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iPhone is too hard to use?

By: , IntoMobile
Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 12:55 PM

iPhone is too hard to useUm, no, it’s not. In fact, the iPhone didn’t even come boxed with an instruction manual/booklet. Those Apple guys put a lot of thought into an intuitive interface, and they had the confidence to scrap the instruction book altogether.

Come to think of it, maybe the lack of an instruction manual is to blame for Opinion Research’s findings that 1 in 8 new iPhone owners (12%) found the iconic handset too hard to use. We aren’t joking, there are apparently some people that just cant figure out the single-buttoned (well, aside from volume and power buttons on the bezel) user interface of the iPhone.

Still, the 12% iPhone frustration-rate is less than the 14.5% of BlackBerry owners that return the crack email-pusher and the 21% of other smartphone owners just couldn’t make heads or tails of their geeky handset.

Granted, smartphones are starting to make their way into the hands of the not-so-technically-inclined, but come on. Are these 12% of iPhone owners the same demographic that has never browsed the web or sent an email? Oh wait, that makes a lot of sense.

Opinion Research iPhone study (PDF link)

[Via: tech.co.uk]

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About The Author

Will Park

Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...

  • Kevin

    The iPhone has a lot of hidden menus and secret gestures. Some are not at all intuitive.

    Without reading the manual, would you know how to place the cursor on a certain letter while typing?

    Would you know how to scroll a textfield within a page? (Hint: two fingers)

    Many people, without being shown, don’t even realize the home button is real.

    Also, the navigation is funky. You drill down, drill back up, and then hit a place where you have to jump from the screen back to the home button again.

    If it didn’t have so few options, it would be just as hard or harder to use than other phones.

  • PlayerKill

    I totally agree with Kevin. Also, I don’t think the iPhone is a smartphone with so many basic features like multitasking absent. Serena, your only valid point is the web browser, which I think is really good. The multi-tasking, though, is not valid at all. Can you tell me how to multi-task between email and web-browsing without going back to the main menu and then go back in again?