Jul 18 2007
Wheeee, iPhone
Yes, it has arrived – the nice Fed-Ex guy made a second stop at the house after having missed me for my signature earlier in the day.
Impressions out of the box:
Actually, first impression of the box: Apple continues to do a great job at packaging. The box itself is clearly the spawn of an indulgent marketing department, with a smooth matte black finish atop an unusually heavy guage of cardboard. The cover is embossed with 1-to-1 sized image of the contained iPhone, and it slides off the box with the resistant suck of a precision fit. Yes, yes, I’m gushing about the packaging, jeez, but it is always nice to see folks sweating the details.
Inside: the iPhone, another set of ubiquitous white headphones (how many pairs does this make?) with the small addition of an inline mic on the right earphone lead. Also a USB cradle and some leaflet docs.
The critter is smaller than I’d expected – it looks more-or-less like an elongated iPod. The screen is super crisp, bright colors. The UI is snappy – particularly in comparison with my old Treo 650.
To my stunned amazement, the AT&T activation completes without a hitch. My currrent phone is a Treo 650 on a family plan in my wife’s name, so I was expecting some hassle getting the new phone added, but no – I’m up and on-net in about 5 minutes. This is in Waterville ME, for anyone wondering if us Mainers would have trouble getting service.
Impressions after a few days of mucking about:
Pro:
- A (generally) brilliant user interface. Really shows what happens if you spend the cash on good, user-focused design.
- Whatever they have under the hood, the UI is very responsive. The screen animation is almost always fast and smooth, and you never seem to have to wait for the thing to catch up to you.
- It makes a nice little internet terminal on WiFi. The Safari app is actually usable doing things I never expected – like reading forum articles and blog posts.
- iPod + internal speakers is a surprisingly wonderful thing, particularly if you like audio-books, and/or are constantly losing earphones.
- Typing on the thing “isn’t awful”, in-fact it’s considerably better then I’d been willing to put up with. I personally find almost all small-device input methods generally terrible – or to put it another way, I’m a lousy typist on anything smaller than a full-sized keyboard to start with, so anything smaller is just a question of degree. But the predictive typing code they’ve got running under the virtual keyboard is actually useful – my typing speed and accuracy is certainly on-par with what I could bang out on the Treo’s ‘real’ keyboard.
Cons:
- This thing SCREAMS for: OpenVPN client + SSH + a VoIP client for use when on WLAN (not holding my breath on that last). I’ve seen web-based SSH clients mentioned, but, nrg. It needs native clients.
- Reception is not as good as the Treo, at least not at home. The indicated signal strength varies greatly, from 4 bars to ‘No Service’ seemingly at randomly. When reception is good, the call quality is excellent – but it’s not unusual to drop calls if I end up in the wrong part of the house.
- Smudgy
- Typing passwords is a serious pain, particularly if you’ve been conditioned to use non-alphanumeric characters.
- Dumb bugs. I mean, I was expecting bugs, but I was NOT expecting to struggle to sync data between iCal and the iPhone’s iCal equivalent.
Bottom line: I love it. Most of my frustrations with the device are software related, so I think I have a reasonable shot at seeing them resolved – if not by Apple/AT&T, then by the Evil Hacker Collective. Apple will probably sell a trillion of these things. At the very least, they have raised the bar on UI design for mobile devices – one can hope that it will set the Motorola and Nokia’s of the world thinking about what can be accomplished with some good interface design.