One of my mates got a new mac & the other day I was having a play around with it. It is sweet.  The UI is out & out gorgeous, no question. It’s intuitive too, I really haven’t used a mac since I was in high school, but it all just worked.  The photo application using the built-in web cam was a lot of fun & the Time Capsule app is really nice (plus its interface, like everything else, is just plain fun).

Apple iPhone

The new iPhone looks to be much of the same, beautiful design, easy to use software and, soon to be available, lots of third party apps to install.  The ability to sync with Exchange looks to be a really good feature, this puts it in direct competition with the Blackberry.   The new iPhone will finally get 3G networking support too.  A lot of people wondered why this wasn’t in the original iPhone, but none the less it will have it now.  It’ doesn’t have video recording or video calling facilities, and while some may wonder why, I don’t see this as a problem.  Video calling was the original major selling point of the 3G network, but it really hasn’t taken off.  I’ve got a 3G phone & I’ve only ever made a single video call – when I first got it to test it out – but it’s just not feasible to use normally.

This brings me to my point.  The new iPhone will run on the 3G network, but it won’t have MMS or video facilities.  Have a look at the features page, it ain’t there.  It will take photos, and you can email them or sync them with the new MobileMe service, but you can’t directly send them to other mobile phones with MMS.  It’s certainly not a big deal, but this is such a simple feature I’m really not sure why it would be left out.  It seems like Apple doesn’t want it’s users to know that there are other 3G phones out there, it’s the walled garden all over again.

But this isn’t the most annoying thing.  The most annoying feature omission in my opinion is that the new iPhone still can’t copy and paste text!  Are you kidding me?  This is insane.  I don’t think I’ve gone a day without doing this at some point on my computer, and it’s something I wish my normal phone could do, copying names from inside SMS messages would be really handy (my Motorola phone does allow you to copy phone numbers out of messages, which is quite handy).  The official reason apparently is that they don’t want to over complicate the UI, but seriously, how hard would it be for the phone to allow you to drag over text to highlight it and when you release have it auto-copy to a clipboard.  It could then, for example, do paste on a double-tap into a text-editable area.

Obviously this is just an example I’ve pulled off the top of my head, it would need some thought about how to integrate it into the actual UI, but it could be done.  What annoys me is this: Apple wants you to do things the Apple way.  You can transfer data between apps on the iPhone.  It automatically picks up phone numbers and email addresses and allows you to interact with them.  Clicking on an image brings up a menu to do things to that image.  This is all good an intuitive, but it’s structured.  Structured how Apple wants you to use the phone. Cut/Copy/Paste is more free-form.  It would mean people are doing things their own way, and there would be the chance of users getting confused.  And this seems to be Apples overriding concern.  It treats users like children who don’t know what they’re doing. You can imagine the conversation at Apple HQ:

Copy & Paste? No we couldn’t possibly allow the customer to do that, they might make a mistake!

So? It would also allow people to do things you hadn’t imagined people could do.  What happened to think different?  Did that just mean think like Apple? I mentioned something similar in an earlier post on a completely different topic, but I think it’s relevant here:

Don’t unnecessarily constrain your users.  Sure if there are real technical or financial reasons why something can’t be done, don’t do it.  But if you’re building a service or a product that people can use, especially if it involves communication or some form of social interaction, then expect that it will be used for more than what you intended it for.  It’s a good thing really.  Because if people don’t stretch the boundaries of your service, it probably doesn’t mean you’ve built exactly what people need.  It probably means that you’ve built something that people don’t want to use.

Now, people are going to want to use the iPhone. I want to use the iPhone, it looks amazing and the built in GPS + web browsing + Exchange syncing make it really attractive.  I just wish Apple was a bit less patronising towards it’s customers.

Update: Here’s some other people breaking out of the Apple Reality Distortion Field:

  • Adrian Kingsley-Hughes – iPhone 3G – Apple’s reality distortion field redefines the phrase “half the price”

    Here’s the deal. An 8GB iPhone 3G costs $199. Sounds good so far. However, AT&T has added an extra $10 a month to the unlimited 3G monthly fees compared to EDGE, so over the 24 month period of the contract, that sets you back an extra $240.

    $199 + $240 = $439

    That’s a $40 increase compared to the price of the current iPhone.

  • Charles Cooper – So the press has become Steve Jobs’ willing tool? What else is new?

    I guess it’s a case of keeping up with the Joneses, though the risk is that we’ve all inadvertently become fan boys. Let’s face the truth: Apple gets a enormous amount of free publicity because we’ve all bought into the idea that it’s special. I suppose kudos are in order to Apple’s corporate media planners on a job well done.

  • David M. Ewalt – The iPhone’s Biggest (And Dumbest) Flaw

    But here’s my problem: why in the name of Woz has Apple not added mobile messaging (MMS)? Few non-iPhone users realize that it has a major missing feature; it can’t send or receive photos like it would a text message. You know, that feature on every other phone on the planet where you can snap a pic with your camera phone and then beam it off to a friend? I can buy a $20 burner in a convenience store that’s able to use MMS. So why can’t a $200 state-of-the-art superphone handle it?