I commented yesterday about the apparently great usability of Apple's just-announced iPhone, and now I have to ask “Apple, are you idiots?”

Someone else has had tha “iPhone” name trademarked for six years:

Of course, that someone sued Apple over it.

Apple, splitting the most infinitesimal hairs, said that because Apple's product is for a cellular phone and the current “iPhone” offerings from Cisco are VoIP (i.e. “internet phones”), Apple is not in violation because “they're different products.”

I'm not a lawyer, blah blah blah, but isn't this exactly what trademark law is designed for?

Quoting from this article....

From what's been made public, I can't see how this is anything but outright attempted theft by Apple. Considering that Apple's been asking Cisco for permission to use the “iPhone” trademark for years, Apple's use of it without permission would clearly be considered “willful infringement,” which opens Apple up to treble damages.

Apple's one saving grace (besides deep pockets that can be used to buy its way out of this mess) may be that Cisco has not aggressively defended its iPhone trademark in the past, thereby creating an environment in which that trademark can be stripped. I gathered this might be Apple's angle because it's reported that an Apple spokesman said “There are already several companies using the name iPhone for voice over IP products.”

Still, it seems so clear cut that Apple is wrong that I have to wonder if it's all some kind of publicity stunt... a way for Apple to rename it “Apple Phone” with great fanfare, or something.

I'm sure nothing major will come of this... Apple will go ahead and license the name from Cisco (albeit under slightly better terms for Cisco than had they completed the agreement before making Apple's product public), and it'll all be forgotten.

I've never had a cell phone that didn't totally suck. This is as true for you as it is for me, because they are all horrible. The only metric in which a cell phone can't rate “abysmal” is when compared against other cell phones, because there are different levels of abysmal.

For example, every phone number in America is 10 digits and of the form “(123) 456-7890”, so when you type in 10 digits on an American-market phone (or bring up numbers in your phone book, or receive a call with caller id), why do most of them display a big mash of numbers like “1234567890”? It's just moronic. Even the just-released Motorola phone I got last summer did this, and was an overall usability disaster. Motorola has been around for a long time... has it never learned anything about designing a product for humans to use?

It's not just Motorola; it's all phone manufactures. (I've had some Nokia stock since 2004, but now that I think about it, I don't want it, so I just sold it while typing this.)

There's no technical reason behind this complete lack of development in user interfaces. I think a good percent of the general population could design something better on their first try, so the problem must be that the small population of people who actually work for phone manufactures are total idiots.

Call Waiting, iPhone Style

Until today.

I watched the introduction of Apple's iPhone today (via this video) and was astounded, not that the iPhone seems to have such a great user-interface design (although it does), but that it's so great in the face of a history of moronic phone design.

It's been designed like the cell phone should have been designed many years ago. That usability has been combined with current, state-of-the-art technology, so its feature set is advanced. Advanced and usable. That'd be an oxymoron from just about any company except Apple and TiVo.

It seems that the phrase generally used to describe Apple's other products — “it just works” — will apply here as well.

I've never used more than the most basic features of any cell phone I've had because I don't have the time or energy to invest in learning the crappy extra features that I'd be frustrated with if I did use them. Tiny screen, slow and expensive internet access to wimpy pretend pseudo-“web” pages. Ugh.

But the iPhone.... wow. The hour-long live demo in the video showed a whole new world of usability in all aspects of the device... phone, music player, photo viewer, video player, internet browser.... It seems to be designed for humans, to actually use. Pure Apple.

It runs OSX, so I wonder how long before Firefox and Photoshop are ported to it.

Browsing the Web, iPhone Style
bird's-eye view

Of course, the Apple Cult faithful will drink the Apple cool-aid no matter what Apple puts out, and I should make it clear that I'm not such a person. I bought my first Apple product, a laptop, just before Anthony was born in 2002. True to Apple form, it not only didn't suck in most every way; it was wonderful. (Unfortunately, product longevity is not Apple's strong suit, and I had to buy a replacement last summer.)

I've since bought two iPods (the second to replace the first that I lost in Malaysia) and that second laptop, a MacBook. I was sufficiently impressed with these products, as a consumer, that I put most of the proceeds from the sale of our house into Apple stock. (What didn't go into Apple went into Adobe, because I'm extremely impressed with Lightroom, their photo-workflow application that I'm sure I'll write about more in the future.)

The biggest problem I have with the iPhone is that it's not out yet, and even after it does come out, it'll take a long time before it finds its way to the Japanese market. (When it does, I predict that they'll go with SoftBank as the service provider; time will tell.)

So, I have to wait, and live with my current phone that's full of pedestrian features hidden behind a complex, opaque user interface.

Sometimes, it just sucks to be me.

Or “The Sad Tale of my Nikon D200 and Nikkor 70-200”

It is with a mix of fondness and sadness that I greet today's one-year anniversary of having gotten my Nikon D200. The sadness is because it and all my lenses are in the shop again. )-:

The problems started when I got my new Nikkor 70-200 zoom and found that it had focus issues. So, I brought it and all my kit to the Nikon Service Center in Osaka. (“kit” is geeky-photographer speak for “photography equipment” — doesn't it make me sound like such a pro? :-)). They accepted the lens and the body for repair, sending it back to me a week later.

Unfortunately, I got it back in worse shape than when I brought it in. Before, I believe that the body and my other lenses were properly calibrated, and only the 70-200 was in need of adjustment, but at the service center, they calibrated the body to match the wrongly-calibrated lens, so now those two worked together better (but still not great), but in doing this my other properly-calibrated lenses no longer worked. Sigh. At least, that's what seems to be the case.

It really astounds me that a company like Nikon can make a mistake like this (so much so that I hold out plenty of space that I might be wrong in my assessment of the situation... time will tell.) Still, my first clue that all was not right in Nikon land was at the service center when I explained the situation to the lady at the reception counter. She said "you can calibrate the body for one lens, but you can't expect the body to be perfect will all lenses." I had in front of me a $2,000 semi-pro body, two $2,300 pro-level lenses, and an $800 lens, and at those prices, I damn well expected them to work perfectly.

Anyway, I trekked back to Osaka last week, made sure to talk to a different person at reception, and had them take everything and said clearly that I wanted them to all work properly, and suggested that the problem was with the 70-200. They apologized profusely, and gave me a target date of Jan 22 to have them back to me. They beat the target date last time by a week, so if that holds again, I should get them back later this week....