iPhone abroad: usability nightmare

Last month almost the entire company decamped to Austin for the South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive festival. My experience with my iPhone there was frustrating, to say the least.

My carrier, O2, prices a 3G data connection when abroad so rapaciously (at £6 per megabyte), that there’s no realistic option of having a network connection when abroad, unless you can find a functioning wifi network. Open wifi networks appear to more common in Austin than they are in London, especially in hip cafés and bars (not that I ever visit such places in London), but at times when you are genuinely out and about, you’re stuck with no data at all, and the iPhone in effect becomes an iPod Touch.

To be fair to O2, something that does not come naturally to someone who’s been consistently underwhelmed by them for years such as myself, they do send you a text message as soon as you emerge from your airplane mode, warning you about what a rip off their data roaming charges are. At those rates I’d have more respect for them if they walked up to me with their finger making a pretend gun in their coat pocket and asking for my dinner money.

Actually, this text message gives a useful insight into the way mobile phone companies think. I’ll wager that they introduced that warning text message in response to customer complaints about the price. Whereas what a normal business would do is to look at ways of providing the service that users wanted, all O2 did was to provide themselves with a way to say “see? I told you it was expensive” when the bill comes.

The O2 data roaming warning (screenshot taken in Madrid, where data is priced at the much more reasonable £3 per megabyte, where by “much more reasonable” I mean “mindbogglingly, outrageously high, although not as outrageously high as the £6 per meg they want when you’re in the States”).

The user experience when choosing and connecting to wifi networks that your phone has never seen before is variable, to say the least. You very often end up with no connection because you didn’t wait long enough for a login screen to appear, or end up with a semi-opaque layer over your browser. (How are you supposed to know whether to login to the network in the settings app, or in the browser? It’s a lottery, and one that very rarely pays out.)

This could take a while.

All in all, the user experience when using the iPhone abroad without a data connection is simply terrible.

Every single time you open a mailbox (I have four mail accounts configured) in the Mail app, or even switch between them, the iPhone warns you that you don’t have data roaming turned on and, helpfully, although rather understatedly, that “fees may apply”. At £6 per MB, “fees” isn’t really the right word.

Hey! Did you know that data roaming was turned off?

Once you’ve dismissed that warning, Mail gives you another popup message telling you that it couldn’t reach your mail server. No kidding? The iPhone can only reach a mail server when there’s a data connection? Lame.

This is annoying enough, but for it to happen literally every time you open the app is bordering on intolerable. There are many reasons to open your email without a data connection, for example to look up your hotel reservation voucher, or your flight times, or the address of a bar you’ve agreed to meet at. Surely it would be easy enough for it to warn you just once a day? Or allow you to opt out of the warning entirely? Apple don’t provide that option.

Apple apps are so zealous at informing you about the lack of a data network that they do so even when the app concerned doesn’t actually need one at all. The worst offender here is the SMS app (i.e. texting) – it repeatedly tells you that you don’t have data roaming enabled (remember that fees “may apply”), even though it has absolutely no need for a data connection given that it sends the SMS via the regular cellular network.

An app that doesn’t need a data network telling you you don’t have one.

Not content to irritate you with the the built-in apps, Apple now want third party developers to do the same.

The problem is that this should be a system level function. The data network isn’t available or unavailable on a per app basis, so having each and every app remind you about the lack of one simply becomes redundant and infuriating.

There has to be a way for the phone to give you this information without annoying you to the point of wanting to smash the thing. Maybe a band at the top of the screen like the “touch to return to call” or “internet tethering” notification would work. Something like “no data network, tap here to learn more” and an option to dismiss the entire thing.

An iPhone global alert reminding you that a call is in progress.

Of course the usability problems are frustrating, but the real problem is the outrageous prices that mobile companies want to charge you for data services. Surely this is something that only the regulator can do something about, since the entry of other mobile companies into the iPhone game in the UK hasn’t actually kicked off any proper competition.

Be that as it may, Apple’s justified reputation as a company that designs brilliantly usable interface is tarnished ever so slightly by the dog’s breakfast of constant annoying warnings. I hope that iPhone developers ignore Apple’s advice and stick to useful defaults when there’s no data network rather than badgering users about it.