Desktop iPhone, please

In the wake of the iPhone 1.1.1 software update, there’s been lots of controversy over Apple’s disabling of hacked iPhones. As an iPhone owner and a software developer I’d like to see Apple support third-party iPhone software development — I think it would make my iPhone more useful, make the iPhone a bigger success, and make the world a better place. But at the same time, I’d like Apple to think about going the other direction with its desktop computers.

I spent 45 minutes yesterday helping an elderly friend set up Verizon DSL service on her brand new HP/Compaq computer. It was my first hands-on experience with Microsoft Vista, and I was appalled. On a Mac, hooking up DSL would have meant plugging all the cables in, turning the DSL modem on, connecting to a Verizon website, and picking a username and password. But on Vista nothing worked the first time, I had to install extra software, and through it all I had to answer questions. I counted at least 20 different alerts with questions about security, certificate revocation, firewall exceptions, etc. None of them was the sort of question that my friend, or any typical computer user, could answer in any reasoned fashion. It was as if they were designed not to actually gather useful information, but to make the user feel responsible for anything that might go wrong down the line.

So why was the experience so bad? I think the core problem was like the one alluded to in the old joke about how porcupines mate (the answer: very carefully). Vista is designed to run all sorts of software, good, bad (e.g. spyware and viruses), and ugly (e.g. the Verizon software). So it tries to protect itself with restrictions on application behavior, and an avalanche of inscrutable “is this okay?” alerts. Actually having the entire system work together in an attractive, seamless way, is a ridiculous aspiration. It would be like expecting to look and feel good hugging a porcupine.

So why did my friend purchase this prickly, defensive, ugly machine? All she wants is a way to email her children and grandchildren without tying up the phone. The only app she will ever use is Internet Explorer, in order to connect to Yahoo! Mail. She used to have an iOpener, an Internet email appliance, but after years of service that machine broke, and the company is out of business. So her kids took her to Best Buy and got her a low-end HP machine, and I’m guessing they paid substantially less than they would have paid to get the lowest-end iMac.

But what she got is very poorly suited to her needs, and while an iMac would be much better, it too would have been overkill. What she really needs is a desktop iPhone: a locked-down Internet appliance, that does a few things and does them perfectly.

There’s no question that Apple could make such a thing, and sell it profitably for under $500. It would work well, and it would be beautiful. And I suspect that the market is large, especially as web services (e.g. Google Docs) make having local storage and local third party software less vital. It could be that the biggest obstacle to such a product is the kind of backlash Apple is facing today over the iPhone. An intentionally limited computer could be tarred as a step backwards, a crippled “Mac Jr.”, defined by the things it is missing rather than the benefits it delivers.

Apple does not need to sell to the people who buy $400 HPs, they’re making plenty of money selling to the higher end of the market, and they could decide that they don’t need the public relations aggravation that would accompany a desktop iPhone. But I hope they are at least considering it.

A step forward for iPhone car adapters

Both my Belkin and Neo iPod car adapters started working (for some definition of “working”) with the iPhone 1.0.1 update. Thanks to commenter Allen Huffman for pointing out that change. Now the audio from the iPhone’s iPod mode is routed to the car stereo, as expected. But there are still problems:

• Everytime I plug in the iPhone (or start the car, if the iPhone was plugged in while the car was off) I get the warning about the accessory not being designed for the iPhone, and the suggestion to use Airplane mode. I have not had any problems saying no to Airplane mode, but having to answer the question each time is a drag.
• Sometimes, with the Belkin, I have to unplug it and plug it in again (and answer the Airplane mode question) before the audio is routed correctly.
• The iPhone is a great iPod if you have two hands and your eyes free, but it’s a step backwards if you’re trying to pause, play, or skip to the next track while keeping a hand on the wheel and eyes on the road.
• I’m used to leaving my iPod in the car, but I want to keep my iPhone with me. Running errands to a few stores involves a lot of shuffling the iPhone between my pocket and the adapter.

I’m grateful for this additional compatibility — I’ll take advantage of it on long drives, when there’s a passenger to control the iPhone. But otherwise I’ll stick to iPods for car use. At least until Apple comes out with an iPhone that that sends audio wirelessly from my pocket to the car stereo, and can be controlled (also wirelessly) with the steering wheel and dashboard audio controls….

iPhone and the Neo Ion

I finally got around to trying the iPhone with the iPod adapter in our other car, a Neo Ion from MP3YourCar. The Ion is wired directly into the stereo’s CD changer port, so there’s just one cable and the audio quality is great. But, like the Belkin, the Ion charges the iPhone but does not route audio to the car stereo. And (unlike the Belkin), the cable to the iPhone is too short to allow use of the phone (except as a speakerphone) while it’s plugged in. The short cable can be a hassle even with an iPod (e.g. when someone in the back seat wants to choose the music), and so far I haven’t found any iPod dock extension cables.

Apple was farsighted to standardize on the 30-pin dock connector for multiple generations of iPods, and smart to use it in the iPhone, so it’s a shame that the compatibility with existing adapters is only partial.

The iPhone and the original Macintosh

John Gruber made a comment in the second episode of The Talk Show podcast to the effect that the iPhone merits comparison with the original Macintosh 128K. That got me thinking about the two products, and their introductions.

I was in college in 1984, and while there was some hype generated by the “1984″ Super Bowl commercial, I don’t recall knowing anyone who was looking forward to January 24 the way I was. On the big day I picked up that week’s copy of InfoWorld, with Steve Jobs on the cover, and the first issue of MacWorld, at Out-of-Town News in Harvard Square, and headed into the Harvard Coop to see the machines on display. They had a couple set up, running MacPaint and MacWrite, with ImageWriters you could use to print out your doodles. There was no hoopla, no crowd, and at $2,499 (without peripherals) certainly no worries about running out of stock. All the same, the machines were magical, utterly unlike the personal computer state of the art.

The two things that struck me most immediately about the Mac were the screen, and the mode of interaction. At a time when other computers used green (or amber)-on-black text, with big fuzzy pixels, the Mac 128K used sharp black-on-white. And while you communicated with other computers through a layer of abstract commands, typing “copy letter.txt b:” because you’d learned that command for backing up a file to a different disk, on a Mac you moved your hand to actually pick up that file, and drop it where you wanted it to go. It was the difference between typing directions and driving a car.

Of course these are also the two things that strike you first about an iPhone. The screen is so sharp that it has nearly as many pixels as the Mac 128K, squeezed into a space that fits in a pocket. And again, the interaction is direct: you flick photos, pinch maps, and tap on phone numbers, instead of pressing some button that’s arbitrarily labeled with the function you want.

A dozen years after the Mac 128K shipped virtually all personal computers worked like a Mac. I’m not sure that the iPhone will be as sweepingly successful a template: by 2019 we may have moved on to phones that we wear like glasses and interact with by voice command, or something similarly futuristic. But in the meantime I expect to see more and more iPhone-like phones, from Apple and others.

By the way, it is easy to forget how primitive the personal computers of 1984 were when the Mac debuted. For a look back, check out James Fallows’ excellent Living with a Computer. Originally published just 18 months before the Mac was released, it portrays a now almost unimaginable world. Tellingly, Apple is the only manufacturer mentioned that still makes personal computers. The rest — Tandy, Processor Technology, DEC, Heath, Atari, Commodore, Victor, Vector, Wang, Sinclair, North Star, Xerox, Osborne, and even IBM — either no longer exist or have fled the business.

Advantage: iPhone Google Maps

In planning out-of-town business meetings I’ve found myself looking up hotels on my iPhone instead of using the MacBook Pro in front of me. Typing the name of the town where I’ll be is definitely slower on the iPhone, but the other steps — calling the hotel to ask about meeting rooms, and storing the hotel address, phone number and URL so I’ll have them later — only take a couple finger taps. The iPhone does much less than a laptop, but sometimes the few things it does are the exact things you want, with the result that you can do them more directly.

iPhone accessory compatibility watch

My favorite iPod car charger is the Belkin Auto Kit for iPod w/ Dock Connector. It keeps the iPod charged, pauses playback when I turn off the car, and has a line-out for iPod audio so I can use a cassette adapter without a second cable running from the car dashboard to the iPod. Unfortunately, the Belkin only half-works with the iPhone: the iPhone charges, but its audio is routed to the iPhone speakers rather than out the dock connector. I’ll be keeping an eye out for an iPhone-compatible replacement.

For more on iPhone accessory compatibility, see MacWorld.

The iPhone Internet, better than the regular Internet

YouTube on the iPhone is hampered (temporarily, we’re told) by a smaller selection of videos, but the videos that are there look strikingly better than the same videos viewed on a computer at YouTube’s web site. [Provided that the iPhone is on WiFi; on EDGE it apparently uses a crummier, lower bit rate stream]. I am curious how much of that is due to the use of H.264 (instead of Flash Video) on the iPhone, and how much is due to the iPhone’s higher resolution screen. I wonder if there is a way to access the H.264 versions of YouTube videos from a desktop web browser….

One thing that helped make YouTube popular was the ease of embedding videos into web pages and blog posts. Sadly, when you run across one of these in iPhone Safari you just get the you-don’t-have-Flash-installed missing plugin icon. It’d be slick if iPhone Safari instead put in a link that brought up the video in the iPhone YouTube app.

Google Maps vs. Multitouch scrolling

I love the drag-two-fingers-on-the-trackpad-to-scroll feature of my Mac Book Pro — it’s been a sneak preview of the multitouch user interface on the iPhone, very natural and convenient. But I’m always surprised at what happens when I use it in Google Maps — the map zooms instead of scrolling. The zoom operation is fairly slow, and there’s no quick way to undo it, so I feel frustrated every time this happens.

No doubt when Google first mapped mouse scroll wheels to the zoom feature it seemed like a clever trick: scrolling was already handled by click and drag, and this way you could adjust the zoom without moving the mouse. But the trackpad scrolling gesture — click and drag with two fingers — does not feel like a zoom, it feels like a scroll, and it is a scroll everywhere else in the UI.

Fortunately, finger dragging works as expected in Google Maps on the iPhone (with one finger or two). As more people become familiar with multitouch interfaces, on the iPhone and other devices, I expect that more people will stumble on the maps.google.com zoom feature, and perhaps Google will reconsider it.