Matter/Anti-Matter

I am now a reverse switcher--I switched from a BlackBerry to an iPhone about six months ago, and now am switching back again. Why? Basically it comes down to the fact that the iPhone is really good at the stuff I do 10 percent of the time, but pretty poor at the stuff I do 90 percent of the time.

This is not to bash the iPhone. It has been a transformative device in the wireless industry and forced everyone else to up their game. It has shuffled the power structure among device makers, service providers, developers, and the broader ecosystem. But such a sophisticated device is a very personal choice, and people have very different priorities for something they use and carry around with them almost every waking hour. My phone is provided by and for work, and I primarily use it for work purposes, and for that I find a BlackBerry much, much more efficient.

Now after having a BlackBerry Bold for a week, I realize how much I was fighting with the iPhone the whole time trying to get it to do what I wanted, at the speed I wanted.

iPhone upsides

There are definitely some things the iPhone does extremely well: 

• Maps: The best out there. Invaluable for me, and I'll miss these, though the latest rev of Google Maps on the Bold does all the same things. It just misses that last bit of visual flair.
• OmniFocus: I'm not really a big app buyer, but this GTD-based task manager is the one app that I use every day. I will lose it on the Bold, and I will miss it. (I'll continue to use it on my Mac.)
• Photos: I love how conveniently I'm able to synch my Aperture photo library with the iPhone, and the experience of showing photos on the screen. It's not something I do that often, but it is very handy when I want it. (I'm mystified why it's relatively laborious to get photos off the iPhone and into Aperture, though, requiring a manual import process as though it were any other SD card.) The imminent Desktop Manager for the BlackBerry promises similar photo (and music) syncing.
• Facebook: The iPhone Facebook app is mostly very good (though often hard to get a refresh), and the new version looks to be even better. But the current FB app on the Bold works very well, is actually faster than the iPhone one, does everything I need, and I find more intuitive to navigate.
• Safari: It's the best mobile browser, and while it has its downsides in general it works very well. But I don't do much mobile Web browsing, it's just not that much fun--still slow and inconvenient, and only worthwhile when there's nothing else to do or you're in a pinch. In truth, it's often more pleasant to look at mobile-specific versions of Web sites like NY Times and Southwest, than it is to try and look at the real page. They load faster, require less scrolling, strip out the advertising, etc. In fact, looking at NY Times mobile is faster than using the NY Times iPhone app (though it doesn't allow caching, but I was never organized enough to cache ahead of time anyway).

iPhone downsides

Now for the things I dislike about the iPhone:

General Usability

• Typing is what I do more than anything else on the iPhone, and it's the thing that causes me the most frustration. It's my No. 1 reason for switching. If I could get on with the touch screen, I would probably keep it. But I just don't like the touch screen. I am literally 3 times faster typing on the Bold, which has an excellent keyboard. No matter how much I "just trust" the iPhone, the number of typos and deletions I have to do is just unacceptable. Yes, it's all well and good to have smart predictive typing, but it keeps doing "fir" instead of "for," "sane" instead of "same," and so on. The horizontal keyboard helps, but then you only get a few lines of text to actually look at, and it's slow to switch when you rotate the device, and sometimes seems to get stuck in horizontal mode after I flip it back to vertical.
• Apple's insistence on the "simple" paned interface is indeed easier to get started with than the Bold, which has more of a learning curve. But unlike the big Mac OS, which has all manner of shortcuts, there are none in the iPhone. You have to follow the tortured route from one app or function to another without shortcuts. This is my second biggest complaint. By contrast the BlackBerry UI is incredibly fast to use once you learn it, as you do a desktop OS. The lengthy menus and the amount of customization possible are intimidating at first, but you quickly realize they contain everything you could conceivably want in any context. The two convenience keys make it instantaneous to get to your most-used apps.
• Fingerprints, earwax and general grime on the iPhone screen; it's constantly dirty and this both mars visibility as well as touch gestures.
• It's tricky to hold to your ear for more than a couple of minutes--too thin at the edge, and slippery. The Bold is bigger in width and thickness (a bit too big, IMO), but it is very secure to hold. It's not quite as well built as the iPhone, however.
• Poor battery life--it requires charging every 1.5 days for me, with 3G on most of the time, no Wi-Fi, and only a few calls a day. Having said that, I'm not doing much better with the Bold so far, so we'll see how it does once I settle into a more normal pattern of usage.
• iPhone camera is very slow to activate (often 7 or 8 seconds for the animated iris to open). It often jogs when I press the poorly placed onscreen button (causing blur) and my finger often gets in the way of the lens. There's no flash, no white balance or exposure control, basic photographic features that have existed in other phones for years.
• It's not that good of an iPod: Using it while it's locked is a pain. Using it in a pocket is a pain. No way to switch off coverflow (as on the Nano)
• No expandability. No card slots to add memory, you have to buy a whole new phone. With the Bold I can add 8 or 16GB micro SD cards for a remarkably low price.

The iPhone represents an interesting paradox that often comes up in usability testing: the UIs that are perceived as the best to use are not always the fastest. However, over time, people's opinions often change from their first impressions as the things that didn't seem that big of a deal at first, and which perhaps aided initial ease of use, now become barriers. At this point, enjoyment drops off dramatically. That's what happened with me. I was ready to throw the iPhone against the wall a few times because of how slow I found it to use, even as I appreciated its visual loveliness.

E-mail

• Shuttling back and forth to look at each e-mail account separately drives me batty. If I'm in my work e-mail account and want to see if my personal e-mail has anything new, it takes four clicks. And then four clicks to get back again to my work account. It takes no clicks in Blackberry to do the same thing because it unifies all e-mail accounts (and texts and IMs) into a single "feed."
• I have to unlock the iPhone to see if I've got a new e-mail, and remember the e-mail unread count from my last time looking at it (for each account). This often takes 30 seconds of constant interaction or more--not a big deal, it may seem, but it pulls my focus away from whatever else I was doing more than it should. The notification light on the Bold tells me at a glance when new mail (or SMS or voice mail) has arrived, saving me the trouble of picking it up to check.
• The iPhone Sent e-mail folder doesn't get populated in real time, and if I want to find a recent message I sent, I have to wait for it to download from the server. This can take several minutes if it's been a while since I looked at my Sent folder. On the BlackBerry, sent e-mails are included inline with received messages, making them easy to go back to.
• iPhone has no customization of font sizes for e-mails (message list, or within a message). With such a large and high-res screen, why can I only see less than five messages at a time if I have the message preview on with two lines? (Reduce message preview to one line and it goes up to...six messages visible! And still only eight if I turn off preview entirely.) That's just a ridiculous waste of space, and means I have to do a lot of scrolling. On the Bold I've got it set so I can see 13 messages at once.
• No auto-text/shortcuts to speed up repetitive message elements (e.g., On the Bold, I have created a shortcut sig and typing it at the end of an e-mail will fill out a signature as needed. On the iPhone you can only have one signature, and it's applied every time or never. And the Bold will let me create any other number of text shortcuts--mtg for meeting, fdi for frog design, inc. and so on). I was stunned when I got the iPhone that it couldn't do this, searching in vain for a way to accomplish it. (Third-party apps exist to do it in an extremely hacked way.)

Calendar

• Entering new appointments takes way too many steps due to the iPhone's modal-paned UI approach. On the Bold, it takes two button presses beyond the typing of the event name; I can be in and out of creating an appointment in a few seconds. Also the BlackBerry does simple things like allow a default setting for meeting reminders, where on the iPhone I have to select that every single time (I always want one). The numeric keypad on the BlackBerry makes entering times and dates much faster than the iPhone's gimmicky and finicky slot-machine style tumblers.
• No week view. This is my most frequently used view after day view, and not having it is a real pain for planning purposes. The iPhone's month view is next to useless.
• No snooze for meeting reminders, a huge miss
• Can't jump to a specific date in the distant future, have to tediously scroll or switch to and from month view. Why can't I swipe sideways on a day to skip to the next day, like with everything else on the phone? On the Bold, press G (go to date) and enter the date, done.
• Where in the day new appointments get inserted seems random. Sometimes late in the day or where an appointment is already placed, or even will default to a time in the past! With all the CPU power, you'd think it would at least just look for the next open slot. And why can't I double tap an hour in the day and activate a new appointment at that time?
• Can't send comments along with appointment acceptance/decline notices--a frequently needed ability to add nuance to the person who requested the meeting. 

Phone

• On the iPhone, dialing specific contacts is rather tedious if they are not saved in favorites. On the Bold I just start typing their name and it finds the number and dials it. I found a third-party app for the iPhone that does something similar (thought not as well), but it's bizarre that with all this CPU and screen that Apple hasn't rethought this daily activity.
• Muting the phone while on a conference call is a multistep process that requires looking at the screen. The Bold requires just a button push on the top and can be done blind. Safer while driving, where muting/unmuting needs to be done frequently when on a headset. The Bold also has a nice note-taking feature while on a call, and I can e-mail notes to myself or others afterward.

I'm clearly in the minority with my gripes. Most people seem to love their iPhones. Like I said, I'm not trying to bash the iPhone and say no one else should like it; this is a very personal choice. But at least for the time being, the Bold is a much better match for my needs.

An article in the New York Times says customers are being more attracted to "simple" products:

And, as it turns out, the buyers of consumer electronics could very well have been a leading economic indicator. Over the last year, they chose to buy two inexpensive and simple products, the Wii and the Flip, over competing gadgets bristling with more features.

But the article conflates two different definitions of "simple"

• Doing a focused function or small number of functions (i.e. it's "simple in what it does")
• Being easy and intuitive to use (i.e. it "simple to use")

The article cites a number of examples including the Wii, the iPhone, the Flip camcorder, and the Sonos multi-room music system. These products represent a spectrum of the different meanings of simple, but the article conflates them all together as though they were equivalent. If you're making decisions about how to approach a new product design, this is a very dangerous thing to do.

The Flip camcorder is very simple in what it does. It has removed all but the most essential functions of being a video camera, which has a knock-on effect that it is easy to use just because there is very little to learn about.

The iPhone is far simpler to use than any other smartphone out there, but it is very complex in what it does. With the App Store, that complexity grows every day. Indeed, if Apple had come out with a greatly de-featured smartphone, it would not have been a smartphone at all.

The Wii is not significantly easier to to set up or less complex than the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3, but they have put their emphasis on a different kind of game play than the "technical" type of games with steep learning curves that tend to dominate on the other platforms. This makes it easier to get started with playing the games themselves.

Which brings us to an important point: at the same time these devices are removing things, they are adding others. In the case of Flip it faciliates spontaneous use in a way that traditional large and expensive and complicated camcorders do not, and it can be customized with a very cool website to make it more of a fashion accessory. The iPhone added a new interface paradigm with its multi-touch, gesture-based touchscreen, and was able to push back the layered complexity that the wireless carriers tend to impose. The Wii brought joy back to video games with control accessories that use physical movement beyond one's thumbs, and which encourage more personal collaboration and competition than one gets from a first-person-shooter.

These additions have allowed the products to open up new market opportunities and reach customers that have stayed away from less convention gadgets in each category. But it's not just the removal of things to make the devices simple that's achieves this, at least as important is the judicious addition of evocative capabilities.

Sonos is in some ways is a counter-example: It's well designed and much simpler to use than the usual cobbled-together solutions for get multi-room audio using a PC as a music source. If simple was all it took to appeal, then they should have done much better. In fact it took additional complexity -- creating an iPhone app that allowed the iPhone to replace Sonos' custom-built remote (which also contains a scroll wheel and a color LCD, not unlike an iPod -- to goose sales, according to the article.

The common denominator throughout all of these is ease of use, and a new twist on the experience of using the product. But don't make the mistake of thinking that "simple" just means removing functionality. Sometimes that's appropriate, but other times it's exactly the wrong thing to do.

NY Times article

At the Consumer Electronics Show, Hitachi is demo'ing a product called Starboard that is a multi-touch interface at a very large scale. You can use it to control a regular PC, and they've also got some custom apps for it. One of those is shown in the video.

What's interesting is that this is a projected interface, so it's untethered from the need to have a touch-sensitive LCD. This allows it to scale very large relatively inexpensively. They were also showing a wall-size version.

The projector in both cases was a very short throw Hitachi model that could produce an amazingly good image from an extreme angle. For the one in the video, the projector lens was maybe a foot above the surface, perched top-center of the image. Yet the image was completely distortion free and perfectly rectangular and about 4 feet across. Same thing with the one on the wall, which was an even more extreme example.

(Credit: Photo illustration by Handvertising USA)

Advertising space is scarce. No wonder advertisers are innovative when it comes to taking advantage of underutilized real estate--such as the human skin.

Handvertising USA is an Orange County-based company that connects advertisers with customers willing to display ads on their hands.

"Almost everyone has been to a county fair, swap meet, bar or club and had had their hand stamped for proof of entry. We have found a better use for this space that could make everyone happy," says CEO Mike Brown. "We find venues also use the stamps to increase business. For example, venues are offering special prices on drinks if the customer has a particular Handvertising stamp. People are requesting particular stamps because they want to fit in and they want the drink special," he says.

This low-tech advertising idea will not work everywhere: Barcelona's exclusive VIP Baja Beach Club offers its VIP guests the option to implant a special microchip in their upper arms. The RFID-recognized chip not only gives them special access to VIP lounges, but also acts as a debit account from which they can pay for drinks. No fraud possible. And identify theft requires body theft.

Both examples indicate the renaissance of the human body in the marketing mix. While sidewalk wavers and door-to-door promoters are part of the old-school marketing arsenal, the new solutions are more sophisticated and go literally under the skin. Not only are the borders between human body and technology slowly disappearing; advertising, network, commerce, and consumer are converging as well.

Humans are still the best hardware. (By the way, they're still the most powerful software, too; it will take at least five more years, experts forecast, to develop a computer processor that is on par with the capabilities of a 6-year old child.) Consequently, NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest wireless operator, is working on a mobile phone that sends electric signals through the human body to transmit data, enabling electronic payments or data transfer at the touch of a finger.

There are many pundits who herald Apple for its "convergence strategy:" iTunes is on more than 300 million computers, Apple TV has been launched, and the iPhone has emerged as the most talked about new consumer electronic device in history and is expected to fuel the launch of more all-in-one gadgets from competing consumer electronic makers. Convergence is -- once again -- all the rage.

But what does convergence exactly mean? Let's try a very simplified overview. First of all, there is the media convergence between the worlds of telecoms, TV, Internet, and computing, including fixed-mobile convergence, voice and data convergence, and three-screen-convergence. Then there is what you may call messaging convergence: email, chat, video-conferencing, and other messaging tools are becoming more and more integrated. Device convergence, furthermore, describes the fact that almost everything from a laptop to a mobile phone to a television to a games console is now, arguably, the same kind of device: each consists of a microprocessor, a screen, storage, an input device, and a network connection. Finally, all these types of convergence require a convergent user experience. Media scholar Norbert Bolz argues that "Shaping the interface between telecommunications, new media, and computer technologies is the most important task of the future." Indeed, there is a gradual convergence of things with Internet and the Internet of things, resulting in ubiquitous computing and -- to a certain degree -- ubiquitous design.

Yet some outspoken critics of convergence remain skeptical. According to Al Ries, "In the high-tech world, divergence devices have been spectacular successes. But convergence devices, for the most part, have been spectacular failures." Ries provides some examples: "The first MP3 players (the Diamond Rio, for example) were flash-memory units capable of holding only 20 or 30 songs. The first iPod, on the other hand, had a hard drive and could hold thousands of songs. Now there were two types of MP3 players, a classic example of divergence at work. Every high-tech device has followed a similar pattern. The first computer was a mainframe computer, followed by the minicomputer, the desktop computer, the laptop computer, the handheld computer, the server and other specialty computers. The computer didn't converge with another device. It diverged. When the cellphone was first introduced, it was called a 'car phone' because it was too big and heavy to lug around. You might have thought it would eventually converge with the automobile. It did not. Instead it diverged and today we have many types of cellphones. Every Best Buy and Circuit City is filled with a host of other divergence devices that have been enormously successful: the digital camera, the plasma TV, the wireless e-mail device, the personal video recorder, the GPS navigation device. What convergence device has been a big success? Not many, although there have been a lot of convergence failures."

Ries was obviously wrong in predicting the failure of the iPhone, but nonetheless his view corresponds with the findings of a recent research project, conducted by Swisscom's R&D division. The study examines how users really use their cell phones, and it unearths some surprising insights that run counter to the widespread gospel of convergence: "People are in fact using different communications technologies in distinct and divergent ways. The fixed-line phone is the collective channel, a shared organisational tool, with most calls made in public because they are relevant to the other members of the household. Mobile calls are for last-minute planning or to co-ordinate travel and meetings. Texting is for intimacy, emotions and efficiency. E-mail is for administration and to exchange pictures, documents and music. Instant-messaging (IM) and voice-over-internet calls are continuous channels, open in the background while people do other things. Each communication channel is performing an increasingly different function."

So what do innovators make of these conflicting views? Of course, one could argue that the iPhone doesn't really try to be a convergent product and that, in fact, convergence is a myth that users don't care about. Is the answer to divergent user needs more divergence or better convergence? "We have to be extremely careful that we don't go in the Swiss army knife kind of direction where we lose focus on what the consumer wants," warns Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the boss of Nokia, in a recent Economist article. I think he is right. It is paramount that companies have a "convergent view" on product ecosystems and know when to design the space between the devices and platforms and when not - this is what Apple is so good at. What we need is a greater diversity of hybrid devices that orchestrate convergence and divergence to the benefit of a more satisfying user experience. Convergence does not equal "sameness." Convergence and divergence are not fixed attributes; they are adverbs that describe the modality of an experience. A convergence/divergence combination will enable variety, which will again enable true customization. The Holy Grail is not convergence. It is a slight variation of a line by Malcom Gladwell: "There is no perfect product. There are only perfect products."