Marc Palmer

It all started a couple of years ago I think. Co-op had a workable Java-based online banking system that I’d been using for about 5 years. Then they announced a fantastic new system a while back and… so many people complained at how hideously unusable it was compared to the existing system that they had to backtrack, apologise, and rework the new system – leaving the old system in tact.

Late in 2006 the second incarnation of the new system was rolled out. They forcefully shut down the old system around that time also, to give us customers no choice but to migrate to the new system. It’s new so it MUST be better, right?

Well it isn’t. There are new features not available previously, but really this application is amazingly bad in terms of user interface. You contrast it with Co-op’s personal online banking and you just think “what the f**k are they doing?”. The personal banking product is fine, good even. Clear, fast, easy to use.

The business banking is full of obscure terminology, shows too much technical banking data, is very slow, and offers very little over the previous version. For this we have waited a couple of years, and had to re-register to be able to use the system. It hasn’t carried over our bill payment information nor all our accounts. Many of the pages don’t render quite right in Safari – although this is an improvement because the previous system only worked in MS IE due to a requirement for an ancient Java VM.

You just wonder what on earth the person who designed this was thinking, and how much money was spent on it. I don’t think I want to know, it will be sickening. I can tell from the error messages that the system uses CORBA (ugh). I liked the error message I got… it didn’t respond to my request to save a recipient’s details so I tried again with the same one… the message along the lines of: “8197:  The profile name XXXXX is not unique”. Lovely!

The iPhone looks brilliant. We don’t have a lot of firm details, and typically these things disappoint slightly after the initial sales pitch.

However there are a couple of assumptions I think may hold, which are not immediately obvious but could have a truly massive impact on the
iPhone market and user experience, both positive and negative.
Upgradability
There is a serious usability deficit in normal mobile phones – they are effectively “frozen” with the operating system they come on, and my experience in mobile game development shows that there are ALWAYS bad bugs there, as if trapped in amber, never to be repaired in your phone.

With all the talk of OTA provisioning in mobile, I haven’t seen anybody provide effective over the air operating system patches.

iPhone’s a market killer in this respect. It will almost certainly just be like any other iPod and will do automatic firmware upgrades via iTunes.

This is pretty profound because it means you may, provided there is enough ROM or a clever Flash RAM patching system, mean that Apple will continue to provide OS upgrades for iPhone users well into the future, as they do with desktop OS X

Absence of content purchasing

Apparently you cannot purchase content on the iPhone itself. This may not be a limitation but a deliberate act. Both Apple TV and iPhone are just clients of iTunes. iTunes requires a PC… or more likely as market share and number of apple consumer devices in the home increases, a Mac.

Absence of 3G

Apparently there’s no 3G so data transfer is slow over mobile networks. The wifi is there however, so it looks like they’re gambling that the decent telcos they work with will be rolling out top-notch wi-fi soon. You’re never far from Wi-fi these days anyway, so its a moot concern for many.

Is there MMS/EMS?

I have a hunch that, while GSM and SMS were demo’d, that there won’t be MMS. I wouldn’t put it in, it sucks. Compatibility issues are huge. Sending people a rich email with a photo in is infinitely better.

Limited support for operator/aggregator supplied content

They made it pretty clear that Apple own this, and they will choose their operator. This probably means little if any operator re-branding as done by many mass market handsets.

They also said no WAP. That probably means no WAP Push, one of the primary ways to push paid-for content to devices. This might be worked around depending on the integration of Safari with the phone’s wallpaper, tones and (speculated) ability to download new applications such as games (assuming J2ME makes it on there).

On the latter point, there is a fundamental issue. How to you write, let alone play, games that are anything but puzzle games when your input device is your fingers? It could be interesting, but it will probably suck!

I don’t care really, as mobile phone games generally do suck, but the operators may not be too pleased. It looks like the only revenue stream might be from bandwidth tariffs. It could be a BIG one though.

Steve Jobs’ keynote speech at Macworld yesterday announced that Apple TV (previously iTV) will be available for order now.

Thing is… I don’t see how useful it will be, especially in the UK because it looks like just a remote iTunes player for audio and video really. Notably:

1. There’s no DVD drive, so you can’t watch DVDs.
2. There’s no TV input (maybe it will come with USB) so you have no hard disk recording of TV/Satellite
3. There’s no mention of OS X or installing new software, so this makes adding something like EyeTV via USB to record normal TV quite unlikely
4. No SCART output. In fact there’s a list of “compatible TVs” which implies you can’t even use it with your normal TV.

So in the UK, unless you are willing to keep your clunky old DVD player, set top box, get an Apple TV and get a huge new TV, this thing is pretty useless.

Especially so in the UK where you still cannot buy films or TV shows from the iTunes music store.

What’s with buying anyway? iTMS should be offering RENTAL.