Via Daringfireball: Cooper’s One Free Interaction

In school, we used to talk about designing the perfect fidgeter’s gadget. It was basically a product with no specific function except to be fun to play with, like a paper weight, except with even less utility. Various designs included ball-pen clickers, ratchets, pushbuttons and sound effects. The Free Interaction goes one better by appending something otherwise functional with a little extra humanness, i.e. a reason to love it beyond its inherent purpose. On men these are called “biceps” and on women they’re “boobs.”

After one week, here’s how things are shaking out:

The obvious omissions have been commented on so many times I’ll only give them a brief nod: No copy/paste, no MMS, no tethering—major WTFs. App store dictatorship, mildly annoying, but frankly I’m glad not to have to sort through thousands of mediocre, buggy apps to find a few real gems. Open source is great, but I still don’t have Linux installed on my home computer for a reason.

There are a couple of major failures that are worth mentioning. The camera is just shy of atrocious, with crappy image quality, significant lag and the worst “jellyvision” I’ve seen in a camera, ever. The otherwise-craptacular LG Dare kills the iPhone with a 3.2mpxl camera that’s faster, brighter and shoots video. Mind you, I don’t expect my phone to serve as a substitute for a “real” camera, but it’s so bad that I can hardly use it for the one thing I really care about: capturing whiteboard meeting notes.

As expected, the iPhone is not, primarily, a phone. And so, it’s phone features are very limited, though I don’t really care. Of particular note is the lack of voice dial, though there are apps that handle this reasonably well (I do wish they integrated better with the default phone app). There vibrator is strong enough to count as its own ringtone, though it’s suitably quiet when in a pocket. Disappointingly, there’s no “vibrate, then ring” setting, so when you get a call, everyone knows right when you do.

While it appears that the phone gets good reception, the number of dropped calls I’ve had suggest that the signal meter is slow to update, but this is the kind of behavior you learn as you continue to use a new phone. The bluetooth signal appears to be unfortunately and disappointingly worse than my Motorlola Razr—though still usable. Forget talking on a headset in a separate room, however. The signal is so full of crackles and pops that it’s not worth the effort.

The biggest iPhone failure of all has nothing to do with Apple. AT&T’s presence on the phone feels like a cancer, not a service. To view your minutes, rate plan or any other provider feature, you are relegated to SMS messaging. There is—no kidding—NO AT&T iPhone webpage, application or interface other than some menu prompts to receive your information via SMS whatsoever. AT&T, like most corporate juggernauts, is so blinded by maximizing profits that they see customers as overhead, not their business. They provide you a service in the way that best serves them, making concessions only when necessary to stay competitive. Unfortunately, the competition isn’t any better, so they don’t have to bend very far to stay in the game. My suspicion is that Apple got into bed with AT&T because they needed a partner, they got a reasonably good deal, and they’ll drop them like dead weight the instant they get the opportunity. Did I mention their 3G service sucks?

So this is the part of the interview where I make a 90-degree turn and leave you wondering if I’m off my meds, because thus far I make it sound like the iPhone is kind of a mediocre product. But the fact is, it’s brilliant. C’mon now, it’s not like you didn’t see that coming.

First of all, I hate cell phones. They’re garbage—all of them. Overpriced junk designed to hammer on your gadget lust until you succumb and sign up for 2 years of extortionary business practices from your least-disliked service provider. If you’re a real chump, you’ll shell out several hundred dollars for one, and keep doing so after the hinges break on your flip phone every two years. We’ve had telephone technology for a century and the culmination of all our worldly efforts boils down to a little plastic candybar that has worse sound quality and reception than anything made since before switchboards had human operators. (A quote from a Bell ad in the December 1947 issue of Fortune magazine comes to mind: “Connecting most out-of-town calls in less than 2 minutes!”) My cell phone connects in seconds, when it connects, drops out in minutes (but hey—it reconnects seconds later, wash rinse repeat). Rather than invest in better reception or improved call quality, they give us cameras, voice recording, address books and games, when all I want is a decent phone call.

But the iPhone isn’t a phone. It’s a handheld computer with, among other things, a handy phone application. If you take out the SIM card, you can use your iPhone just like its sibling, the iPod Touch. Heck—leave the SIM card in, turn on Airplane Mode and turn your wireless back on and you have the same result. I suspect Apple doesn’t care about a phone as much as they realize that if you’re going to carry around a Tricorder, it might as well have a phone and since that’s the technology paradigm that everyone understands, it’s the easiest point of entry.

Fast forward to a future where cell phone service providers don’t rule the world of interpersonal long distance communication and imagine a device that gives you a portal to information, provides a conduit for communication, and allows you to access your personal data over Skynet. That’s what the iPhone does now, it just uses conventional channels because Apple can’t (or won’t) afford to be their own service provider on year one. Nor do they need to.

But on year five, after you begin to understand that the technology behind how you communicate is irrelevant compared to the interface, suddenly having a phone seems way less important than having a portal. Sure, you can make a “phone call”, though now you call it something else because phones are something you had back in the dark days of proprietary communications media. You just make contact, and you choose between video, audio, or text. I’m inclined to speculate on the future of mobileMe—could this be Apple’s quiet introduction of providing these kinds of services? The Apple store rep pushed it, but given my current needs, I declined.

But the LG Dare does all this too, doesn’t it? Sort of. What sets Apple apart, as usual, is the quality of their experience. The iPhone feels like a computer. It’s slick. The interface is fluid, intuitive and even though it has hiccups, it comes off as extremely sophisticated without being overly technical. The LG Dare, as an example, feels blocky, heavy-handed and…a lot like a cell phone. Because it is. It’s a cell phone with a computer in it. The iPhone reverses the hierarchy and thus changes the conversation.

Which brings me to a feature of distinction: I placed an order on Amazon.com last night at 2am through their iPhone app. It was sublime. While I love having full web access via Mobile Safari, loading and viewing web pages on a tiny screen is slow and cumbersome, though nice to have at times. Because once again, the Internet is the current paradigm, and it’s optimized for roughly 800 x 600 pixels on a large desktop monitor. But the Amazon app (among others) opens the door on a new path.

The interface is largely search-based, not browsing-based, so if you’re just poking around for shopping ideas, you’re better off going to the website. But for finding the thing you’re looking for and buying it, I’d sooner buy it on the iPhone than my computer. For one, it’s incredibly simple. No banners, extra links, or any other chaff. Just product pictures, a description, pricing, reviews, and buttons to add the product to your cart. Click through and purchasing is as simple as adding your credit card number into a field, choosing your desired shipping address, and off you go. I used to think interfaces that offered a dumbed-down version of the web were annoyingly limited. Now I think this is the future of online commerce.

The same could be said for interfaces for flickr (currently just a mobile webpage), wikipedia, and at least one iPhone porn site. The idea that these need to be viewed through a generic browser interface feels curiously outdated compared to using the iPhone. I could easily envision these spaces existing as “apps” on a desktop computer as well. The option to customize the interface adds much more benefit than having a catchall browser window. It makes me wonder if there’s really any necessity for a browser application at all—one could simply open the Google search app, dig for their information which is presented as a list of apps, click on their selection and up pops a mini-app of the “page” they chose. Each site becomes its own discreet process, rather than a tab hanging in a browser window.

But I digress. I realize it’s obvious, but the genius of the iPhone is the applications. And not just that they’re on there, but that they’re well-designed (for the most part), that they work and look like Apple products, and that the possbilities have just begun to emerge. We found three new restaraunts over the weekend using Urbanspoon (briefly: There are three tumblers for location, cuisine and price which can be locked. By shaking the device, the unlocked tumblers roll randomly, resulting in a restaraunt recommendation complete with a map and reviews from users and local papers). We avoided traffic with Google Maps. I found a color palette generator that works with colourlovers.org to access their palette library. They’re not indispensable, but I’m finding value for more than just my own entertainment.

And I’ve managed to keep from checking my email in every meeting.

So far.

After months of pretending not to care, I finally took the plunge and joined the ranks of dumb looking men staring at their hands while standing in lines, sitting in bars, on trains, in taxis, bathrooms, and next to their significant others (unless those SOs have iphones themselves, then it’s two dumb looking people standing next to each other not interacting whatsoever). I could write a whole blog entirely about justifying the purchase, but this would give way more attention to the infernal device than anything deserves. I’d even go so far as to say that because I bought one, I ought to invest some time focusing on whatever constitutes a counterpoint to the iPhone experience, thus ensuring that my existence doesn’t become a life support system for some stupid device.

But the fact is that it’s a great device, brilliantly designed and far more entertaining than anything that small has a right to be. Which is exactly the problem with it. You want to fiddle with it constantly, when you could be staying present in the moment and enjoying reality as it happens around you. I don’t need every second of my idle time to be filled with blinking lights and games, the internet, email or text messaging. Sometimes, I just need idle time to be…idle.

I thought about returning it. I am still thinking about returning it—I have another 27 days to deliberate over whether I’d really be better off with an iPod Touch, or no iPod at all. So far it hasn’t made my any better looking, wealthier or healthier. I could argue that it’s made my life experience a little more interesting, perhaps even more enjoyable (notably, having a direct link to icanhazcheezburger.com provides some good laughs now and then. I love cats). But the real selling point of the iPhone is convenience.

I can check the internet in places I never knew I needed to check the internet. While I’m pooping, for instance—a moment when my hands are entirely idle (well, most of the time) and I want to be anywhere but where I actually am—or while waiting at a train crossing. I can look up directions while I’m in my car, find out traffic conditions, or best of all (and I’m not kidding) I can look up movie times while out with my girlfriend. I actually do these things, and I find the iPhone to be a hell of a lot better than a google maps printout or scrounging around for a newspaper in downtown Seattle after 9pm.

As a device that brings people together, it has potential. Photos, music, entertainment—these things you can share with the people around you, usually for your mutual benefit. As a device that creates isolation, it’s unfortuantely and perhaps inevitably better. The sheepishness I feel when I pull it out in public probably isn’t entirely bad—I wish more people felt a similar sense of shame about some of their behavior. Take talking on your bluetooth headset in the grocery store, for instance. I’ve done it, I’m not proud, but it’s awkward for you and everyone else. I see that as both a hardware problem and user error. The right device would allow you to not look as though you were a crazy person talking to yourself, and the right manners would empower you to use good judgment about when it’s appropriate to have a high-decibel conversation in public and when it’s not.

So, the experience for me is both a gadget investigation as well as an exercise in moderation. Can I enjoy the benefits of a pocket computer without succumbing to every bad habit it enables? I’d like to see the iPhone and its ilk as something not inherently evil. I could have made all the same arguments about cell phones ten years ago and I would have been just as right. And now a decade or two later we see that some of the downsides are valid, as are many of the benefits. In the era of infinite data and always-on technology, I want to stay as acutely aware of what we stand to lose as what we stand to gain.

Three years ago, after fielding months of frustrated phone calls from my mother to help troubleshoot her ailing PC, my persistent lobbying for her to purchase a Macintosh finally paid off. Within a week, our phone conversations resumed their normal peaceful tone and we only talked computers to discuss how great her new iMac was working out.

But as users and computers tend toward entropy, eventually the phone calls started again—less frequently than before, and I could usually solve the problems more quickly. Nevertheless, we were ramping up toward a Tech Support Crisis in short order and upon my last visit I discovered that despite Apple’s best attempts to make OS X easy to use, it’s only just this side of impossible for a menopausal woman in her 50s to navigate without leaving me with cold sweats and trembling.

Much of this isn’t exactly Apple’s fault. I’d like to thank the developers at Western Digital personally for implementing a notification window that pops up every single time a file is backed up to the external drive. One of the great things about a reliable backup system is that you don’t have to worry about it, so I can only assume that by knowing about the status of each and every file as it gets transferred, blinding irritation is not the user experience they were aiming for. Oh, you can turn it off, sure, but if you’re not a computer-savvy type, you might be worried that you’re turning off your whole backup system, not just the WD equivalent of Clippy, the World’s Most Annoying UI Feature of All Time.

My attitude toward data backups has been embarrassingly cavalier throughout my tenure as a computer user. The fact that I’ve lost very, very little data over so many years is a blessing of luck. Time Machine was my first honest backup system, and Leopard came out, what—a year ago? So it was to my absolute (and admittedly naive) shock that no more than four weeks after leaving my mom’s house, (and two months after her Applecare expired) I received a call on the red phone that her internal hard drive had in fact failed catastrophically, and she was taking her iMac into the Apple store that afternoon.

No problem, I thought, because she has been backing up her crucial files for as long as I’ve known her to own a computer. Since her Applecare expired, it’s going to cost some money, but all will be well thanks to Apple’s great wealth of Geniuses and customer service.

It’s worth mentioning that I received this call while on a road trip to visit my dad, so my availability to actually help was very limited. This becomes important later, in the chapter where I spend $100 on roaming fees while driving from Montana to Seattle talking my mom through the file restoration process. If you know the road then you know that cell phone reception is limited to line of sight signal paths along straight sections of road, of which there are approximately four between Helena and Coeur d’Alene. I expect my phone bill is 40 or 50 pages thick with a profusion of 1-3 minute calls all within a couple of hours.

The next call I got went something like this. “Well, I don’t know what happened but the guy at the store replaced our hard drive, but he wouldn’t give us the old one back. He told us that if we didn’t like it we could go someplace else he didn’t help us restore any of our backed up files and now I’m home and I have files everywhere and I don’t know what to do.”

It turns out that, as part of the service agreement, Apple does in fact not return your original failed parts. These are presumably whisked off to a team of engineers deep within the bowels of Cupertino who take the item apart and study how and why they failed. If this is your video card, no big deal. But if this is a hard drive with the last fifteen years of your financial data on it, you might be concerned that the guy at the Apple store with the bad attitude and the short temper doesn’t have your best interests in mind. Or your mom’s, since she didn’t seem to immediately connect with my fears. (Further research would turn up information that, while it is not Apple’s policy to return your bad parts, you can purchase them back for a small fee. Weird enough, but now a moot point since Mom and computer were at home while the hard drive was no longer in her possession.) But in either case, this was a far cry from the kind of service I expected from Apple—a company whose sole existence is about delivering great customer experience. To say I was unhappy was an understatement. My mom is not a doddering old lady who can’t find the Any Key or who puts her coffee cup on the CD tray. She’s a sweet, patient woman who has been a dental hygenist, Xerox technician and was at one point pursuing a career in GIS. I pushed hard to have both my parents buy Apple computers specifically because of their quality and service, and now one asshat at a mall in Denver was undermining not only my faith in Apple, but my mom’s faith in me. We had a problem, Houston.

With a little encouragement, I talked my mom into giving Apple customer service a call to describe her experience at the store. Her first call went to tech support and instead of getting much sympathy she got most of her data restored which, though helpful, didn’t make her feel a lot better about Apple. I sent her back to the phone, this time directly to customer service.

Within minutes the service rep had my mom booked for an extended appointment at the Apple store, gratis, complete with an apology and a concerted investigation into the identity of the employee who “helped” her previously. At the store, she was greeted by both a friendly Genius as well as the store manager and was taken to a back room where the gentleman sat with her for hours, helping her recover her data. He installed the 2GB of RAM that she bought, a complimentary upgrade of iLife and, because they had run out of time for the day, he asked her to come back in the morning. At that point, I got a phone call wherein my mom not only extolled the virtues of Apple, but thanked me for encouraging her to call them in the first place.

The next day—today—she met with the same Genius and he installed a fresh copy of Leopard, set up her external drive to work with Time Machine, and installed a free upgrade for Quicken. My mom called me this afternoon to, again, thank me and say that she was trying to figure out how to send the folks at the Apple store a thank you gift.

The moral of this story is self-evident, but I’ll say it anyway: Customer service wins, and Apple knows how to do it right. Had I expected anything less, we wouldn’t have gotten past the conversation about her poor treatment in the first place, and I’m delighted to know that Apple delivers on their promises. The fact that they made us both look like heroes just hits it out of the park. Thanks, Apple.

A few photography links I’ve been enjoying lately:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/acksonjay/

http://flickr.com/photos/sjrohde/

http://flickr.com/photos/tannerv/

adcBicycle’s “Through the Mirror” remix album, on which I contributed the opening track, is now available as a free download!  A tremendous amount of work went into this album by a roster of impressive talent, and it was well worth the wait.  Check this one out ASAP!