now i can update facebook from anywhere

Like most nerds, I lusted after the iPhone when it was announced. I’ve always wondered how cell phone UIs could be so bad. My only guess is that the people who design the phones must not use them, but cell phones are unavoidable these days. Do they just struggle to use other manufacturers’?

Generally speaking, Apple designs pretty simple and elegant user interfaces, and the iPhone is no exception. I was able to resist buying one because of the price tag and because I hate AT&T. But once the software unlock was out there — allowing me to use it on T-Mobile — and the price dropped $200, I just couldn’t stop myself.

The UI on the phone isn’t without its quirks, and there are some missing things that I wish were there (3G, GPS, richer Bluetooth) but it’s still easily the best UI ever made for a phone, and it’s going to revolutionize the business. SMSes are represented for what they really are: conversations between two people. The UI is just like iChat on the Mac and it’s a pleasure to use. The full-blown browser is gorgeous and the multitouch interface makes zooming and scrolling easy. The behavior of the phone whenever you receive an SMS or get a call (especially when listening to the iPod) is brilliant. Google Maps is great, YouTube is an amusing distraction, Mail is passable. The third-party apps for it are fantastic.

The software keyboard obviously doesn’t feel as good a real one, but I would rather have that physical space for screen real estate when I’m not typing, so the tradeoff is well worth it. The keyboard buttons vary somewhat based on context, and the typo autocorrection works very, very well. I can now type very quickly with one finger and pretty quickly with two. I am not very good with two thumbs yet.

But the one thing I’ve been terribly disappointed with is the iPod interface. Steve Jobs called the iPhone “the best iPod we’ve ever made”, but I’ve owned several iPods and this is far and away the worst they’ve ever made. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more about this online.

The special sauce with the iPod has always been the wheel. It allows you to quickly seek within a song or move through hundreds of items quickly, but also gives you perfect down-to-the-second resolution when seeking within a song when you move it slowly, and you can easily correct any over- or undershot. If I gave you an iPod and asked you to seek to exactly 2 minutes and 43 seconds inside a 4 minute song, you’d have no problem. The iPhone (and presumably iPod Touch) use a short onscreen seek bar that is positively stone aged in comparison. You are never able to seek to exactly 2:43 in a song with the iPhone. Maybe you can get to 2:40 or 2:45, but not to the exact location. Now imagine that you’re listening to a 1 hour podcast, or a multi-hour audiobook. If you lose your place you won’t be able to seek to even the same minute.

I don’t really understand why Apple went with such a 20th century UI for this. I would have loved to see them display a wheel on the screen and emulate the old iPod behavior — it would be immediately obvious to existing iPod users and relatively easy to learn for new ones and would solve the seek resolution problem.

There are other UI annoyances in the iPod interface:

• You can’t see the full titles of artists, albums, songs or podcasts without playing them. On older iPods, you’d just move the cursor over one of these items, and the text would start scrolling like a marquee.
• No podcast show notes. This one drives me mad. Sometimes I want to skip interviews or segments or entire episodes altogether. Without the show notes I am missing this crucial information.
• Lack of tactile feedback is a downside, but mostly made up for by the microphone/click button built into the headphones. You can’t jump back to the beginning of a song, but I can just set up a playlist when I need to obsessively listen to one song over and over.

The duality of the iPhone as phone and iPod also make for difficult behavioral decisions. I can’t decide when I should take my headphones with me when I leave the house. Always? Then they get tangled into a ball in my pants pocket. I also listen to my iPod a lot at work, and I typically put it in the dock to charge and stay in place on my desk. I haven’t gotten in the habit of grabbing it whenever I leave my desk yet, and so I’ve forgotten it when going to lunch quite a bit. But these are things that I just need to train myself for.

So overall the iPhone is really a step down from my previous 2nd gen iPod Nano in terms of a listening experience. But the phone is a billion times better than all of my previous phones combined, and it means I have to carry one fewer devices. That’s definitely a plus.

Phil links to instructions on how to unlock it. I wish Apple would fix the seek UI, but they’re not particularly receptive to feedback and I haven’t seen much clamoring on the blogosphere to fix these. Of course, with my phone unlocked and running third-party apps I won’t be updating right away, at least until it’s broken again.