@amnon I agree. Never let users as is the case here with Andy have such fine control will only add to the confusion of the functionality of what is actually happening when the switch is used.

Either (1) is lying to save face, but looking dumber in the mean time, or (2) should be complaining about his PA, not his iPhone, who must have set up an alarm to go off while he was at the Orchestra (side comment: I wonder if she had already resigned and did this as a prank like setting the hotel alarm to go off load at 3am in the morning).

@Rod Drury – I am sure that the iPhone alarm use to turn the phone on but this no longer seems the case. I too just use aeroplane mode at night – it is one button and a toggle so cant imagine how a special mode would be quicker. I dont want data at night so this is not a problem and is no different to having the phone off. What does the blackberry bedside mode allow that the aeroplane mode doesn’t (other than brightness which I dont see as a major)

Firstly, it wouldn’t have helped the man at the orchestra, as he didn’t even know an alarm had been set.

Secondly, it achieves nothing, as nobody knows, at the time they set their alarm, which hypothetical situation they may be caught out where the alarm is due to go off and the phone in silent mode.

An alarm clock gets away with its design and naming conventions because it has only two emitting functions. It plays audio, and it rings an alarm. Alarm Mode isn’t a good name for the iPhone hardware switch because, as Marco points out, there’s a wider set of well thought-out rules for what type of audio will and won’t play in this mode.

Most phones call their mode ‘silent’, even though it does not mean absolute silence. The iPhone continues the tradition of calling this mode ‘silent’. The official name for the button is the “Ring/Silent” switch. Is there a better name? Probably not. You can’t capture a complex set of rules with a single word. And you don’t want to simplify the rules, as Andy argues, because that’s the tail wagging the dog. So you pick the most descriptive word for the job. ‘Alarm Mode’ doesn’t tell the user anything about what the function does, except that it has something to do with the alarm – and, in fact, the alarm has nothing to do with the switch’s primary function – to stop the phone from ringing when a new message or call received.

Just like you can’t capture the rules in a single word, you won’t capture them in a simple, recognisable icon that fades away after a couple of seconds. The current icon, which illustrates ‘silence’ in a universal way, is the right one. Thinking up a new icon to solve this problem is, I think, a wild goose chase.

Some, like Andy, have suggested that giving users more control, by allowing fine-grain options in the Settings app to define exactly what the Silent switch does, is the answer. It’s not. And most users never open the Settings app anyway, so the debate is a non-starter.

In reality, the current design is probably the best compromise, given that if it wasn’t, we would have been debating this long before one overblown story about one man at a show – three and a half years after the introduction of the iPhone.

I had one idea, that I only sort-of half like. Rather than buried deep in Settings app, a single setting could live in the Clock app, where the user is already forced to look every time a new alarm is set. It could live under the “Snooze: On/Off” setting –

“Play in Silent Mode: On/Off”

Then wake, turn up brightness and turn off flight mode.

Blackberry has done it for years and it’s immediately missed as soon as you move to an iPhone.

Maddening.

Rod

All the best!

Cheers,
Neil