stevenberlinjohnson.com

Apple: Consumer Unfriendly

What a bizarre Joe Nocera Times piece about the lack of a removable battery in the iPhone. The key question:

One thing I wanted to know was why Apple had made a cellphone without a removable battery in the first place; it seemed like such an extreme act of consumer unfriendliness.

Why indeed? Hey, wait, here's one answer, quoted a few graphs later:

“The real issue is that Steve and Jonathan Ive” — Apple’s design chief — “have decided to emphasize sexiness and a different basic experience” over such ho-hum consumer needs as a replaceable battery. He was convinced that it was primarily a design issue; indeed, he thinks Apple is using a lithium polymer battery in the iPhone, which can be stretched into different shapes — and thus can be tucked into an extremely thin space.

How ludicrous and superficial -- not to mention consumer unfriendly -- to think that people might like a smartphone that's signficantly lighter and thinner than the competition!

According to Nocera's calculations, the iPhone battery might run out after two years of use, thus potentially requiring that it be sent back to Apple for replacement. Obviously, Apple made the decision that consumers would much rather have a slimmer phone for 730 straight days, and then have to part with it for a few days to get a new battery. I certainly would happily make that tradeoff. What's so hard to understand?

Two Hours With The iPhone

So I have an iPhone. (No surprise there, right?) Tried to be clever and buy at the downtown Brooklyn AT&T store, which was a nightmare and limited me to only one phone. Came home and my wife was so irritated at my having the only iPhone in the house that I got back into a cab and went into Soho at about 10:30, where I bought a second phone at the Apple Store in maybe 45 seconds.

First impressions after an hour or two of playing (and traveling in a cab) with it. Edge speeds right now are much better than I thought they'd be. Typing may be a little harder, though I'm still getting used to it. The landscape mode keyboard is SO much easier -- why is it only available when you're typing a URL?

But on the whole, my gut is that this going to turn out to be the best first-gen product Apple has ever released. It really is that good.

The thing that really struck me riding in the cab tonight was how foolish the consumers-don't-like-convergence naysayers have been. I'd been thinking of the iPhone convergence as primarily a pocket real estate matter: I'd be able to consolidate music and phone into a single device, thus leaving one whole pocket free.

But I hadn't really thought about convergence as a media experience. I got a little glimpse of that future riding in the cab tonight: I'm listening to a song, and checking email and surfing around a little, knowing full well that if someone calls me, there will be no fumbling around to find the phone, or switching from browser mode, or turning down the music, or pulling off my headphones -- the music just automatically fades out, and I just hit "answer" on the screen and start talking. And the second the call ends, I'm back reading email and the song starts up right where it left off. Pretty sweet.

Update The Next Day: EDGE speeds are way faster than I was expecting, in Brooklyn at least. Loaded up the front door of kottke.org in about 12 seconds while standing in the Long Meadow in Prospect Park. And while I was there, I read this excellent line from Jason, which is completely true for me as well:

After fiddling with it for an hour, I know how to work the iPhone better than the Nokia I had for the past 2 years, even though the Nokia has far less capabilities.

The Map Has To Show You Something New

I've been meaning to post about our new blogger maps at outside.in -- they were a little pet project of mine, and I'm pretty excited about how they turned out. As I've mentioned before, one of our guiding principles from the beginning has been that maps shouldn't be a prominent part of the interface, because people really don't read maps (unless they're looking for directions.) So the basic outside.in UI has the map as small as possible -- it's there to give you a basic sense of your location and zoom level and a mechanism for moving around through space -- and that's it.

But ever since we launched our place pages, which tag posts and stories with specific locations (schools, restaurants, etc), it's been clear to us that we can track the places that bloggers have been writing about in ways that most bloggers themselves can't easily do. So we thought it would be fun to create blogger maps, in a part as a service for the bloggers themselves, whose work we rely on in multiple ways.

But we didn't want to just put pins on a map for each place the blogger writes about, because for the blogger him or herself, that's not really news. When Brownstoner writes about the new Brooklyn Bridge Park pool, he doesn't need to see its location on a map -- he already knows where it is. And I'd wager most of his readers do as well.

Which gets to our other guiding map principle: the map has to show you something new.

So we decided to use the map as a discovery mechanism as well -- showing not just the territory covered by a specific blogger, but also the overlap with other bloggers who have written about the same places. So if you look at the Gowanus Lounge map, you can see recent places he's covered on the left, and then a series of orange and black "pies" on the map corresponding to each place. The size of the pie shows you how many total stories we have in our system about that place, and the ratio of orange to black shows you how much that conversation has been dominated by the current blogger. When you roll over each place, you can see headlines from all the other stories about that place.

We think this view adds a huge amount of information to the original blog itself. You can see in a single glance:

1. The general geographic focus of the current blog

2. The names of the places the blogger has written about lately

3. How active the conversation is about these particular places (ie, how many stories)

4. How crowded the conversation is (ie, how many other blogs are participating in that conversation)

5. The headlines from those other blog posts.

Now, if you knew the neighborhood well, you might be able to read through a blogger's posts and figure out #1 and #2 after a few minutes, but it'd be impossible to see #3-#5. It literally gives you a whole new view of the original content, and also manages to connect it to a wider conversation.

Cool, huh?