Wow it's been a while. I don't have any excuses, other than the fact that I basically haven't had anything to do this summer and now that I do (PDEng assignment), might as well write a blog entry.
Today I had the opportunity to play with a real, live iPhone and I have to say I was pretty impressed. Like any other gadget-blog reader, I've been completely overwhelmed by the iPhone news over the past month and had to start filtering out any post about the iPhone because it was getting so annoying. I don't think there's ever been this much hype about a gadget, although any news coming out of the cult-like Mac community tends to hog the newswire around release time. Despite my frustration with all the iPhone coverage, I was still pretty excited to play with one.
First impressions - sexy. Apple is known for having incredible industrial design and they have produced some of the sexiest technology out there - from the iPod to their operating system Mac OS X. I am a huge fan of minimalism and thankfully, so is Steve Jobs. The iPod managed to succeed with only 5 buttons and revolutionized the mp3 market. The iPhone has one button - home. Everything else is accessed via its glass touch screen. The touch screen has a very good resolution (both optical and capacitive) and although smudges are awfully annoying, the glass is much more scratch-resistant than typical plastic LCD covers.
Navigation is fairly intuitive with lots of flicking, pinching, and tapping. However, exiting programs was not very simple and I usually just hit the physical home button to return to the homescreen. It supported a bumch of email programs such as GMail Yahoo! etc and it was a breeze to configure my gmail account and read mail. Replying to mail was simply impossible - the iPhone keypad is as bad as the reviews say. It is simply unusable. It would be convenient if the keyboard would flip horizontal when you flip the device horizontal (as all images and web pages do) since this would make the keys a bit larger and perhaps increase the accuracy. As a BlackBerry user, I found thumb-typing on a touchscreen with no tactile feedback nearly impossible. I was typing approximately 6 words per minute.
The reason I was impressed with the iPhone was its media playback. Looking at the photos on the phone was a very enjoyable experience. You can easily zoom in/out, flick around, start slideshows, and view in portrait or landscape view simply by tilting the device (complete with pretty animations). The iPod portion of the phone was really cool as well - cover flow is just as cool as the commercial, and scrolling through songs/artists/albums flows really well. I thought there would be a character-based search option but I couldn't find it. This would really make the iPod for me. Another downside is that the headphone jack is the standard 3.5 mm but they sunk it into the plastic so that only their earbuds will fit in it (my sennheisers won't work without an adapter).
Overall, the applications all look cool, and navigating around was really cool. As a phone or smartphone, I would never buy one of these. The crappy keyboard, ridiculous AT&T contract lock-in, and lack of GPS are all dealbreakers for me. However, if Apple uses all the technology in their next video iPod, I would definitely buy one. Especially if they can mimic their 9 hours of battery life during video playback (as reported by the engadget iPhone review). Verdict: wait for the next iPod and buy a BlackBerry ;)
Anyways, I'll be trying to update this bad boy once a week from here on out. Thanks for reading.
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