Why some people hate the iPhone
This article, written by Catriona Campbell was originally published on iabuk.net and is republished here with permission.
There has been more written about the iPhone than any other technology gadget in the last ten years. How do I know this? According to PC World’s 50 greatest gadgets of all time, the others on the list don’t even come close.
The iPhone achieves a staggering 315m Google search results, where the Nintendo Wii has 239m, and the Sony Walkman 3m, it’s fair to assume that it is a gadget which creates a good deal of buzz.
However not all that buzz is generated by people enamored by the iPhone. In April Virginia Heffernan: a US Journalist at the New York Times wrote a personal account of her experience: “Why I hate my iphone” It is an article written by a well-heeled journalist, and one we should take note of. She opens with an introduction into the heady world of the iPhone enterprise and how it requires so much attention, organisation, explanation, praise, etc.
“I was late to get one – and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe my hopes for the iPhone curdled in the time it took for my perfectly good T-Mobile plan to expire so I could switch to balky AT&T and purchase one. But I had bided my time. And, really, my enthusiasm survived right up to the moment at the AT&T counter, post-sale, when a saleswoman transferred my address book from my battered BlackBerry to the sweetie-pie iPhone.
“Can you set up my e-mail too?” I asked. She handed me the phone and told me what to type. Pressing her good nature, I asked if she’d do that part too, since I wasn’t yet handy with the iPhone’s character-entry system – the D screen-based simulation of the qwerty keyboard.
She gave me a hard look. Truly, as if she was supposed to be on the lookout for people like me. “It’s your phone,” she replied briskly. “It’s time you started typing on it.”
It is disappointing that the Apple store experience has not been transferred into the AT&T store where she purchased the handset. The Apple store would have delivered a better “out of the box experience” – they may well have had a pre-charged up handset for her – and they would certainly have helped her transfer her data onto the iPhone, as well as showing her how to use it. Apple store staff are trained in each of the Apple products, and staff are encouraged to understand them inside out. The staff are even called “Creatives, Geniuses” or “Specialists” as opposed to sales assistants.
“I didn’t trust myself either, there were warning signs. I didn’t rush to explore the phone or load it up with apps. You can see I wasn’t thinking clearly. To answer the phone, I had to touch the screen. Years of not touching screens – so as not to smudge or scar – made me wary. But I brushed the “answer call” and up came fragments of my mother’s cheerful voice. AT&T no doubt works like a charm in other areas, but as I’d been warned, it wasn’t so hot on holding calls where I live. I let it drop her. I hunted for a keypad to call back, but it was gone.”
The next example she gives in her dalliance with the iPhone is about learning how to use the device’s keyboard. It points out an issue we have with the way we use technology – Behavioural Psychologists call it “Learned effects” – the fact is that once we have learned how to do something – it takes a great deal of time to relearn it, and for some, that is time best spent elsewhere….
“The morning after my sleepless night of charging the phone, a text message arrived from a colleague, about breakfast. It came up in a little dialogue bubble, as if we were characters in a comic book.
Now I had to reply. My throat tightened. “Running late,” I decided on. “See you in 15 min.”
What came out was this: “Runninlate. See you in 15 Mon.”
And so the iPhone made suggestions. Did I want to say Ride? Ripe? Ruin? No. I wanted to say Running. I refused to fight further with the smug phone. Off sailed my text – the work of a blithering idiot.
The failure to appreciate the iPhone was all mine. But I decided not to dwell on that. “I thought you might be back,” the AT&T saleswoman said as I walked in the door. “So?” I said. “You were right.” With some satisfaction, she took the iPhone, and I walked away with a new BlackBerry and money to spare.
Does one person’s experience make a universally popular device unusable? No, of course not, but unfortunately the iPhone does expect a different kind of human interaction, and one that takes some time to get used to or “learn”. Above all else – if a device is not intuitive, as I would argue the iPhone is not, then it needs to be taught. When the iPhone is sold in non-Apple stores you rely on the non-Apple staff to sell the product, this dilutes the brand experience.