iPhone SMS
14 days into the iPhone and I’m very happy with the iPhone. There are omitted features that would be nice to have, such as a List application. But everything the phone currently does it does well. I haven’t got lost in the iPhone interface at any time unlike every other mobile phone I’ve used. The experience has been so good that I am happy to discount the mail issues and SyncServices corruption on my Mac last week as an oddity with my setup. The SyncServices corruption ended up taking a day to resolve by moving all my files into a fresh OS X account.
Last night I used the iPhone SMS application for the first time. I typed out my message. It wasn’t until 3 lines into the message before I realized that I was typing complete sentences. I felt no need 4 sms spk.
Vowels are here, punctuation too. Hello prepositions, how I missed you.
Back in Australia, sending an SMS was a few cents a message with SMS service included in the phone service. So SMS charges ended up being background noise in my mobile phone costs. It wouldn’t surprise me if 50% of my Australian mobile phone use was short messages.”xing hbr bdg – b @ qvb in 15″ was a common message to sync up with friends in the city. Hmmm, that’s almost as ugly as writing Perl.
In the USA I’ve found SMS to be not worth using. This avoidance has been as much about the per message cost as it was about messages not getting through to the receiver and the way that each of my US cell phones have made writing a short messages difficult.
Part of the issue with SMS on my US phones was that a ridiculous amount of screen real-estate occupied by non-message elements: To, From, and Subject fields that were not relevant to SMS, soft-button labels that were not needed for the SMS task, an so on. The iPhone fixes this issue by virtue of its large, high-res screen. Additionally, the iPhone SMS application is focused solely on the SMS task showing the SMS history, the current SMS, the keyboard and a send button. The SMS history is shown as an instant-message like history above the current SMS text area. The result is a very simple UI for what is essentially a very simple task.
This simplification is a result of Apple’s design aesthetic, but I also wonder if it is also a side-effect of building phone software in individual pieces rather than as a monolithic block of code that handles all phone functions. Each function on the iPhone (SMS, Phone, Address Book, Mail, Settings, Safari, etc) is implemented as a separate stand-alone application. This focus on an application doing one task well rather than trying to solve everything in one application leads to simpler and more task-focused applications.
It might be the IM-like history view. It may be that the message that I am composing fits onto the screen. It may just be my time away from SMS over the past 4 years. In all likelihood it is probably the combination of these aspects that result in making it feel natural to write short messages using actual English on the iPhone.
Though it’s probably too much to hope that the iPhone will bring back natural language and relegate SMS-speak to the dustbin of history. At least the iPhone helps to show SMS-speak for what it is—a kludge to deal with bad SMS user interfaces of the past.
Hi!
I share your views on the iPhone SMS application – it certainly has the potential to radically change the way that people view SMS, and to encourage them to use proper English.
My only problem is that my big fingers are a little big for the keyboard, so I’m hoping to check out the new Stylus that’s just been announced for the iPhone.
I only wish that I could find a good application for synching the messages on my PC, and composing them too – it was searching for that that brought me to your blog in the first place
Cheers!