Apple iPhone
Apple announces it’s new iPhone (iPod, mobile phone, palm-top). Too bad I’ve just recently got a new phone and new iPod.
It does look pretty darn nifty, especially the touch screen interface. It’s interesting that this final (?) version is quite different to the many different prototypes or suggestions that have been floating around for years.
The video demos on the site show the interface in action, but I wonder how well this would work in practice. That’s a hell of a lot of fairly complex functionality to squish into one device without any buttons. Most of their devices are quite usable, but lately the usability of Apple products has slipped a bit.
For example, my new 80GB iPod has a few surprises. Firstly the search functionality is new (or at least it wasn’t on my old one) and seems OK, but it might be pushing the limits of the controls (scroll ‘wheel’ and buttons) available.
Then there’s the fact you need to wake it up by pushing ‘menu’, on my old iPod you could just press play and keep going where you left off. The extra step is annoying, especially as the Apple logo that appears whilst it’s waking up is hard to spot and at first I thought it wasn’t doing anything at all.
Oh and then there’s this little gem: if a track has an artist but not an album, browsing by ‘artists’ doesn’t show the track! You can get to it by browsing through ‘songs’ or by using the search though. For some reason I immediately started thinking this was because an SQL query buried in there somewhere joined the artist table with the album table in order to show the tracks for the artist in question. How geeky.
About the author
Patrick Kennedy is a user experience strategist and design researcher based in Sydney Australia. He leads research activities that improve the user experience of cross-channel products and services; helping both designers and business decision makers in bringing those products and services to fruition. Read more.
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