Me, and my iiiiPhone…
One of the hottest-selling and most eagerly anticipated products of this last year was the iPhone, the “smart” phone from Apple. The device itself is an example of graceful, minimalist beauty. The operating system for it is well thought out and helpful in all of the right places, making doing anything on the iPhone nearly effortless, even without a manual. Unlike my Symbian-based Nokia with it’s thick tome, the iPhone comes with a small folded pamphlet that gives you the highlights, and assumes you can figure out the rest as you get there because it’s just so easy.
For the most part, they’re right. I’m sure there are Treo and Blackberry users out there that will grind their teeth at some of the limitations. After spending a week with one, I can say that for me, it’s almost perfect. The programmers at Apple need to be thanked.
I do have a few general complaints though. There are also a few oddities that tell me there is more to come.
First of all, there is no selection of text, or copy, or paste. Secondly, if you’re going to allow people to email pictures taken with the camera, not having the phone send and receive MMS messages is a bit odd. While it would be nice if I could SMS multiple people or use instant messaging, I don’t have a high demand for these features and can comfortably live without them.
The first two issues are the most annoying. The lack of select/copy/paste because it gets in my way the most often, and the lack of MMS because it just seems an odd oversight when you’ve included the lowest common denominator (SMS) and gone well past it (full IMAP email). MMS is still very commonly used and since my kids and many of my friends don’t have iPhones yet, how am I supposed to send them pictures? At least with the “select” issue there is a valid question of how do you “select” text on the touch screen that’s easily differentiated from the other touchscreen commands.
There are places where you can legitimately copy or paste entire blocks of text such as URL’s, without worrying about seelction. This brings me to an interesting incomplete feature I stumbled into. While reading an online book, I had quickly noticed that entire paragraph blocks highlight when you touch them. I didn’t think much of it, but at one point when the block highlighted, I kept my finger down, and a bezel popped up like so:
Note the tiny letters under the excerpt of text that say “Action.” This leaves open the possibility of copying or otherwise using blocks of text in the web browser, as well as suggests at least one way that selection can be done for at least paragraphs and perhaps even whole words.
I’ll probably write more about using the phone later.
Update: After doing a bit of digging, it turns out I’m not the only one who’s seen this inactive “action” button. It apparently shows up when clicking in the margins of web pages that have them. Why this applies to the html e-books available at Baen is a bit of a puzzle as of yet, andI have seen no mention yet of other text being incorporated into the “action” button.