We stopped in the nearby Apple store this evening before dinner. I don’t know if they had any iPhones actually for sale, but they did have many of them out for a hands-on experience. Since I’m unlikely to buy one anytime in the foreseeable future, here’s my impression from 5-10 minutes playing with one.
Phone – no idea, the phones are activated, but I didn’t try calling anyone.
iPod – Yeah, it’s got CoverFlow… the single most overrated user interface I’ve seen. Yes, I have it on my iTunes, no I never use it. Why not? 5,759 songs, 100 album covers. Even with the new feature of iTunes to search and acquire album artwork, most of my music is without it. CoverFlow is just stupid without it, and even with it, it’s not that good of an interface. It’s inefficient. “Best iPod – everâ€? Hardly. Sound quality was OK.
Maps – that’s cool
YouTube – I didn’t try searching, but the the videos in the favorites and recent were all so uninteresting I didn’t want to watch them. I did try one but it took so long I gave up before it played.
SMS – worked just fine, very nice
Web Browsing – Now this is the reason I’d consider an iPhone. I want (even it if it slow) to browse real websites at any time during the day. I rely on the internet to look up information frequently and this is the make or break item for me. Pages loaded somewhat slow, but everything I tried came up fine and looked great. I even posted a comment to my own website just to test it out.
Keyboard. I had no trouble adapting to the keyboard and, provided I was only typing characters, I had no trouble with missed keys, misspelled words or anything like that. What I did have trouble with was punctuation. I have never gotten in the habit, even in SMS messages, of omitting punctuation or ignoring rules of spelling or capitalization. The iPhone keyboard requires that you shift modes to get to punctuation, and I could find no way (remember, 5-10 minutes with this device) of shifting back without hitting the spacebar. So, when I tried entering a comment, the text was fine, but entering my e-mail address was a real nuisance. E-M-A-I-L-[SHIFT MODE]-@-[SPACE BAR][BACKSPACE]L-O-N-E-L-O-C-U-S-T-[SHIFT MODE]-.-[SPACE BAR]-[BACKSPACE]-C-O-M-[DONE]
For some reason, that process, while entering into an HTML form resulted in several failed attempts. The oh-so-cool [.COM] button that appears on the URL keyboard isn’t there on the regular keyboard.
Once they have flash and (hopefully) java enabled in the browser, this could be a viable device.