John’s Blog

trying a post from safari on my iPhone – wordpress seems to work pretty well. It’s a little constrained to do very much with, but passable. On the whole, I think I’ll prefer to use the email posting capability of WordPress instead of going through the web UI, although this is probably the only way to do styling, links and tags.

Hmmm… There seems to be a bug where I can’t see all my tags, so this one will be uncategorized for a while.

After about a week with my iPhone, I’m going to start writing up a series of thoughts about individual features of the thing — I’ll start with talking about the keyboard, since it’s central to the experience.

I’ll not mince words: it’s not a great experience. I’ve had probably every sort of device since the Newton Messagepad — handwriting entry systems like that, Graffiti-based systems like the Palm, full keyboards like the Treo, phone keyboards with T9, and most recently the unusual 2 letters per key Blackberry Pearl keyboard.

I’ve never really been a very fast typist with any of these — and with the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, I’m getting to where I’m generally as quick as with my Pearl, but it’s pretty inconsistent. My left thumb overcompensates a little bit — I end up always tapping to the right of where I mean to — and both my thumbs end up obscuring a lot of the keyboard, of course — which matters especially much in this case because there’s no tactile feedback.

But I find that mostly I’m unsure of what I’m typing, and as a result, I’m tentative about it. Apple’s done an interesting thing to address this: they enlarge the image of each key after you type it so you can be sure about what you’re typing.  That definitely helps to know what letter you type — it helps a bunch, actually. But it interferes some cognitively with another more important piece of the experience: auto-correct.

Auto-correct — the phone knowing that I didn’t mean to type “Qppke”, but instead “Apple” — is really, really great. It’s the best that I’ve ever used. I think it’s partly because of the large dictionary and partly because they’re doing something with key proximity — knowing that “Q” is close to “A”, for example. (I’m not sure they really do that, but I suspect they do.) And the way that they’re showing auto-correct — with an as-you-type suggestion box showing up under the word you’re typing — works really well — tap on the box or the space bar to accept the suggestion, hit backspace or tap on the original word to keep what you’re typing. (Tapping on the word you’re typing that the iPhone doesn’t recognize will also add it to the dictionary for the future, which is great, except that I just added “Qppke” to my dictionary and don’t have any idea how to take it out again.)

The conflict that occurs is this: my eyes don’t know what to look at — the animated images of the keys that I’m typing or the constant stream of suggested words to fix my typos. So I end up moving my eyes back and forth from one to the other — which I’m pretty sure is slowing me down. I have a feeling that if the keys weren’t animated, I’d instead stay focused on the text entry and be more efficient, but I don’t know that for sure.

Apple & apologists routinely say that the virtual keyboard is great because of the auto-correct experience — but it seems to me that they’re completely orthogonal to each other — the auto-correct system could be implemented with a physical keyboard just as well.

I think things will also get a lot better when more of the applications on the phone will work in landscape mode — right now it’s mostly Safari & Photos that work that way — because a wider keyboard is really what you need. But it doesn’t work in mail currently, so that’s something for the future.

Another quibble with the keyboard is that the “.” and the “,” are hidden under the “.?123″ mode key. I use both those keys all the time, and to have them be on the secondary keyboard is a little bit rough. Once you’re in that punctuation & number mode, though, you can get to a third screen full of symbols like international currency & such — that’s a decidedly useful thing.

On the whole, for me, it’s a subpar keyboarding experience, but one that I’m willing to put up with in order to get the large screen. I have a tough time imagining that most of the Blackberry set will ever be comfortable with it, though.

Weird problem today — I was watching a bit of video on my iPhone, then stopped & went away for a while — it had more than 50% charge left when I walked away. When I came back, it was dead — felt warm to the touch. No buttons would work, black screen, nothing. Rebooting wouldn’t work at all. I plugged it in for a while and after an hour or so it showed that it was charging again, but at about 5% — now, after charging most of the afternoon, looks like it’s up over 90%. Not sure what happened, but will be watching it.

my first full day of use suggests that battery life is gonna be a problem for me. it’s 8:45p now, and i’ve got maybe 10% of my battery life left — that’s after leaving the house 13 hours ago (that’s when i remember unplugging my phone).

having said that, the phone is showing 14 hours 18 minutes of standby time (which might be right, since it’s about when i woke up this morning — very possible i started using it right away), and 6 hour 19 minutes of use, which i guess includes everything.

26 minutes on the phone, and about 6.3 MB of data received over EDGE and 1.1 MB sent.

we’ll see what happens in the days ahead (and how much longer the phone lasts now), but i think this may be a problem for me. today, like all mondays, was an active day — i didn’t get to sit much at my desk, and so was checking my mail a fair bit (and doing demos), but after about 4p, i found myself really watching the battery meter a lot and thinking that if i had been talking on the phone more or using the ipod more that it’d be even lower.

i have a couple of ideas on why it depleted so quickly — i have 2 e-mail accounts set to check every 15 minutes, and mostly stayed within WiFi range of the office all day (and i have it set up to auto-join WiFi networks that it recognizes).

i think the way the WiFi works is that it connects when it needs to (to check e-mail or something) and then disconnects after a period of inactivity — if WiFi drains significant power (and that’s my guess) then i may have effectively kept the WiFi power drain on for most of the day. i may move e-mail checks to every 30 minutes and change the brightness setting a little bit for tomorrow — that would reduce the load, i think.

anyway, we’ll see, but a little troubling for the first day. lots of other things i noticed — mostly i really like using it, and the pictures of my family on the main screen & when they call really brighten my day — they’re just shown in a vivid, fun way.

so hopefully i’ll be able to figure out a way to get the battery life more workable…

3 things about the phone this morning:

1) i really miss a few things from other devices — even back on my original palm pilot, there was a row of 4 application buttons — you could assign them to any applications. the iPhone would really benefit from those — 1 button access to calendar, mail, phone and ipod (or whatever 4 apps you want). i think there’s plenty of room on the front to accommodate, and it’d help a lot.

2) i haven’t done a lot of testing on this yet, but seems like when you wake up the phone, it’s connected to EDGE (naturally, since to receive calls you’ve got to always be talking with cell towers), but the WiFi takes maybe 3-5 seconds to wake up. so for a guy like me, who wakes it up to check e-mails in a sadly OCD quick way, sometimes i get to checking mail before the faster connection kicks in, which results in a slower e-mail checking time than if i had taken longer to do the…um…what do you call these things…gestures? swipes? you know what i mean.

3) it’s killing me a little bit that you can’t rearrange icons on the home screen — that would help a lot very quickly.

i set up a Flickr contact this morning so that i can send pictures that i take to flickr automatically — but haven’t gotten the flickr2blog stuff to work right yet. will play with that later.