With the first reviews out, there’s quiet some hype around the quality of the iPhone’s virtual keyboard. As Ed Baig from USA Today writes: “You also have to learn to trust the device; an intelligent virtual keyboard auto-corrects mistakes on the fly and anticipates what you will type next to try to prevent you from making a mistake.”
My question: Trust it to correct mistakes in what language?
If you ever tried to write a text message in a foreign language with a phone’s auto-correct feature turned on, you quickly learn to turn it off. So what will it be for the iPhone? My guess: A big percentage of users will turn it off. And will complain that the keyboard is not good enough…
I guess we will know in 48 hours for sure…
Say you are in Germany. Maybe shopping in the downtown area of a major city, e.g., Stuttgart. At the same time, the local soccer team plays a very important home game just a few miles away. How do you stay abreast of the score?
No problem — you carry with you a mobile phone (called a “handy” in Germany), which offers quite a few bells and whistles. You whip it out and… you call your buddy in San Francisco who’s just about to start plating a game of tennis. He then uses his mediocre mobile to give you an update on the game and even sends you a text message at the end of the soccer game, so you know what the final score is.
Say again you are in Germany. This time, you are at a wedding in Stuttgart, where a bunch of (half-drunk?, fully loaded?) people decide, on the spur of the moment, to roast the groom. See, he’ll move to the U.S. in a few days to work for a major car manufacturer — what better than to challenge him to a little quiz presenting him with the latest taglines of the car manufacturers in the U.S., just to prove how little (or much) he knows about his future home country. But what are the latest taglines?
No despair — you take out your handy and make the call… to San Francisco, where your buddy is in the middle of shopping at Costco. Within minutes, he uses his mediocre mobile to pull the taglines from Google and text message them to you. The success of the roast is now guaranteed!
What are the three lessons from these two episodes?
1. Never take a call, even from your best buddy, when walking on a tennis court
2. Check your caller id before accepting calls while shopping
3. No matter how superior your mobile technology, it’s still easier to call a buddy who’s in the know…
Recently, my corporate notebook crashed and had to be rebuilt. Since our IT department does not provide “loaner machines” like my car dealership does loaner cars, I was forced to conduct almost 3 days of business from my Palm Treo 650. In short, the experience was sobering.
On the positive side, I could manage my emails from the Treo through Good Link’s Software. My calendar was available and so were my Outlook address book.
On the negative side, only rudimentary calendar management is feasible, because it is next to impossible to set up new meetings, when you cannot see availability of all the meeting participants you plan to invite. Rather than typing long emails on my Treo, I wrote them on my personal notebook and copied them to an SD card which I then put into my Treo and pasted the text into the email program. Cumbersome, but it worked, although it would have been impossible, if I were on the road. Similarly, I used the same trick to move email attachments to my notebook to be able to read them, alter them and then resend them.
Accessing web site was not easy, either. While many popular web sites have sub-sites or pages optimized for mobile access, not all of them are readily available. Google is by far the best, since it can detect that you are using a mobile browser, thus being able to redirect you to their mobile-optimized pages. For many other sites, I had to either look up their mobile sites on a PC or play with various pre- and postfixes (such as mobile or wap). And even if there were mobile sites available, some were still quite media-heavy, so more than once my Treo ran out of system memory (at least it handled it gracefully and the browser did not crash). I ended up uninstalling all non-essential apps and then some (e.g. Google maps) to free up memory. I wish more apps were written so they can be run off of a memory card.
However, the biggest nuisance is that my Treo reboots about every 15 minutes (my first phone ever that actually does a reboot) and any downloadable updates from Palm’s and Cingular’s website to upgrade to a newer version of the Treo’s software fail to install even when doing a hard reset before the update. Very annoying!
In summary, I would not want to have to use the Treo as my main computing device for a second longer than I have to. I certainly expect them to improve over time, but right now, it is not ready for prime time!
