The Apple iPhone wasn’t a miracle just a repurposed design from arrogant salespeople

 

It really needs a glove with the case built in for the left hand.

I just got an iPhone.

 Since all the hype has died down about these iPhones 2 years later, and people have accepted this device as the most amazing thing ever I thought I would post my reactions to this nice but not miraculous device.

The first thing that I realized when I got this iPhone was that its a video iPod. (of which I also own) It is a repurposed design of a former product. That isn’t revolutionary at all.

It’s like someone at Apple said, wow I like my iPod so much I’d like to make calls from it and ditch my phone. And they did it. All the technology was already developed for a former device. Some new things did have to be added and re-engineered. But there is so much re-purposed from 5-7 years ago, the development costs were probably not that high because they knew pretty close how to use the materials to do this from past experience.

Now I see this Apple tablet image in the news and think they are re-purposing it again on a larger scale. I get the if it’s not broke don’t fix it idea, but their marketing and PR hype is a bit off.

I think these functions work really well:

• The touch screen is better than the old Palm Treo one and more intuitive. I am impressed at how they solved the QUERTY problem with a touch screen.
• I think the apps are also very good and its nice that they share the love with the app companies that develop them. I don’t think $5 an app is a bad price for what they deliver and plus you should think before you download a ton of apps and a cost helps you do that. The alternative is that your HD gets full and crashes quickly.
• It syncs with Yahoo email very well, which is what I use for one of my accounts. It turns out that email is very doable on a small screen.
• I like the pull the corners effect to read web pages and increase the size of the fonts so you can click a link. This is very intuitive.
• The GPS is pretty good. I watched my phone show a blip of my location on a map that was about 2 seconds behind where we really were as we drove home. That is pretty good bouncing off a sattelite that fast. I think the directions from where we are to an address will be very helpful in the future.
• Doing the convergence thing and having the phone, music player, GPS, camera and email all together works great.

I think these things need work:

• The rss feeds don’t always work on the iPhone. Not that it doesn’t literally work, but these are items I’d like to read in more depth, and on a tiny screen its hard. Also all the links go out to the web and I am finding that I can’t get that data very easily in Chicago.
• The web issue is still an issue with web enabled phones. I hated that things took so long to download on my old Treo 650 and 4.5 years later its still an issue with the iPhone. (heck its an issue on my computer sometimes with Google reader)
• I think people who have iPhones use them on the go a lot and the backup for the wireless network are free wireless networks. Which means you’re in trouble if you want to download an rss feed in google reader online. (meaning the bandwidth exceeds the ATT mobile network and that is sometimes spotty with its coverage)
•  The Metra commuter train and Chicago CTA don’t have free WiFi on their trains and busses and you can’t always find one when you are on the street either. (neither do our cars) So, there are a lot of times/places I look down at my phone and can’t connect to anything (phone or internet network). fail.
• I feel like we’ve developed content and a device for reading things in real time that wants to be downloading info/updates 24/7/365 and the networks still look like swiss cheese or a spider web, with gaping holes in them. We need more ubiquitous universal access before these devices can really be life changing.
• The touch screen is great but then switching to a physical button for on/off seems counter intuitive. Why not make all the functions be a part of the touch screen? I keep looking for an off button in the screen itself. 
• The battery life is horrendus. If I read email and rss feeds on the train and bus between home and work I use 50% of my battery life. Holy Monkeys, this needs a better battery or a plug that pops out the side that you can stick in any outlet you find.
• I also like that Steve Jobs has the kind of what I say goes power and involvement in the details to make his products good on many levels and keep the design level very high. It’s impressive he has been able to hang on to that power in a large company, it is rare to see and keeping one person in charge makes decision making faster, easier and true to the original purpose. Its how things get done if that person is well rounded in knowledge and willing to enforce what they preach.
• There is also the annoying problem that on any field you need to enter text you can’t click to put the cursor anywhere on the field to start typing except the end. If you want to change one letter you have to backspace the entire field until its blank and start over. We need to have a click to cursor ability/function, do apples just not do that?
• The me.com thing they sell as an add-on is cool but way way overpriced. I cited that 1 yr of Flickr unlimited access is $25 and 1 yr of full LiveJournal access is $25. Why is syncing my phone to the web $100 for the year? Assholes. I did get a small discount and got it for $65.
• The Apple sales guy was over the top. I really hope I never have to go back to that Naperville Apple Store again. He was about 18 and very arrogant. He made me (age 34) feel stupid for not knowing everything about the iPhone or web phones and his Apple Brand Arrogance and demeaning tone was disgusting. Why ask us about our computers at home? Why rip on them in front of us? When you don’t even own one? Admit most people have windows machines and then say why you might consider the Apple, don’t just say everything else sucks. OMG, and don’t explain everything for 2 hours when I just want to buy the damn phone. Dragging things out forever and then asking 7 times if we want to buy the apple care program that I didn’t want. And when someone says they will look it up online and then decide later, don’t say look it up now on this Apple, that is a high pressure sales technique and if I didn’t need a phone that day I would have walked out of the store at that moment. Totally unethical and wrong to do to a customer while you are looking over their shoulder. So, at all costs avoid Apple sales assholes that admit they don’t even own any of the Apple products they sell.  Just buy stuff online if needed. 

The basic thing is that the phone was worth the $288 that I paid (for the 16 gig). I paid like $300 for the Treo 650 in 2005. I think if this works for a few years it will be ok, and worth the purchase. But it really doesn’t need the hype or the arrogance.

National Marketing Email Unsubscribe Day September 1st on Labor Day

Get your life back (and time) from your inbox. Unsubscribe from email newsletters and marketing messages on Labor Day September 1st.

I am proposing that everyone take (an hour or so of) time on Labor Day to clean out your overloaded email boxes and unsubscribe to the emails you always delete or file to read and never come back to. If you have not read it in a month or longer or you delete the email newsletter or marketing messages every time you see them, just scroll down to the end of the email window and click the unsubscribe link.

I think that everyone has the best intentions when they subscribe to email newsletters and marketing messages. I have subscribedto a lot of them over the years and only this week did I finally get to my breaking point when hundreds of messages were commonplace after only a few days away from the computer. Most were from companies I had purchased things from in the past, social networking sites that send you an email every time something happens, blogs which send updates via feedblitz and news sites that send news and links as they happen. Oh and the ubiquitous google alert on anything I was a fan of or working on at that moment. There were also some marketing newsletters from publications that write about the industry that I work in but as time has gone on some were relevant and others, not so much. Sometimes you also have to subscribe to and email newsletter in order try it and see what info they send. If you get all kinds of stuff that isn’t helpful, it’s time to unsubscribe.

I am guessing I unsubscribed to around 100 email newsletters. Everything from travel sites with airfare updates to flights to Paris to the Anthropologie and Nordstrom sale newsletters. (I’m sad to see those go but I never buy anything there, too expensive) I aim to take back the 3-4 hours a week it took to weed through all these alerts and updates on everything from celebrity news to Chicago entertainment options. I still get some alerts and some emails I am actually using but we will see if I can weed it out further and regain another hour of my week back.

If you think about it, you only have so much free time after work and why would you want to be mildly entertained by marketing messages when you could be out living your life? Or writing your own email messages to real live humans.

Update: I went from 150 messages in a weekend and 100 messages a day to 45 messages in a weekend and about 40 messages per day in the email account that was in question. I still have another email account I have not completley pruned and my work email that also needs pruning but this is a start! Information overload and email overload have been taking place too long. I aim to get my time and life back.

Update: I just spent the last 2 months ignoring this email box after it was initially pruned. What happened? I got 2,000 email messages and had to spend my christmas vacation cleaning it out. I took about 3 hours on 12/20 and about 3 hours on 12/29 to read, skim, file, delete and unsubscribe through this list of 2,000 emails. I also had to change alerts to weekly from daily and reroute some newsletters that are useful to a new email address I use more often. I hope now that the box won’t need as much maintenance but as soon as I get the list down more marketers seem to get my address and start emailing me. Most of what I unsubscribed from today was newsletters I never signed up for in the first place. Some were others I had a hard time letting go of (Etsy and Chicago Mom’s Blog) but knew it wasn’t going to get read.

Are you going to unsubscribe to more emails in 2009?

FTC and Advertising Tracking

Ok, so the federal trade commission wants to regulate how advertisers track people on the web? Do they realize that that data is never linked back to an individual person? Or that no personal information is ever collected? That the cookies expire after so many days?

This is a necessary debate that should happen so consumers understand better what is happening on their computers and around them all the time, but it should not outlaw such a practice.

This 3rd party tracking data is the only thing that makes the internet more viable as a place to advertise than offline. (are the TV networks and newspapers behind this push?) And the growth of our American economy depends on these cookies right now. (and google’s especially)

To my knowledge the cookies track this type of information:

1. whether or not you go back to a site after you have been displayed an ad for it

2. whether or not you convert from a visitor to a buyer while you are on the site

3. whether or not you come back to the site at a later date and buy something then

4. which ads you were displayed over the time the cookie has been there

5. which ad you came to the site from clicking on

6. sometimes there is geo location information generated from your IP address, but a lot of ISPs don’t assign you a static IP and then that isn’t relevant anymore.

7. the time and date of the ads you have seen and of your visits to the site

8. What type of browser you are using and what operating system but this is hardly personal information

And that is about it. No personal info, no credit card or social security info either.

The big flap about behavioral advertising is that they target the ads based on some data they have about you or your computer. Sites may serve you ads relevant to your location, your past site visits or of you have a profile on that site, the profile information you have submitted. Then they follow you around on the site showing you the ads targeted for that group. I know that only certain sites use this and it is not the majority. The click through rates are even lower than normal because you show someone the same ad 10 times, but the conversion rates after they click are higher than normal because of the fit between the ad and the person’s need if it was targeted correctly.

So all in all, I just wanted to say that this information is crucial in keeping businesses in business by knowing what works and does not work in advertising so they don’t spend a lot of money on stuff that doesn’t work. This was the huge problem in offline advertising for years even before it fragmented. It’s not about spying or sharing any information about you as a person. It’s simply about business data and using it to refine their business to be a better company and web site. And if you turn off the cookie feature on your browser you don’t have to participate at all. It’s not as evil as people think it would be when you get into the real meat of the matter.

Happy World Internet Day

I am not sure when this holiday started or if anyone really recognizes it, but happy world internet day. You are within the 1/2 of the people in the U.S. or the unknown number of people in the world that are able to access the internet. Congratulate yourself for that and for a good hair day.

We think that the internet is no big deal now, because most of us use it so ubiquitously and some of us make a living from it. Who would have though that was possible in the early 90′s? How did we ever live without it? I noticed that there are specific characteristics of internet people:

1. We don’t own phone books, address books or other written on paper type records. Some of us are not even getting paper bills anymore, and do all our record keeping online. What this means is that we aren’t record keeping at all really. We get easy access to the info when we need it but businesses hold our info, not us. And sometimes if you want your own information that is more than a few months old you have to pay them to access it. Ouch.

2. We don’t know how to read a map without step by step directions attached. Duh, pre mapquest we all just got lost all the time. Maps are hard to read, directions are easier, and GPS is great, but some day if that won’t be available (even for a short time) we won’t be able to leave the house.

3. We surf aimlessly for hours rather than socializing and it shows. We get less done even though we have tools to be more productive and the internet tests our ability to stay focused and on task and not to procrastinate. It’s just as much a time waster as a productivity and information tool. Hello Twitter.

4. We have generally no idea we are all being watched. Not by people or the CIA, but by companies and Google archiving every click and interest we explore. All in the name of targeting up for ads and studying human behavior online in order to build more profitable (more seductive) websites that sell more stuff. Hello Conversions. 

5. We do have a greater view of the world outside our home towns but at the same time we only search for and look up information that justifies our own personal views. So, instead of getting closer together about ideas and community, we are actually getting farther apart. Writers know that you get more readers and page views if you write something polarized and sensationalized to the extreme and a lot of people (including the media themselves) do this. Then people who are living at that extreme feel justified. I am not sure where this goes, but somehow I doubt it will end well.

So, while we celebrate all the good that has come from the internet today, we should also probably do a reality check if we’re the ones celebrating such a niche holiday. It might be a good time to turn off the computer and just go for a walk outside and call your mom to say hi also.

Google 411 info number (1-800-GOOG)

This is new from Google yesterday. Apparently they are getting into the 411 info business. More evidence that they do want to cover all of the communications and advertising world. It is free to consumers and supported by businesses. It is also funny that this billboard was found right above an ask.com billboard in California. When you buy outdoor advertising you don’t get to see the loactions exactly that you purchase. You purchase by metro or zip code not by individual board. So, it would have been impossible for them to know what was going to run on the other board on that wall. Likewise for Ask.com. But the effect is that Ask is trying to prove it’s search worth and Google is so past that on to the next millionth thing that they have mastered. It shows pretty obvious dominance and superiority for Google and is not very convincing for ASK. Good luck to ask.com in surviving another 2 years.