July 26th, 2007

Did you guys hear? Apple came out with a phone!

A few weeks ago, I said I wouldn’t be get­ting an iPhone on the day it came out because I wanted to have some ques­tions about the UI, data speeds, and a few other nag­ging issues sorted out before I took the plunge. It took me a week and a few trips to the Apple store, but I went ahead and got the 8gig iPhone the Friday after it came out. Over­all, I’m very impressed with the device, and it has met all of my expec­ta­tions save for a few minor issues.

First of all, acti­va­tion was not a prob­lem for me like it was for some. I got the phone, drove home, plugged it in, and within 5 min­utes the phone was acti­vated and ready for use. Once this part of the process was done, it was a matter of get­ting my ’stuff’ onto the iPhone. This was also easily accom­plished from within iTunes. I’m still not so sure how I feel about iTunes being the center of my iPhone/computer inter­ac­tion, but at the same time, I’d rather use that than another stand­alone app. My con­tacts, cal­en­dar, music, pod­casts, email accounts & photos were all loaded onto the device, and I was good to go. I spend the better part of that week­end play­ing around with the iPhone UI and the apps.

It really does seem like a lot of thought went into almost every deci­sion that was made about the inter­face of this device. I think almost anyone can instantly get used to how this device works, and easily nav­i­gate it’s appli­ca­tions. I think those iPhone com­mer­cials were a great idea, as every­one I have let play around with my iPhone try basi­cally the same actions dis­played in the ads (play with cov­er­flow, use google maps, pinch and zoom photos). People instantly know what the iPhone is all about, and that gives them a big advan­tage over Black­berry and other com­pet­ing phones in the market.

Some of the things that have jumped out at me over the past 3 weeks of owning this device:

1. Bat­tery life is great. Even using WiFi and brows­ing the web, I get the adver­tised bat­tery life. In a normal day (taking a few calls, send­ing a hand­ful of text mes­sages, check­ing a few web sites, lis­ten­ing to music for 5-6 hours at work) I only seem to use about 25% of the bat­tery. Even with heavy use, I haven’t gotten much below half in one day.
2. The phone is a near per­fect size. It feels very solid in your hand, and it really seems well-​built. It freak­ing better be, but still … feels great.
3. EDGE isn’t great, but it works for basic tasks that I use – email, rss/news, twit­ter, google maps, things like that. I was on vaca­tion last week with my family and got a chance to really put the data net­work thru it’s paces while I was on the road, and it got the job done … although it was frus­trat­ingly slow every once in a while. Over­all, I get some­where between 125-150kb/s in good areas … and some­thing much, much slower in others.
4. The Google maps app is out­stand­ing. We had to use it a few times to find some places in Orlando, and while it doesn’t have GPS, the dri­ving direc­tions with it’s ‘turn-by-turn’ fea­ture is good enough … espe­cially in a pinch.
5. Using the WiFi for inter­net access is ideal, but I have left it off most of the time unless I’m at home, work, or a friend’s house with WiFi. It seems to affect bat­tery life mar­gin­ally, but I’m not sure turn­ing it off while dri­ving and such makes a huge dif­fer­ence either way.
6. The touch­pad isn’t per­fect, but I’m really fast at it now. You really do get used to trust­ing the soft­ware to auto-​complete even the most obscure terms, and 99% of the time, it works won­der­fully. I have sent out a few emails I didn’t re-​read in a pinch, and it included some inter­est­ing word­ing, but for the most part, it’s been great.
7. No AIM is a downer, but I’ve just had IMs for­warded to SMS and that does the trick. Also, for now, FlickIM fills the actual AIM issue pretty well. Per­fect? No way. But hope­fully we’ll see an update even­tu­ally from Apple that allows me to chat it up on my phone when killing time or in a pinch.

Now, of course the iPhone isn’t per­fect. There are a hand­ful of glar­ing issues – some that can be fixed with soft­ware, some that cannot – that annoy me to dif­fer­ing degrees. The ringer is pretty quiet, and I have missed a few calls already when walk­ing in a public place, and the vibrate func­tion is a bit weak as well. Addi­tion­ally, while the camera phone qual­ity isn’t bad at all, the inter­face for the camera app itself is pretty abysmal, and in my opin­ion, coun­ter­in­tu­itive. There is one button for taking pic­tures, and it works when you RELEASE the button, not when you press it. I can under­stand the logic, since the camera is on the oppo­site side of the touch screen. If you’re taking a self por­trait or some­thing along those lines, the best way to take photos is to place your finger on the button, turn the camera to where it needs to go, then release the button … but I just find that odd, as every camera ever has used the oppo­site action. A cool option to add would also be to have, say, a 2 second hold of the home button auto­mat­i­cally take a photo. This way, no fum­bling around find­ing but­tons, no ambi­gu­ity. But I doubt we’ll see any­thing like that – nor will we see an added button to a 2nd gen iPhone for the camera.

The ‘notes’ appli­ca­tion, which osten­si­bly will be updated to work with Apple’s improved Mail appli­ca­tion that’s coming out with Leop­ard, is god awful right now. There’s no way to synch it with any­thing, so you can create to-​do lists while on the go, which is help­ful, but you can’t easily get it onto the com­puter since there is no cut/paste func­tion­al­ity on the iPhone (yet). If there were cut and paste, you could at least email your­self the list.

Finally, the YouTube appli­ca­tion is a great idea, but cur­rently there are almost no worth­while videos on the ‘quicktime version’ of YouTube. There­fore, other than a few great clips of Family Guy, it’s a com­plete waste of my time.

Mr. Zeld­man wrote an arti­cle recently about how the iPhone is the only thing that has ever really ‘forced his hand’ and had him switch over to many of Apple’s default OS X apps. I have made a sim­i­lar tran­si­tion, away from Google Reader, Google Cal­en­dar, and gMail in favor of Net­NewsWire pro + News­Ga­tor (which now syncs items between the online & desk­top apps so I can read unread RSS feeds on my iPhone and have the same list at home, work, and online), iCal, and IMAP/Apple mail/Address book. There are cer­tain ben­e­fits to making this switch, but it has been a process get­ting used to new habits, work­flow, and ways of storing/using my data.

I’ve used the Apple apps on and off over the years, but gen­er­ally have sought out the best prod­uct for each task, not always the default app. Now, due to how easy it is to get all of that data (not to men­tion it being the only way right now) into your iPhone if you use all of the Apple apps, Using Mail/Address Book/iCal/iTunes/Aperture is a no-​brainer.

Over­all, I’m noth­ing short of floored by the iPhone. It’s rare a ‘convergence device’ works as well as this does – it’s a fine iPod, a great phone, and a very useful PIM / web browser as well. Apple hit this one out of the freak­ing park. Not only that, I really feel it has changed the way I inter­act with com­put­ers and the web. I actu­ally spend less time online, as in a pre-​iPhone world I would sit down to check email, then get sucked into AIM, then start read­ing RSS feeds, and next thing you know, it’s 2am. No more. I’m more acces­si­ble to others, yet I spend far less time actu­ally being in one place wait­ing for this inter­ac­tion to take place. I def­i­nitely text more now, as well. If/when we see iChat for the phone, it’ll be over.

Simply put, the iPhone is the nicest piece of con­sumer elec­tron­ics I have ever used. It meets all of my needs in the per­sonal and pro­fes­sional realm, is fun to use, and the best is yet to come. With soft­ware updates on the hori­zon from Apple, you can only assume this prod­uct will improve over time. Is it for every­one? Of course not. But it’s a fine device that has ‘enough’ stor­age to let you throw your con­tacts, photos, music, videos and cal­en­dars onto an easy to use, great look­ing phone that’s an absolute plea­sure to use.

My site is now ‘iPhone opti­mized‘ as well: the default zoom level & page width have been adjusted for the view­port attribute.