I have recently acquired one great hardware and one great software. First the iPhone 3G, which I have been fondly amazed by. Why I love iPhone? Because it works in ways which I expect it to. Its all about usability which apparently is common-sense to some people. No. People have common-sense but machines do not. You have to “engineer” common-sense into machines. Something that doesnt come up on the project spec very often and when it does, a teeny weeny budget is allocated for it.
What I really liked about the iPhone:
1) The music dims down when you make/receive a phone call and resumes after the call, automatically and with grace
2) (Yes, I love the feeling of music fading away), the music dims down when you launch youtube videos
3) iPhone web apps are straightforward and simple back and forward navigation is extremely easy to use, at least for me when I first came into contact with it
What I did not like:
1) There is a mild lag to the machine, perhaps something like allocating more memory resources to messaging with a good (larger?) IO buffer might really help in smoother text entry. Engineers figure that piece out please, Phone = Phone Calls (Priority no. 1 or 2) and Messaging (Email/SMS Priority no. 1 or 2) so these two pieces should be hyper-responsive, never mind other applications, when I write Emails on my mobile, it already sucks without a full-sized keyboard, at least make it responsive.
2) No Flash. Stunning browser but no flash.
3) Syncing with Outlook doesn’t copy SMTP authentication details automatically. No useful message comes up to indicate to the user what is happening. I set up my iPhone for the first time and tried to send emails but got that sender is unknown error.
(Read: to a common user, sender is unknown translates into the system not knowing who I am and cannot send the email, people do not know that SMTP authentication details are missing out especially when it works fine on their outlook accounts.
Resolution: Change the message to something like “Some email settings are missing. Please go to ….. and set the username and password”)
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Google Chrome
I am currently using Google Chrome to open up wordpress and write this post and I have to say that this is another piece of software that works! Although there seem to be bugs. I couldn’t remove boxes in facebook when I’m using Chrome.
Its simple, imports all my firefox settings and fast. A new tab showing my recent surfed pages is also a big welcome. Firefox wastes that space by showing a empty page when you open a new tab.
Chrome also maximises surfing space by having a floating status bar that disappears and appears as and when it is required, as well as not having a traditional application menu bar.
Great phone and great software and it is heartening to see that people are using technology to make things easier to use.
Download Google Chrome
http://www.google.com/chrome/index.html?hl=en&brand=CHMG&utm_source=en-hpp&utm_medium=hpp&utm_campaign=en�
