is like the vaccination theory, you not only help yourself but everyone around you when you get vaccinated.

Compared to other smartphones, the iPhone is at greatest risk because of its full fledged internet capability. It also has become a prime target for hackers trying to build their street (net) cred.

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#2: Plays by itself

SUN Microsystems, Adobe, and Apple engineers all work, eat, and play in the same neighborhood, but Apple won’t let your iPhone play with those guys. Java support is non-existent in the iPhone, which severely limits your available applications. We know that the processor on the iPhone supports Java natively, so it shouldn’t be a performance issue. In addition, it isn’t like Java is a brand new language. Apple just didn’t want you to have it.

Shockwave’s, now Adobe’s, Flash application has really enriched the broadband internet. The iPhone, unfortunately, can’t do Flash. There are some sites that run exclusively on Flash media, YouTube previously did.

Apple really wants web developers to design around the iPhone limitations, we’ve seen this with YouTube converting many of their videos to h.264. It really is hard for Apple to claim to give you the full internet experience without Flash media. Fancy Javascripting and dynamic HTML can only do so much. I will have to say concede that the 64 bit version of Internet Explorer on Vista doesn’t support flash either, but there you can at least run 32 bit IE.

#3: Recessed headphone jack

If you haven’t heard yet, the iPhone headphone jack is so recessed into the body that the only headsets that will fit are those from Apple. If you want to connect another set of headphones, you need to buy a very clunky headphone extender. This suggests that none of the beta testers or designers at Apple use any higher quality headphones than the stock earbuds…I honestly find it a little hard to believe, unless Apple is going to be getting into the headphone business as well. I’ve complained about all the proprietary connections on cell phones before, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, Nokia, and Motorola all do this, but they aren’t sold as high end music players. Apple went with style over function on this one. Unfortunately, this problem can’t be patched with a software upgrade. It’s going to require surgery.

#4: No user-accessible File system

The iPhone’s email system handles attachments very well. It can display attached pictures inline, word documents and PDFs can be viewed, but it lacks the very important ability to save these files. We won’t even get into the iPhone’s inability to edit these files, but there needs to be a provision to save the files. If you get a PDF with directions for example, to see that PDF again, you need to go back into the email program. Apple needs to trust users with the ability to do file management without having to hack the iPhone.

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#5: Speakerphone

Compared to other cell phones, the speakerphone is embarrassing. It isn’t loud enough and the proximity of the speakers to the microphone sometimes creates echoes. Apple chose to put the external speakers at the bottom of the iPhone, where your microphone is, instead of near the top or the sides. I’m sure with the tight packaging of the iPhone they were limited in their choices, but it’s still too bad. I would have loved to see NXT technology here, with the entire iPhone face acting as a speaker, that technology could also be used to provide haptic feedback for the iPhone touch screen. Too bad they didn’t consult us first, before we did our reduction to practice. Maybe next time.

The holes for the speakers are also more style than function. They are big enough to pickup lint from your pocket, but too small to clean the lint out. We would have preferred a fine metal mesh grill, that would keep the lint out, while also being less restrictive. Since the black plastic part of the iPhone is removable, there is some hope for availability of a replacement part.

#6: No copy and paste

We love the iPhone interface and think the keyboard actually works, but still typing a series of long urls into your emails is a pain. You can share links, but only one at a time. It doesn’t seem like having the ability to copy and paste text should be an advanced feature, this was how Apple started out with the first graphical wysiwyg word processors. Hopefully this bug will be fixed soon, I didn’t say upgraded since this should have been recognized as a vital feature. Apple really likes to tell you what you need and don’t need, kinda like the one button mouse.

#7: Ringtones

Admittedly some, okay many ringtones can be utterly annoying. Apple’s built in ringtones aren’t bad, but we need the ability to choose our own ringtones. Nearly every single phone on the market today can use mp3 ringtones. The hacked iPhones have already added this feature, so the only reason I can see why Apple hasn’t done it yet is that they want to charge people money for ringtones. They must be trying to develop their own DRM system for ringtones. Hmm…who’s starting to sound like the big bad monopoly now?

#8: Voice recording

Take an ordinary 5.5G iPod, throw a microphone on it, and you now have a voice recorder. The iPhone is an iPod… it has a microphone… but no voice recorder.

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#9: Everyone is not all created equal

Apple is trying to market their iPhone as both Windows and Mac compatible, but compatible doesn’t mean equal. Microsoft saw the fact that if they wrote both Mac and Windows software, their Office suites would run on nearly all personal computers in the world. Apple realized with the iPod that compatibility opened up their market share, they didn’t start off with this belief as they were using firewire for the iPod instead of USB. With the iPhone though, Apple is again trying to proselytize that Macs are better. When syncing with a Mac, the iPhone is able to categorize contacts into groups, with windows it can’t. Publishing photos on the web from the camera only works if you have a .mac account. You may have Yahoo! mail, but where’s Flickr?

More recently, news of “second tier” LCD screens have been reported on newer iPhones as well as iPhones with reports of “dead zones.” Neither Alexis nor I have experienced problems with “dead zones” after using the iPhone as our primary phones since launch day. The LCD screen issue is much more interesting: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=711

Basically, it turns out that the some of the LCD screens in newer iPhones are dimmer and can show a grid pattern at times. If my iPhone had an obviously visible grid pattern like that, I probably wouldn’t have been as happy with the phone. What’s worse is that only some of the newer iPhones have this problem – looking at the serial number isn’t enough. Most likely, as Apple began expanding their contract manufacturing to include additional LCD manufacturers, they began to have slightly varying levels of quality. This isn’t unusual – IBM and now Lenovo used to contract their “legendary” ThinkPad keyboards to different manufacturers with varying quality.

iPhone Conclusion

This will be the last iPhone article you’ll see from FiringSquad for some time. (At least until they open up the platform) Now that the hype has settled, we still have to say that the iPhone is still an excellent luxury toy. It’s still slick, it’s still a pleasure to use, and if Apple begins to address the flaws discussed above, it’ll only get better.

The “Internet in your pocket” is still the killer feature of the iPhone and it is a glance at what the future has to offer. In 1999, two years before the first iPod was released, NTT DoCoMo (Japan’s equivalent of AT&T) launched i-mode, a mobile Internet phone and service. Within a few analysts thought that the “post-PC” era was on its way, with i-mode leading the way. In Japan, that claim was justified. Not only could you use your cell phone to send and receive email, but you could purchase train tickets, movie tickets, and even look for restaurants. But the thing was that it actually worked, and it was working years ago. It’s not that you could buy a train ticket from a select number of stations, it was actually pervasive all throughout Japan and you could actually buy a monthly pass. Think about America and credit cards, only now you’re using your phone. Currently, more than half of all Japanese mobile phone users actually use the features on a regular basis. Even in mobile-phone-happy Europe, only 10% of mobile phone owners use the non-phone capabilities of their phone. NTT DoCoMo tried to bring this technology to the rest of the world, but the culture and infrastructure outside of Japan wasn’t compatible with i-mode. It was a $13 billion mistake.

What the iPhone has the potential to do is to change things. The i-Mode infrastructure was never about packet switching or bandwidth. It was about having content and critical mass. In 1999, it was easy to pull that off in Japan with a completely novel network. In 2007, we have the luxury of a Web 2.0 world. The Internet is now the home for entertainment and business and the iPhone represents the first mobile device to truly achieve access to the mobile internet in something with enough battery life and ergonomics where you no longer have to think twice about looking up that frivolous question, or making that transaction.

Is it worth $600? Of course not. Is it a glimpse of the future? You bet.