There Is No Cat

Field Trip

We stopped at an Apple store this afternoon; we needed a new power adapter for our three year old iBook G4 since the old adapter is fraying at the point where it enters the computer, making power somewhat intermittent. Oh, and we heard there was something interesting going on at the stores, too.

So I’ve played with an iPhone for about ten minutes. Didn’t buy one, so I can’t provide a detailed review, but hell, fourteen million bloggers out there are reviewing the thing, so you don’t need my input. Overall, I was impressed with it. The interface is really beautiful, and quite usable. I even found typing with the faux-keyboard worked surprisingly well. Laura, on the other hand, had some difficulty. So I think this is something that’s going to vary by person. Overall, very cool.

But I have two random observations about mis-features in the iPhone that I haven’t seen anyone else offer. First: people talk about how small the iPhone is, and when you compare it to my Palm Tungsten C, our Siemens SX-66 Windows Mobile smartphone, or our iPod Videos, yeah, it’s pretty small. It’s definitely way thinner than any of the above, and slightly less wide, but seems longer than any of them. But compared to the free LG dumbphone in my pocket, it seems huge. My first cell phone was a Motorola something or other, a candybar phone (one piece, no folding). It felt big, although it was smaller than the iPhone. It didn’t feel comfortable in my back pocket. I never took it anywhere; I generally left it in the glove box in my car. My current phone, the above mentioned LG freebie, is a clamshell phone (it folds). It’s definitely thicker than the iPhone, but it’s way smaller in the other two dimensions. It feels fine in my pocket, and as a result, when I leave the house, I take it with me in my back pocket. I don’t see Apple producing a clamshell iPhone any time in the near future; it just wouldn’t work with the kind of interface they’ve developed. Candybar phones don’t work for me on a day-to-day basis. The Palm (which isn’t a phone, just a PDA) and the SX-66 are handy when I’m going on a trip and don’t want to bring a laptop, but I generally don’t carry them with me otherwise. The iPhone looks like it’s much better at the sort of things I use the Palm and SX-66 for, but because it would also be my phone as well as my PDA, I would have to take it with me, and I don’t see that happening. So it’s unlikely that there’s an iPhone in my future.

Second random observation: Safari on the iPhone doesn’t respect handheld stylesheets. I’ve implemented CSS stylesheets here on There Is No Cat that rejigger the interface for use on mobile devices. Most mobile devices get one column instead of three, for example. Not the iPhone. It renders a tiny inscrutable version of what you see in a desktop browser, and then you do the pinching thing to zoom in (and I’m not complaining about the pinching; it seemed very natural to me, worked very well). I understand why they did this, wanting to give iPhone users a web experience as close to what they’re used to on the desktop as possible. I just think it was the wrong choice.

I’m sure Apple’s going to sell a billion of these things (and AT&T will sell a few dozen as well, if what I’ve been reading about the sales experience there is true). Probably not to me, though.

Tags: CSS iPhone Apple Safari

Posted at 12:15 AM