I just got an iPhone. This thing is pure user experience: it doesn’t let you do anything you couldn’t already do with other mobile phones before (except being able to interact with voicemail messages individually, which is great), but it makes using those features easy, intuitive, and fun, which in my opinion is why people pay more for the phone and the required service plan.
As with any system, there are a few nits I could pick with the otherwise-sweet user experience, but there are two things so far that I feel are serious mistakes:
The first is the on-screen keyboard. There’s a sensor in the phone that does neat stuff like rotating photos and web pages and zooming them to fill the screen depending on whether you’re holding the phone in portrait (vertical) or landscape (horizontal) orientations, and switching to the Cover Flow view when you’re browsing music in the iPod section. (Most current digital cameras have this feature, too.) This is awesome. However, its application to the keyboard is spotty.
In the SMS and Mail applications, it’s only available in the narrower and smaller portrait orientation. If you’re filling out a form on a web page and the keyboard is already on screen, turning the phone doesn’t change the page or the keyboard. Having the landscape keyboard available at all times would allow the buttons to remain in their bigger form, thus improving typing accuracy and speed, and not lock you into an orientation once the keyboard is up.
The other is the take-the-picture button for the built-in camera. The button is on the screen and the lens is on the back of the phone. This means that if you want to take a picture with you in it, you have to line your finger up and hover it over the right place on the front, turn the phone around so you can no longer see it, and hope you hit the right spot. This is harder than it sounds, because the button is pretty small.
I see two possible solutions to this. The first thing that comes to mind is making the button bigger. This would make it easier to hit, but you’d be left with two sub-optimal choices. You could make the button almost as big as the entire screen and label it as such where the shutter button is now, but that might make it too big and lead to accidental triggering. The other is to make it not quite so big, but that would require an overlay to delineate the target area, which would get in the way of the on-screen live preview when you’re using the camera normally. (The phone has no way of telling if you’re in front of or in back of it, and having a separate mode seems like an unnecessarily complicated kludge.)
A better way would be to use one of the phone’s five physical buttons. While the desire to have each of them produce a single and unambiguous result, regardless of context, is a good one, this problem is annoying enough that I think it warrants breaking that guideline in this one instance. The Home and Screen Off (or whatever it’s called on the top) buttons need to be able to do their jobs all the time, so they’re off-limits. The Ringer switch is small, slide- rather than push-actuated, and requires some force to move, so it wouldn’t work well. But the Volume Up and Volume Down switches are both contextually and physically appropriate: they’re unlikely to be useful when you’re taking a picture, and are in a decent location on the side for both left- and right-handed operation without obstructing the lens, and since Up and Down are both controlled by one connected, push-activated rocker, the target is both large and findable by touch. And it would work the same regardless of which side of the camera you’re on. It’s not perfect, because nothing happens when you press the middle of the button, but it seems like the best solution given the constraints.
I’d love to know the reasoning behind the decisions to make these two the way they are. The camera’s shutter button seems like something that could have fallen through the cracks, but the lack of keyboard rotation seems more deliberate. Is there something I haven’t considered?