PlexNex

eTufte's iPhone Critique

Edward Tufte's short video on the iPhone will help you understand why the iPhone is such an overwhelming success.

(This is an iPhone hacked with Jailbreak, so some of the apps you see are 3rd-party ones. Tufte says, "Don't try this at home.")

"In a world of clunky cell phone interfaces, the elegant iPhone opens with a high-resolution image provided by the viewer."

"No computer administrative debris, at all."

"Content is the interface, information is the interface, not computer administrative debris."

Some of the iPhone apps are cartoony, relying on low Excel- and Powerpoint-resolutions. It would be better to use the iPhones excellent screen resolution (163 dpi) to show finer-grained information that is useful ... 

"To clarify, add detail."

"Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information; they are failures of design."

iPhone is a showcase for information-design thoughtfulness. It is therefore surprising to me why the people continue to seem reluctant to champion the product's successes. I conclude that good information architecture is not all that obvious to us.

"If the information is in chaos, don't start throwing out information. Instead, fix the design. And that is exactly what the iPhone platform has done."

Tufte places it in perspective with his own form of elegant clarity about what information is and what it is not.

iPhone Uber Alles!

Why'd it take half a year for us to recognize the awesomeness of iPhone?

Tells you something about tipping points, and about intrinsic vs perceived quality. Tells you something too about the sameness of nearly all technology, about nearly all products generally.

Actually, it tells you about how long it takes most people to configure, program and use all the features of a smartphone ;-)

Snarking the iPhone Hype

I see a lot of blog & press comments this week about the iPhone hype. Berlind and Aaron Huslage, just for instance. There was this well-executed piece of expectations management last week from the Real Steve, but I'm not seeing any particular froth. Maybe it's because I'm not hanging out on Engadget.

I'm not feeling it. iPhone juices my lizard, but for completely logical and justifiable reasons.

Let me ask you this: Sure there's been a crescendo of ads and contextual pop-ups building toward the June 29th launch in a couple of days, but how, for instance, would you distinguish between what you call 'hype' and genuine, heartfelt enthusiastic anticipation by the Peeps?

You CAN'T!

As far as I can tell this is the most unusual, innovative thing since Linux -- and it doesn't have the geeks-only drag. The ladies, in particular, like iPhone.

Not until the box office comes in can you tell if this was hype or authentic, human buzz. A good amount of what your sensors pick up as hype is just talk. Talk's good, last I reckoned. Unless the talk is all air, vacuous repetition of bad or wrong thoughts, or evil plotting.

If your personal hype-O-meter is running in the red on iPhone, you might check its inputs...as well as the connections inside. There might be an illogical infinite loop.

UPDATE 6/28/2007...

Now this as the queues form at the Manhattan Apple stores -- the 'iCult" -- from ostensibly college-educated Robert Shirmsley at none other than the FT. I tell you, the press is having a hard time distinguishing push hype from pull enthusiasm. You need to understand two things: a) people are very sick of bad products which are not interesting, not innovative and not working; and b) there is genuine enthusiasm for Apple's differentiated levels of innovation on product concepts and designs which are humanizing, as opposed the the many products which are hyped that are not innovative and are, in fact, de-humanizing.

Incidentally, you must see David Pogue's humanizing iPhone demo video. And here is his article. Both are in The New York Times, free registration required -- and recommended by me for you to see the bellwether of the print-newsmedia efforts to exploit e-mail links, video & text on the Web. (The NYTimes is the very best at this, they get the Web -- WSJ and all others will follow them. Can you think of any other good examples?)

Don't wait for iPhone

I wouldn't normally just endorse a product anywhere, but twice in my life now I've come across the "killer app" that made my life better or easier.

Voice mail, for me, has always been a pain in the ASS.  I'm not a big cell phone fan, so I leave it at home when I go to work, most of the time, and hardly do I ever call anyone that I can email.  I've been conditioned, from a job in high school, to hate the phone too.  But people have my number, and they call without fail, almost every day, and leave a voice mail.  I check my phone when I get home, and I'll have 5 messages.  I never listen to them.  I eventually have to listen to them, or at least go through and erase them, when I get a call from someone who I would like to talk to (re: job or friend or family), or when my inbox fills up.

No longer!  I came across this service called GotVoice.com.  It's free, with an option to upgrade the service for $10 a month.  The iPhone's one killer feature that I would possibly consider getting it for, the random voice mail retrieval bit, is covered by this.  The iPhone's will be better, judging from what Steve Jobs showed us on his keynote introducing it back in January.  GotVoice has bits of your service's computer voice with the instructions recorded into it, but I'm sure it's a timing thing that can easily be worked out.  Nevertheless, it's not a big deal, and this thing retrieves your voice messages and allows you to play which ever one you want.

The free version offers scheduled message retrievals 3 times a day.  The paid version retrieves once an hour.  The paid version also offers mp3s of your messages forwarded to your email account, and an rss feed.  I get email saying I've got a new message, but no mp3s.  Yet.  And the paid version will log in to keep your voice mail up to date with what messages you deleted nightly, as opposed to weekly on the free version.  In free mode, you can send an mp3 attachment of any message to any email address.

This is absolutely something I would pay for, if / when I find out that the free version just isn't cutting it.

The other killer app for me was coffeeam.com, which will deliver two random pounds of freshly roasted whole bean coffee, from all over the world (like Galapagos Islands) to your doorstep for $25 a month including shipping :)

iPhone is All the Buzz / Woof

All the dogs in Central Park this morning were abuzz about iPhone...whatever it will eventually be called. iTalk? iGen? iTelephone? iMe? iWoof?

They enjoyed that all the small dogs at CES felt like the bigger dogs at Macworld were having the better party. Admired Job's single-handed PR genius. Concensus is that it's very cool, evincing the must-have qualities of iPod. Jobs' SEC troubles are over; he's the biggest dog; Cisco will take the money, or Apple will do some even better branding. Agreement -- sniff, sniff -- the Cisco lawsuit is unbeatable PR. 

Even the usually laid-back Golden Retrievers said that the critics are mistaken, that Blackberry should adjust projections downward. Ease of use and aesthetics will trump the complexity of the old e-mail device -- even for clandestine text messaging under the conference table (when the small dogs are trying to get an edge).