After being a 100% Nokia-user for almost 15 years, I bought myself an Apple iPhone 3GS some months back – primarily because the Nokia N97 is weighed down by the legacy of Symbian and the Nokia N900 doesn’t have 3G support at 850MHz, the best 3G network around here. I was initially hesitant on making the switch, but quickly realized I should’ve switched earlier. The iPhone simply offers a good user experience. After some months of usage, here are some observations:
The good
- The browsing experience; it’s simply great.
- UI responsiveness is in a class of its own; scrolling is ultra-smooth throughout (smoother than on many Snapdragon-powered newer phones) and things just feel responsive.
- The touch screen, as far as capacitive touch screens go, is very sensitive, accurate and responsive. Even typing works surprisingly well on the virtual keyboard. The screen resolution is a bit on the low side for a modern high-end smartphone, but is sufficient for most uses.
- The availability of a huge selection of applications and the convenience of the App Store; as I have noted earlier, while the App Store interface is not very good, the existence of a single repository for all apps and simple, quick purchase & installation process makes for a good user experience. And there are some excellent apps – so good that they could play a role in the device selection. I will highlight a few in a later post.
- The seamless switching to WLAN access whenever one is available works very well and makes for a good user experience, especially in locations with “known” access points like at home or at work.
The bad
- The camera. While it takes decent video, the photo-quality and user experience is downright terrible. My three-year old N82 easily trumps the iPhone in photo quality.
- Non-customizable idle screen; I want widgets or at least some level of customization for the idle screen. With the iPhone, all you can change is the background picture. The idle screen doesn’t even have upcoming calendar events for crying out loud.
- Some UI idiosyncrasies and limitations; for example there is no splitting of the SMS conversations; I would like to be able to cut off a conversation and start a new one with the same person instead of having all the messages to one person in a single list that eventually grows too big anyway. And there’s not even a good way of archiving the messages to a “saved” folder or anything.
- No Flash support. It’s sometimes annoying as many websites use Flash, but most of the time it’s not a huge deal – YouTube being supported by its own application helps.
- E-mail interface could be better. It’s good as it is, but has some annoying little things: for example, switching among multiple accounts takes too many clicks and GMail conversations show up as individual e-mails.
- The calendar UI is actually quite bad. Adding an entry is far too complicated and it’s missing a week-view!
- No multitasking. I used to consider this a deal-breaker, but I’ve learned to live with the lack of multitasking quite well. A working notifications infra helps a lot.
All in all – and despite the lengthy negatives list above – I am more than happy with it. The iPhone has certainly increased my time spent using a mobile device – it’s a device that’s a pleasure to use. It most certainly suffers from some deficiencies, as noted above, but the positives outweigh the negatives.
Depending on what Apple comes up with later this year, however, my next phone in 18 months’ time might or might not be an iPhone; I have lately been quite impressed by the newer Android devices like Google’s Nexus One. Give it another year or two to mature and we’ll have an interesting competition on our hands. And the Intel/Nokia MeeGo might end up surprising in a couple of years time as well. But today? The iPhone still wins in the user experience sophistication and simplicity – i.e. the stuff that matters the most to most people.
