Hocus Pocus Locus

Apple’s new Siri intelligent agent for the iPhone 4S understands a bunch of useful stuff, but I wish it could do more. Here’s a list of tasks that I wish Siri could help me with:

• “Remind me to give Mark his present when I see him next” — use Find My Friends to discover that Mark is close, then remind me to give him a present.
• “What flights are leaving tomorrow for Seattle?” — this use to work in Siri the app, but no longer does in Siri for iPhone 4S.
• “Tweet ‘hi there #vegastech’” — full integration with Twitter and Facebook, and a full understanding of hashtags and Twitter handles.
• “Launch TweetBot” — app launcher would be great!
• “Reserve a table at a good Italian restaurant.” — Siri use to have this ability by using OpenTable in the app version. Not so in iPhone 4S.
• “When’s a good time to book a two-hour meeting this Thursday?” — returns some choices for when the meeting might occur. Although this doesn’t work, you can ask Siri “what’s going on at 3 this Thursday?”
• “What songs do I have by Dave Matthews?” — returns a list of songs. Interestingly, she does understand this query, but says “Sorry Mike, I can’t search that content.”
• “Show me a preview for ‘Green Latern’” — Siri the app use to return actual movie previews that you could watch. Not so on the iPhone 4S.
• “What movies are playing tonight?” — Siri the app use to return movies that were currently playing in theaters. Again, not on the iPhone 4S.
• “How much time do I have before my next meeting?” — she answers with the time and date of your next meeting. However, she doesn’t go as far as actually giving you a time span. She has this data, she should be able to answer the question. 
• “Tell Mel he owes my $20” — There is no “Mel” in my address book because he’s under his full name “Melvin”. Siri should learn nicknames.
• “Show me reviews for Joseph’s Restaurant” — she would return Yelp results.

To be fair, Siri does a few smart things that I didn’t expect. For example, ”remind me to call Kaywood in a minute” not only notifies you of your call, but she also pops up a dialog box offering to call Kaywood (which, I think, is more a function of the Reminders app).

Erika Morphy over at Forbes recently wrote about her disappointment with Apple’s retail revamp in Apple (Finally) Jumps on the Point-of-Sale Bandwagon. She’s disappointed because “… in truth, there is much more Apple could do to for the customer [sic] at the point of sale.”

However, it seems to me that Erika’s simply upset that Apple’s store update isn’t cool enough for her. Her “real-life” examples fall flat and seem as if they were snatched out of a badly crafted Google search for the sole purpose of filling white space.

She says regarding QR Tags:

Home Depot, Lowe’s and other hardware stores are deploying these. Basically 2D barcodes are attached to products or their nameplates that can be scanned with a web-enabled camera phone. What it pulls up can be anything from videos demonstrating how to use, say, a lawn mower, or other tips or support resources for the post-sale.

The Apple Store is not Home Depot. You can get lost in Hope Depot. I’ve gotten lost in Home Depot. When you’re standing in one of their cavernous aisles and all you hear are blind albino frogs croaking, then yes, scanning a QR code might be a good way to get information about a product. But QR codes are not a better experience than Apple’s iPad-based information displays. For Home Depot, QR codes are simply more feasible than installing an interactive display for its thousands of products.

QR codes are fiddly and have burdensome pre-requisites. You have to know what they are. You need a mobile device. You must download an app that knows how to scan QR codes. You must deal with low light and blurry pictures. You must have the patience to wait while information is being fetched over a potentially slow network.

Why would Apple introduce such a bad experience to its retail customers when its small in-store footprint makes it feasible to place an iPad that already contains all needed information in front of every product? And why not do so in a way that introduces the customer to an iPad?

The function of the iPad display is to organize high-level information better than the paper it replaces. When the customer needs more information than is available on the iPad he can use it to call an Apple Specialist over. The specialist can then have a real-life honest-to-goodness person-to-person conversation to build a better relationship with the customer.

QR codes don’t (by themselves) help to organize information, and they certainly don’t help connect the customer to a human.

Erika’s next example involves (of all things) interactive vending machines:

Okay not exactly ideal for the retail store, but if Apple wanted to expand its retail footprint even more with kiosks or pop-up stores these would be an ideal.

PepsiCo debuted its Social Vending System, a vending machine sporting full touch screen interactive technology, at the National Automatic Merchandising Association’s One Show in Chicago earlier this year. The consumer gifts a friend a drink by entering his or her name, mobile number, text message and even short video if the gifter chooses. The drink is redeemed at a social vending machine.

The point of Apple’s retail stores is not simply to vend. It’s to educate the public on their products. It’s to build human relationships. I haven’t yet had a meaningful relationship with a vending machine. I think I want to keep it that way. And regarding a “Social Vending System,” let’s dive below shallow analysis into the deep blue waters of common-sense and reason.

I could be convinced that PepsiCo’s Social Vending System might work. Cans of Coke are small. They only cost a couple of bucks. You can make a crap load of these machines to place on the corner of every K-Mart. Hell, they already do make vending machines to place on the corner of every K-Mart. 

But now pretend these vending machines don’t contain cheap cans of pop but instead products that start at $49 and range to thousands. How much of your expensive inventory are you going to have locked up on random curbsides? Do you really think making your friend pick up his graduation or birthday gift from a vending machine sends him the right message?

Erika’s last attempt at a real-life example revolves around the iPad display’s level of interactivity.

Why stop with calling a sales rep and custom ordering a Mac? How about iPads that recognize the customer – perhaps he or she has to enter an email address to launch it — and then offers personalized discounts. Assuming Apple were ever to offer discounts outside of Black Friday.

Sure, because customers are so good about logging themselves out of computers. Yes, I’m being snarky. And I’m perfectly happy to leave it at that.

With regard to offering “personalized discounts,” is Erika suggesting that Apple also revamp its pricing model simply so that their displays can be “more interactive?” Customers shouldn’t be playing with the iPad, they should be playing with the product they’re considering to purchase.

Yes, I know I said above that the displays are a great way to introduce customers to the iPad. But that exposure should just be appetizing enough to get you ready for the main course.

The problem with Erika’s article is that it assumes Apple is revamping its stores to jump on some “bandwagon”, implying that Apple is behind the times compared to other retailers. But Apple doesn’t jump on bandwagons. It’s usually the horse that’s pulling it.

Like the upgrades to its software and hardware products, Apple is introducing these changes to give the customer a better experience and to create relationships. The goal here isn’t to advance “point-of-sale technology and concepts.” It’s to make happy customers.

• You can rest all of your fingers on it and just move your index finger.
• Pinch-to-zoom is much more reliable than on the MacBook trackpad. On the MacBook you could zoom multiple times on one gesture. With the trackpad, regardless of how pronounced you perform your pinch gesture, it only zooms one step. Come to think of it, I don’t know if this is due to the new drivers; if it is, maybe it’s fixed on the Macbooks too.
• You can still use the thumb-click + index finger to drag things around. On the 27” iMac I was testing it on, I was able to drag a window all the way across the screen without lifting my finger.
• Three finger drag works for more than just windows. It is a general drag feature. This means it also works to select text.
• Right clicking using the bottom-right-hand corner is touchy. It did not always register as a right click.
• As you’d expect, accuracy is not as good as with a mouse but it’s perhaps a little better than the MacBook trackpad.
• After using it for a while, the fingers that I’m not using are more strained than they would be with a mouse. It’s probably because I’m trying not to touch the pad with them.