Newton Poetry

Amanda Fortini, writing for Salon.com, finds a good reason to complain about her “evil iPhone”:

The calls that go straight to voice mail, though, are the worst byproducts of the [AT&T] network’s weakness. Those messages pool silently, while the iPhone never deigns to give a signal or beep of any kind to indicate that they’re idling in your mailbox…If the phone was previously allowing voice mail messages to pool, now it seemed to be holding them for ransom. Even when it has service, messages don’t come through, and then later show up all at once, as though the iPhone has finally decided it’s in the mood to release them. Last week, all of my contacts in the address book vanished before inexplicably reappearing. The phone is worse than an orchid; it’s a high-maintenance techno-girlfriend whose demands are inscrutable and impossible to meet.

Fortini complains about the touch-screen typing and the auto-correct feature, too, both of which I’ve become used to and – over time – have come to enjoy. I like how the keyboard changes depending on how you’re holding the iPhone.

She also complains about how easily the screen cracks after you drop it, which seems like complaining about your car’s crumpled hood after you rear-end someone. I have my own first-hand experience with Fortini’s “fault,” and I know where the blame rests: squarely with me.

But the AT&T network (lack of) service and the voicemails not appearing until hours or days later – that’s got to stop. At first, I thought it was the piss-poor service in my apartment. One side of the apartment, and the upstairs, gets decent reception. But move into the dining room or the kitchen and you cross some sadistic border where cell service is completely missing. It’s like my rooms are made of Superman-grade lead.

It’s only natural that the iPhone receives some backlash. It’s becoming so popular, and selling so well, that problems start to become a statistical guarantee. The more people use something, the more it goes wrong. Think about when the iPod become super popular and then, predictably, started to attract critics.

Some of the iPhone’s problems are legit. The problems, however, are not with the phone itself. Mostly, I blame AT&T. It’s their network that sucks, and it’s their voicemail that fails to come through.

Get even the most basic aspects of the phone wrong – you know, the calling at the messages and whatnot – and the whole device seems to be tainted. I don’t believe that’s the case. I love the apps and the iPod and the fun the iPhone provides. It’s just that I also find myself cursing when Twitterific gives me a “timed out” message, or the Facebook app loads at dial-up speeds. That’s the fault of the network.

“Don’t blame the phone,” I tell my friends. “Blame AT&T.”

The worst possible thing happened to me last Friday: I dropped my iPhone 3G and shattered the glass screen.

I say “worst possible” only because of the way I felt at the time. When I picked it up after dropping it on the tile floor at work, I nearly sobbed. It felt like my dog just died.

Friday’s incident wasn’t the first time I dropped my iPhone. Thankfully, each time before, I dropped it on its protective white case.

Last week, however, it landed like a piece of toast and jelly, business-side down.

I couldn’t tell whether the awful screeching sound was from the phone or from me, but I knew right away that something terrible just happened. Picking it up from the floor, turning it over to see the damage, I felt my face grow pale. Everyone has to experience post-traumatic stress disorder, I reasoned, even in non-combat situations.

This was it. My phone was doomed. It turned on, luckily. The touchscreen still worked. But now there was a horrible spider-web crack across the top half of the screen. It was more than damaged – it was shattered. I took it back to my work desk and just stared at it.

Then I did some research. I didn’t opt for the Apple Care plan, so I was on my own financially. The best I could do is take it to my nearest Apple Store and see what they could do. From everything I read online, the best option was to pay $200 and have the Apple Store mechanic replace the glass screen. iPhone 3GSs are nice, but my phone was fine, and I don’t qualify for an upgrade. Not yet.

The glass replacement is exactly what happened, but that’s only half the story.

I took it to the Ann Arbor Apple Store, at the Briarwood Mall, and explained my situation to the Geniuses. My option was exactly as I had figured: $200 for a new glass screen ($100 of that is just for labor). And it was a quick fix. I had my iPhone back in about 10 minutes. When the Genius gave it back, I clicked on the wake button, saw that the iPhone was alive and kicking, and headed out the door.

When I got home, however, I found that the home button on the phone wasn’t working. I would open an app, get done with it, and click the home button to return to the iPhone screen. But when I hit the home button, nothing happened.

Whatever happened between the Genius taking my old glass screen and replacing it with the new one was enough to make my iPhone malfunction. The home button wasn’t taking me home.

I placed a quick call back to the Apple Store. A representative, Mike, answered. When I started to explain my problem, he kept saying, “Hello? Is anyone there?” Then he hung up. Weird.

A second call yielded the same results. A rep named Cat answered, asked “Hello?” a few times, and hung up.

My mic, it seems, was busted too. In fact, everything from the the home button down was malfunctioning. I called the Apple Store on the home phone and set up an appointment for the next day – Saturday at 1 p.m.

I came back into the store, and the Genius that helped me the night before recognized me.

“Weren’t you just in here last night?” she asked.

“I was, now I’m back,” I said. “However you guys replaced the screen, it busted the home button and the microphone.”

The Genius tried connecting my iPhone with the USB cable, but it wouldn’t sync with iTunes. Even the USB port, it seems, was broken. The technician took my phone to the back, disappearing for a few minutes, and came back with good news:

“We’re going to give you a new phone.”

Hoo-ha. He switched my SIM card out of my old phone, popped it into the new phone, and kapow – I had a brand new iPhone 3G.

I took it back home and, after a few connection issues involving resetting the phone several times and a lot of cussing, synced all my apps and data back to my phone.

The whole process, from me shattering my iPhone’s screen to getting a new phone from Apple, was a lesson. Now I grip my phone a little tighter and treat it like a new parent treats their bundle of joy.

But I have to give credit to Apple. Sure, I paid $200 for a new glass screen, but they made the whole process as easy as possible – right down to recognizing that their technicians did something to break my first iPhone. They remedied that with a brand new phone, and it was the right thing to do.

[An open letter to AT&T rep Mark Siegel in response to David Pogue’s “Take Back the Beep” campaign. I sent this in an e-mail to Mr. Siegel at 6:57 p.m. today.]

Mr. Siegel,

As an iPhone user, I’m lucky. My voicemail greeting does not burden a caller with an inanely-long “after the beep” message. I realize I’m one of the lucky few, however, because I face this message every time I call someone else.

It has to stop. And not just because of the cost to consumers.

I realize that AT&T needs to make money, and while I wag my finger in shame at using a tactic like the beep message, I understand. I work at a financial institution, and we’re all about using little things, here and there, to draw in more income.

What’s annoying is that it wastes my time. And time, sir, is something I can’t get back.

Like Mr. Pogue mentioned in his article, the basics of leaving a voicemail – which have been with us since the dawn of the answering machine – are known to everyone but the Amish and the corrupt. In fact, many voicemail greetings created by users include the words “you know what to do after the beep” or “leave a message after the beep.” Adding extra instructions without a user’s consent is time wasted.

We’re not long for this Earth, Mr. Siegel. You, or me, or your communications professor from college could go at any time. We live in strange times, after all, and one never knows when the mortality clock could stop ticking. It could happen as I type this. Ever heard of ball lightning?

Anyway, the point is – please let us users decide how much of our friends’ and family’s time to waste. What do you say? Instead of sitting and listening to a laughably-didactic woman tell me I can “page” (is this 1996?) the person on the other end, I just want to leave a message without being accosted by the recorded message. Right?

Right.

Dave Lawrence
AT&T Customer
Jackson, MI

PS: Fix your service. Half my apartment gets a mediocre reception, while the other half has none at all.

Chad S. writes:

I was doing some searching on Google for white iPhone impressions. WIth the new 3GS coming in both colours for both GB versions I have a choice to make when I upgrade from my 1G. Now I’m not the type of person to baby my gadgets, and I don’t believe in cases. So my question is, having had a white iPhone for some time now, how much do you baby it, and how badly scratched / scuffed is the back?

I love the look of the white, and if it scratches less than the black I’ll be all over it. I’m just worried that after time it will end up looking ‘dirty’ or really worn in instead of just scuffed. Thanks.

Good questions, all, because I was worried about the same thing.

For instance, I took a look at my iBook G4 and wondered, “Do I really want another white Apple product?” They get so dirty so fast.

I’m a big fan of the white iPhone myself, and have defended it in the past (people still wonder about the white iPhone’s “manliness,” judging from the search topics above). I opted to get a white case my iPhone, in the end. It matches the 3G back perfectly. The only thing missing (sadly) is the Apple logo. Looking at the back of my phone, I see all the scratch marks and am thankful I opted for the case.

Think of this: do you have an iPod? Is the metal back all scratched? Your iPhone will be comparable, depending on what else you keep in your pocket, how much you baby it, etc. Shucks, I have a back to mine and I still baby it.

I hope that helps.

Courtesy of maczydeco on Flickr, and used with permission under Creative Commons.

The Angry Drunk puts it well:

The technopunditocracy insists on vomiting forth articles about how the iPhone 3G’s camera compares “unfavorably” with point-and-shoot cameras. But I ask you, where are the articles pointing out the lousy quality of the average point-and-shoot camera’s cell reception compared with the iPhone?

Amen, brother.

If you’re in the U.S., have a great Memorial Day weekend!

“The Newton’s gone, but it looks like, at present, Apple has the most compelling PDA on the market. Go figure.”

– Blake Patterson at Byte Cellar. Blake is co-founder of the excellent iPhone gaming blog, Touch Arcade. Check out my interview with Blake, too.

Steven Frank, at his stevenf.com blog, has been thinking about what could possible replace the desktop metaphor that XEROX and Apple helped to pioneer.

Besides the desktop paradigm, Frank describes the pros and cons of other computing models – like the Newton’s soup-based data model and the iPhone’s multi-touch platform.

The Newton’s model had benefits, Frank says, but crumbled under the weight of OS-to-OS translations:

The Newton’s object store was an engineering marvel that fell apart as soon as you needed to exchange data with the outside world. You couldn’t just take a text file and send it over to your Newton because the Newton didn’t understand the concept of “file”. Your text first had to go through a conversion (via Newton Connection Utility) into an object format that some Newton application (in this case, probably Notes) could handle. Then you’d have the reverse problem going the other way.

Because desktop apps and Newton apps would never offer exactly the same feature set, inevitably these conversions result in loss of some information. Nitty-gritty things like precise formatting, metadata, and so on are the first things out the window when you need to convert data between two formats. It leaves you with a “lowest common denominator” form of information exchange that’s more frustrating than just being able to send files around. But in order to “just send files around”, you’d have to jettison all your radical (and useful) innovations and go back to square one: the good old hierarchical file system.

It’s a heckuva read, even if Frank offers no clear solution to what will come (web apps? Spotlight?) after the desktop metaphor has outlived its usefulness.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball has mentioned this before, but what I like about the Newton OS is that everything is automatically saved for you. When you scribble out a new note, you never have to press a “save” button. The only action you take with a note, after you’ve finished it, is to move it into some sort of organizational file system. But that’s optional. If you don’t want to move it, you don’t have to; you can shut off your Newton and the note stays right where you left it.

It’s like the Notes app on the iPhone, or the Stickies app on the Mac. Everything is automatically saved to some arcane folder deep in the Mac Library system.

What do you think? What’s the best possible platform to inherit the desktop’s dominance in computing?

Looks like Microsoft maybe trying to copy the iPhone.

Not that that’s every happened before, right? Microsoft copying Apple? What say you, Mr. Ballmer?

Next they’ll attempt to replicate some sort of “media pad” tablet device, or a smaller version of the Zune phone.

Have they no shame?

There are a few iPhone apps available that attempt to mimick Newton features, such as an updated PocketMoney and a few sketching applications.

The one that recently got my attention was WritePad by Phatware. WritePad is a free download, and offers the one Newton feature that the iPhone has been lacking so far: handwriting recognition (HWR). WritePad also offers cut and paste, a feature iPhone and iPod Touch users won’t experience until the 3.0 release this summer.

But how does it work?

Before we get into that, it’s worth noting that WritePad is a trial application. Phatware wants to test HWR on the touchscreen and is looking for feedback from WritePad users. That feedback will help develop the PhatNotes app. Hence the free download. Phatware also uses WritePad’s HWR engine to power other iPhone apps, like WritePad Events and WritePad Notes.

It’s basically a word processing program that lets you make and edit text files on your iPhone. The app includes a lengthy tutorial on how to use WritePad’s myriad features, like Auto Correct and user-defined dictionaries. There’s a lot to read and digest.

To start with, the logistics of “handwriting” on Apple’s new touchscreens are difficult. With only a few square inches to work with, and a thicker-than-a-stylus finger, your results will definitely vary. Accuracy is limited by the size of your scribbling, the size of your fingertip, and your handwriting style. And unlike the Newton, the iPhone’s relatively small screen size limits the length of your scribbles. WritePad employs a unique solution to the small screen size: you can overlap your letters in individual words. But is that even practical?

iTouch Tips give a great demonstration of the many features, like gestures and HWR options, and I’d recommend reading their post before digging in with WritePad’s options.

Without messing with the options or the tutorials, I went ahead and gave WritePad a test drive. Here are a few examples.

Given short, one-word scribbles, WritePad does a fair-enough job. I made a conscious effort to write neatly and cleanly on my iPhone, and WritePad’s HWR did the job just fine.

Given groups of complicated words, however, WritePad starts to fall apart. It reminds me of Newton 1.x’s brand of HWR: effective at times, but not nearly as good as 2.x.

I made several attempts at writing “Egg Freckles” in WritePad, and none of the translations came up accurate. In fact, the text got more garbled the more I tried.

WritePad does offer a “learn your handwriting” option, where possible words pop up to match your own scribbles. And supposedly, after a while, WritePad will learn your handwriting style. So part of it is patience, and part of it is giving the system time to adapt.

The only problem is, your words-per-minute speed will be miserable using WritePad’s HWR. With the keyboard, it logically gets better. Maybe an iPhone stylus would improve things, but I imagine few iPhone users will bother with a stylus.

It’s too bad that WritePad’s HWR is limited to in-app use. I imagine developers could find some use for system-wide HWR using WritePad’s method, but HWR is probably one of those “background” features that Apple doesn’t allow.

The other feature WritePad offers is copy/cut/paste, and this is done fairly well.

Here I write “Paste” using WritePad’s HWR (again, it does well at translating simple words).

WritePad translates the word (above). To copy the text, tap twice and drag across the word to highlight it.

WritePad offers cut, copy, and paste buttons at the bottom of the screen. To cut my “Paste” word, I just tap on the little scissors icon. To paste, simple tap on the clipboard icon, and WritePad pastes the word as many times as you tap. Clean and easy.

With the buttons, WritePad’s style of copy and paste differs both from the Newton and the upcoming iPhone 3.0 way of doing things. I can’t say if it’s better or worse because you can only copy and paste within the app. When you’re in WritePad, the copy and paste buttons are an automatic part of the UI. They work as advertised.

I had hoped that WritePad could act as a Newton-like Notepad application for the iPhone. Since you can open and save text files within WritePad, you can accumulate a hefty amount of notes. The Newton Notepad offered easy ways to organize your notes, however, which is something WritePad lacks. With WritePad, you have a list of text files with no apparent folder or file system to organize your notes.

If you want an easy way to edit and write text files on your iPhone, WritePad is a fine enough word processor – assuming you use the keyboard. But any hope for using HWR in an iPhone app effectively, especially one that replicates the Newton, is dashed when you start to write longer-form words or sentences on the smaller iPhone screen. WritePad’s HWR doesn’t seem practical enough for extended use.

A WritePad app on a larger-form iPod Touch or tablet, however? The possibilities of Newton-like performance start to grow. And to be fair, WritePad is a simple testing application that provides Phatware with enough user testing to implement WritePad’s HWR engine into a new, improved suite of apps.

So we’ll see how it works out. In the meantime, WritePad offers a bit of Newton-like functionality with the HWR, and a preview of cut/copy/paste that we’ll see later this summer. And hey – it’s free, which helps.