The iPhone is a typical piece of Ive design: an
austere, abstract, platonic-looking form that
somehow also manages to feel warm and organic and
ergonomic. Unlike my phone. He picks it up and
points out four little nubbins on the back. "Your
phone's got feet on," he says, not unkindly. "Why
would anybody put feet on a phone?" Ive has the
answer, of course: "It raises the speaker on the
back off the table. But the right solution is to
put the speaker in the right place in the first
place. That's why our speaker isn't on the bottom,
so you can have it on the table, and you don't
need feet." Sure enough, no feet toe the iPhone's
smooth lines.
If you want little rubber feets on the back of your iPhone, put little rubber feets on the back of your iPhone. The back of the iPhone is, properly, inert and ambivalent to your modifications.
Agreed. Thus far, every time my iPhone 4 has fallen has been a time I put it on an ever-so-slightly tilted surface and it seemingly slides under its own power. I'd be fine with a little more friction on the glass backing.
Okay, Dustin. I have one for you to investigate next.
Does iOS watch your use patterns for the phone and mute alerts when it thinks you're asleep? It could be just me, but I know I'm not the only one with a Pavlovian response when I hear the mail dinger. And the phone is abnormally quiet until just around the time I normally get up, then I hear the morning mail ding in.
I suspect it mutes alerts after a period of inactivity (but it could be something sneaky like a combination of the photosensor and accelerometer reporting dark and no movement).
Between the speaker and the 3.5 inch screen, I believe there is some sort of logical fallacy in Dustin Curtis' reasoning: the existing design is X, then we figure out some justification for X.
I hadn't really noticed these things until I used Android phones. Since switching, I've become aware of how much thoughtful design went into the boring things I used to take for granted on the iPhone.
I've had the same realization about the iPad after working with webOS on the HP touchpad. I think the reason so much gets taken for granted with the iPad and iPhone is that their design and interface are very intuitive, so that you never have to really spend a lot of energy learning how to do things on them -- what comes naturally usually works. When you use a device that does things differently, you have to stop for a minute and take notice, and actually learn how to do it the way they've designed it (not that that makes it inherently worse).
I think what he was saying is that different != worse.
If you had started on an android phone, you would probably have written a similar piece talking about how apple phones get muted when placed on a fluffy blanket (as the edge gets covered), and how the android hardware designers did it right.
You should focus on talking about design tradeoffs irrespective of your current behavior. Reading about how you can't train yourself to place your phone face down, and that this is somehow a samsung design flaw, isn't interesting :-/
I don't understand. Can you explain why you think having the speaker on the back of the phone is better than it being on the bottom?
A 2nd grader's understanding of physics informs us that yes, indeed, there will be some situation in which the iPhone's speaker is obstructed and another speaker isn't (why, you could stand the phone up!). But what obstruction is going to be more common?
If frequency of obstruction isn't the only issue, what's the compensating virtue of having the speaker on the back of the phone? How valuable is that compensation?
I am not an electrical engineer, but to answer your question it is my understanding that the diameter of a speaker is very important for sound quality, volume, and cost. This is the reason that home audio speakers aren't the size of thimbles.
I did a quick search to see if any of those issues have been talked about wrt iphones, and the top hit was http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=761725 ("when i listen at max volume [my iphone] is really bad. my nokia N82 compared is like a audiophile system") -- which I imagine is caused by the N82 having a larger speaker positioned on the back.
Puts the iphone 4 over 3g as ~3x quieter than a nexus s over 3g. (2g is closer, but no one I know uses their iphone 4 over 2g).
From the review: "For a long while, people have complained that the iPhone [3g & 3gs]'s speakerphone volume was too quiet... I'd say the iPhone 4's speakerphone is still loud enough, though calls over 3G are still a bit too quiet. Until Apple increases the gain on 3G calls, iPhone 4 customers who are hard of hearing should invest in a bluetooth headset."
> If you had started on an android phone, you would probably have written a similar piece talking about how apple phones get muted when placed on a fluffy blanket (as the edge gets covered), and how the android hardware designers did it right.
Probably not since the rear speaker on the Android phone would be completely muted by the same fluffy blanket.
If I have to train myself to lay my phone face down, it's a design flaw. It's a design flaw because it increases the chance of damaging the screen, but more importantly because it requires the user to adapt to something that could have been done correctly in the first place.
If the user has to work around a problem with the design, that's a flaw.
> If I have to train myself to lay my phone face down, it's a design flaw. It's a design flaw because it increases the chance of damaging the screen
Screen damage rates for iPhone 4 are far higher than Nexus S. I take it from your message that you believe this is due to a design flaw. Interesting... I suppose I agree.
> requires the user to adapt to something that could have been done correctly in the first place ... that's a flaw.
No, it couldn't have been done correctly in the first place. The iphone 4 sacrifices 66% of its speaker volume relative to the nexus s to get side placement. That's also a flaw. Design is about tradeoffs.
If screen damage rates are much higher, then yes, it could indicate a design flaw.
As for the speaker, if I have to set my phone face down to hear the alarm, that's a design flaw. If the Nexus designers believe that a louder speaker is more important, that's valid, but it's not valid if the extra volume is muffled when placed on a surface in the natural fashion.
Why the change from your earlier position of screen breakage indicating a design flaw?
> If the Nexus designers believe that a louder speaker is more important, that's valid, but it's not valid if the extra volume is muffled when placed on a surface in the natural fashion
Would you care to explain why you believe this and not the opposite? If you were hard of hearing do you think you would have written something like "If the iPhone designers believe that a side speaker is more important, that's valid, but it's not valid if the side speaker is too quiet for many users to hear"
Thanks for pointing this out. I hate when people comment about how great a design is because it fits their use case. There is no "average user" for a smart phone, so any design decision is going to appear brilliant to some and idiotic to others.
I think it's arguable whether this is a true problem that has never been dealt with until Apple tackled it. The author of that article seems to be the only person I've encountered that has had this alarm being muffled issue.
Various devices deal with this in various ways (by putting little ugly feet on the back as someone noticed, by slightly curving the surface on which the speaker is located, or as iPhone does it by placing it on a plane which in most scenarios sits perpendicular to the surface on which the device is resting).
Whether Apple's solution is the most elegant is also arguable but everyone is entitled to an opinion. One thing is for sure, this wasn't some obscure problem that no engineer has ever thought of until Apple decided to save us.
A lot of tech reviewers seem to do that in their reviews, I've noticed. Since they like the iPhone and they are used to it, they treat it as a reference point, and then anything else that deviates from that must be the wrong way to do it.
It is useful to use the worlds most popular smart phone to compare other phones against. More people reading those articles will be familiar with the iPhone then any other smart phone.
Yeah, you could probably conjure up a problem with any positioning, e.g bottom-speaker is pretty easy to accidentally cover when holding the phone sideways.
Worse than putting the speakers on the back, the LG team actually stuck the speakers on the INSIDE of the phone. Yeah, it's fine and loud when you open it up, but you can barely hear the phone ring when it's closed and in a pocket. Things like this really bother me. Thanks for pointing this out.
You know, nothing is perfect.
Ever played a landscape game on the iPhone, watched a movie in landscape, or whatever? Ever noticed how you somehow always cover the speaker with your hand without noticing it? I do. It's driving me nuts.
Even when you place the Nexus S on a flat surface, its speaker becomes almost inaudible.
i just put my nexus s on my desk and the speaker worked just fine. the whole reason why there's a little bump over the center of the speaker is to raise it off of a flat surface and let the audio get out.
putting the iphone in a dock probably muffles the audio coming from its bottom speaker (though maybe apple's dock accounts for this, maybe 3rd party ones don't).
there's probably not a perfect way to solve this for every user. if you know the speaker is on the back, don't rest it on a blanket. if it's on the bottom, don't use it in a dock.
The iPad design team could have learned from the iPhone team. The speaker is on the back which makes it very quiet when watching a movie. You have to put something behind it to reflect the sound.
Dude's blog is driving me nuts overall. No commenting, and the article about why iPhone is 3.5 inches the other day because "Galaxy S II" is too big to reach whole screen with your thumb... Yeah maybe for a child or small-bodied (non-American) woman, but I actually borrowed a friends to CHECK, and I can easily reach beyond every bit of the screen with one hand.
Well, you don't address the post content but attack the writer directly, also implying that he's a child or a foreign small girl (why "non-American" by the way? Do American women have bigger hands?), which is not really good form.
