You can argue that this doesn’t affect that many people, that most people will pay less and be fine, but I think the more interesting angle is how this reveals how AT&T just does not understand user experience the way Apple does. With unlimited data, you can whip out your phone wherever you are and use it. You never have to worry about your data usage, ever. Because you don’t have that barrier, you use the phone more. Because you use the phone more, you’re going to buy more apps and tell your friends, and they’ll buy phones and apps. It creates an ecosystem of consumption where everyone wins.

But now? Now you’ll be tempted to go look at your usage before streaming that movie. Now there will be a psychological barrier, however small, that makes you think twice about using your phone. More friction in the user experience. What Apple understands is that this friction, no matter how small, is an impediment to using the device, and they seek to eliminate as much of it as possible. AT&T either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care.

I have a rule of thumb, which is: Any deal, no matter how good it may seem to you, is usually more beneficial to the offerer. For example, how many times have you been offered 15% off your purchase if you sign up for a store credit card? I guarantee that they make the offer because they know that they will more than make up that one-time 15% on recurring fees, interest, and profit from purchases made with the card.

There’s just no way AT&T would do this unless they made money by doing it. Since they’re cutting the cost of the plan, you know they’re going to make that up somewhere. There are 6.4 million active iPhone users in the US, which adds up to $32m in lost revenue at $5 less per user.

Where do you think they’re going to make that up? Some of it is going to be in overages, though AT&T is more reasonable than some. But I’d wager that a big part of it comes from the recently announced ETF hike, which nearly doubled for iPhone users.

The only bright side to all this is that it seems like they’re telegraphing and end to iPhone exclusivity. They’re lowering the cost of staying slightly and significantly taxing the cost to exit, which suggests knowledge of a user exodus and an attempt to prevent it.

The problem is that when you hold the phone, you cover the speaker and the headphone port. Whoops: No sound for you. Assassin’s Creed is far from the only game that does this. It seems like such a no-brainer, I don’t know why everybody chooses this orientation. Maybe developers are targeting iPod Touch instead of iPhone? Its headphone jack is in the top-right position when in the same orientation. It seems like a trivial thing to add, but nobody seems to do it. Hell, you could probably detect the type of device and put it in the right orientation automatically. Nobody does, and it sucks, and it bugs me whenever I try to play a game.

1. WiFi is incredibly unreliable. It seems to freeze up often, requiring me to turn it off and back on to reconnect. Must frustrating, particularly as I’m trying to perform multi-GB Time Machine backups over it.
2. It takes an extremely long time for my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to connect after a reboot. Around thirty seconds. I’ve taken to powering them down and back on. Lame.
3. For no reason I can discern, the system will refuse to let me launch new shells. Not in Terminal, not in Emacs, not in Screen, not anywhere. I can launch new apps, but any /bin/bash process hangs when I launch it. Logging out and back in fixes it.
4. OpenVPN doesn’t work anymore. I was using Tunnelblock 3.0b14 on Leopard; that complained about incompatible kexts and refused to launch. I upgraded to 3.0b16, which launches okay, but refuses to connect with no error message whatsoever. Nothing in the logs. No idea why it doesn’t work. I installed Viscosity, but that doesn’t work either; it complains about command-line arguments. I hacked on the configuration, but didn’t get anywhere.

iPhone OS 3.1

I upgraded my (new) iPhone 3GS. There isn’t much to report, except that audio-only playback has returned! Sort of. It’s buried really deep, but I found it in 3.0, and it still works in 3.1.

1. Start playing a video podcast. It doesn’t work with movies anymore, only video podcasts.
2. Press the home button. The podcast will stop playing.
3. Press the play/pause button on the headphone remote. The audio will play, and you can pocket your phone.

Sucks, but at least it’s still there.

This happens earlier, so there’s less jumping around.

While I’m a bit fuzzy on the specific version, this feature was removed around v2.0, replaced with the ability to play videos back when the handset was in a vertical orientation. While I prefer the old behavior, I see no reason why you shouldn’t be able to have it both ways. If the audio simply continued playing when you locked the phone during Podcast video playback, that would be fine.

I’ve found two workarounds, neither of which I find satisfying.

1. Don’t lock the phone, but stick it in my pocket.
2. Download the audio-only version of the podcast as well as the video.

The first suffers from two severe deficiencies.

1. The proximity sensor is ignored; the screen doesn’t shut off, eating your battery life.
2. Should you (or something else in your pocket) activate the Home button, playback stops.

The second is also unworkable.

1. Not all podcasts offer an audio and video version.
2. You have to make note of your position and seek to it when switching. Playback resumes from where you left off with the old behavior.
3. Disk space and bandwidth is wasted.

I’ve enjoyed this feature since I found it on my 5th generation iPod, and I’m very disappointed to see it get axed from the iPhone.

One of the features of 2.2 I haven’t seen detailed anywhere else is the display of street blocks, e.g if you look at 1st and Washington in Seattle, it will show you that it’s in the 200s. Street view is nice, but super slow on EDGE. It’s a little hard to get in to – you have to drop a pin, then press an icon of a head and torso. Existing pins which you’ve dropped have the icon, but it’s not active, which is strange.

I like the stop/reload button redesign in Safari. I don’t like the search field eating up space in my location bar at all. I wish I could completely disable it.

Podcast downloads are fantastic. I didn’t realize that they started playing as soon as they’d buffered. I haven’t tried it on EDGE yet. It should be okay for audio podcasts. I doubt any video podcasts are usable on EDGE.

The home shortcut is wonderful.

One continued absence is the ability to play only the audio portion of video podcasts. I loved this feature. Video podcasts appear in two places – Videos and Podcasts. If you start playing from Videos, you get the video. If you play from Podcasts, it’s audio only. This was perfect for me; my commute is around 45 minutes via bus and 15 minutes on bicycle. So I could watch most of an hour long podcast on the bus, then switch to the audio for the bike ride. This was present in the 5/5.5G iPods, and in the iPhone up to v2.0. Since Apple added vertical-format video playback in v2.1, it doesn’t work. If you lock the phone while the video is playing, the audio stops, too. I really wish they’d add this back.

One issue is speed. It’s not very fast. It’s not unusable, but it is irritating. I’m not going into that, because I don’t think that’s very interesting, and I can’t analyze why it’s slow. What does bother me greatly is the UI, so let’s take a look at that.

On the feed list screen, they chose to use large fonts for the feed names. It looks odd to my eye, and this is the only place in the app where they’re used. I’d prefer to see more consistent type in these lists. Also, feed names overlap the badge showing the unread count, which looks bad.

Feeds with no unread items appear in the list; the only visual difference is the lack of the badge on the right. With the small screen of the iPhone, this is a terrible waste of real estate; nearly half the displayed items are just wasting pixels. The desktop version of NNW can sort feeds in order of most-unread to least-unread. That – or some other setting to get those out of the way – would be a big improvement.

Lastly, there’s the Account button. This lets you change the name of your iPhone in the online sync services, as well as change your username and password. This is a prime candidate for moving to the Settings application, since it’s only used at setup time and very infrequently thereafter.

On the list of items in the feed, the unread count is appended to the feed title in parentheses. When you have a feed with a long name, the unread count is not visible, since the title is truncated, and the count is at the very end.

Items which have been read appear in gray, while those which are unread appear blue. The distinction, particularly when reading in the daylight, is too subtle. Adopting the blue dot used in Mail (for unread messages) and iPod (for new podcasts) would be easier to see, as well as being consistent with the stock applications.

There is a “Mark all as read” button. This works as advertised, but could be improved. On the mobile site, this takes you back to the list of feeds, and this seems like good behavior to have here, too. Once you read everything in a feed, the feed should be hidden from the feed list.

There is no way to jump from one feed to another. You must go back to the list and choose a different feed, which feels clumsy.

Examining an item in a feed reveals still more interface blunders. The feed’s unread count is, once again, appended to the feed title, causing the same problem as on the item list screen.

The “Open in Safari” button makes no sense. From it’s placement on the single item view, one would assume it to open the item in Safari. Counterintuitatively, it opens the feed’s home in Safari. There does not appear to be any way to open a specific item in Safari.

Tapping the item title or any link in it’s body opens that in the embedded web view of NetNewsWire. This is convenient, but reveals many more problems.

There are no back/forward buttons in the embedded view. This is a problem, since tapping a link follows it – there is no way to go back. Double-tapping to zoom is quite dangerous, since you often end up tapping a link in the page content which is too small to see. There is also no stop button, so once you do that, you have no choice but to go back and start over.

Which reveals still more problems. When you tap the back button in the top-left of the page, it returns you two levels, back to the item list, rather than the item you were looking at.

Jumping to the bottom, there’s a plus icon. This slides a panel up which prompts you to add the item to your clippings. The dialog contains two buttons. “Add to Clippings” and “Cancel.” If you clip an item, then tap the icon again, you’re prompted to clip it once more. This leads to confusion as to whether the item was, in fact, clipped. Further, there is no reason this requires a full dialog. A simple clip icon which toggles between clip and unclip would suffice. Worst, though, there is no way to read your clipped items from either the mobile site or the application.

The “Next Unread” button works how you’d think. It would be nicer to have up/down arrows like Mail. There is no way to go to the previous item, aside from going back to the list view and reselecting it.

Less obvious is how items are marked read as soon as you view them. When you load an item, NNW starts marking it as read in the background. You see a spinner in the lower-right corner; NNW is sending the status to the server in the background, then it decrements the count. It takes a few seconds if you’re stuck on EDGE. I think it would be better to decrement the number sooner, then send the status in batches. This how it works already if you’re offline; counts drop instantly, then the remote status is updated automatically when you have signal again.

Another nitpicky problem is that the state isn’t completely restored when you quit and come back – when accidentally launching Safari to read a feed’s home page, for example. The item you come back to is always scrolled to the very top, rather than to the position you left it at. This can be irritating when you’re halfway through a longer post.

1. In Safari, tapping the menubar at the top of the screen scrolls you to the top of the page.
2. In any other app with a tall scrollable area, tapping the top of the screen does nothing.