A friend brought an iPhone to a party last night and we admired the box and the feel of the phone itself. The phone wasn’t activated, so it could only do “emergency calls”. We found the big Earth photo behind the virtual keypad distracting.
A long-time Unix and Mac OS user down in Manhattan wrote me the following email:
I played around with a friend's new iphone for 1/2 hr today.
Impressions, from positive to negative:
User interface: superb. Graphics/icons/menus are tasteful and
informative (as expected). Transitions from one "mode" to another
are natural and transparent. The really new elements are the
scrolling (a finger drag, with "inertia") and zooming ("pinch", or
"spread"), which are both intuitive and surprisingly responsive.
Addictive - once you try it, you won't want to go back!
Photos/movies/tunes: interface for all of these is excellent, better
than ipod, and way better than other phones.
Calls: sound quality seems noticably better than average, speaker
phone too.
Battery life: Despite their abysmal track record with laptops and
ipod, Apple seems to have done well on this. Only drawback is that
the battery is not user-changeable.
Connection speed: roughly dialup speed when on the cellular network
(i.e., when using it without wireless access), which is fine for
email and web pages that are mostly text, but tiresome for images/
video. Google maps is reasonable.
Typing: manageable, but the keyboard felt pretty small for me
(although much bigger than blackberry et al).
Missing clipboard: can't copy things (e.g., photos, text) from web
pages. In fact, I don't think there's copy/paste in any apps.
Memory: problematic. 8Gbytes is plenty for the phone, but tiny if
you're going to fill it with movies, photos and tunes.
Bottom line: it's not perfect, but it is the first PDA/phone
interface that doesn't suck. Seems great for reading/responding to
simple emails, and surprisingly good for google-mapping and basic web
browsing. If I were a train commuter, or a yuppie with a fast-paced
street life, I'd buy one tomorrow.
I flew to SMO – HND yesterday. I took a few photos with my new iPhone.
When I landed and walked into the Henderson Executive Airport I told the phone to hop onto their WiFi network (free). I replied to the one new email message I had.
When I was departing the only weather station computer was in use so I used the iPhone’s Safari to check my weather enroute and at my destination. I wasn’t as easy as it would have been on my 15″ laptop screen, but it gave me the answer nearly as fast and I wasn’t toting ten pounds of laptop/bag/charger. The iPhone slips neatly into the same pocket as my wallet.
I bet cut and paste arrives within the year.
>If I were a train commuter, or a yuppie with a fast-paced
street life, I’d buy one tomorrow.
I’m a train commuter, but that is the main reason I will NOT be buying an iPhone. Verizon has a stranglehold on the Wash DC metro system, and ATT will not work underground. Thanks for your stupid, blind, greed that ruins things for your commuters, WMATA!
I went from a Treo on Verizon to a Treo on AT&T. As far as I can tell, the AT&T network is not comparable to Verizon. I’m going to try to switch back.
What I really like about the Treo 700p on Verizon is:
* Verizon’s wireless sync will push all my IMAP e-mail to the phone (well, the phone is really polling but it works very well).
* The Verizon data network is good enough that I don’t need Wifi. I’ve found Wifi coverage to be much more spotty than I would have thought. Only one of the airports I’ve been in recently (Portland, out of Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Reno, Jackson) has free Wifi.
* You can easily do things like check the weather on the Treo. Set a bookmark to the Weather channel home page, and it’s just a few keystrokes.
* The Treo has cut and paste. 🙂
* I had no idea GSM audio interference existed…until I got a GSM phone. It’s horrible! My phone has to be several feet away from my computer, my car stereo, etc. Everybody I talk to who has a GSM phone says “yeah, it’s like that.”
* When I take the train to NYC, I can plug my Treo into my laptop and get net access the whole way down. I haven’t tried this with the 680 on AT&T yet, but my luck with the AT&T data network isn’t very good so far.
I view the Treo as the extremely refined first generation of smart phones. The iPhone is the beta of the next generation. I waited until the last few Treos to switch, I don’t know if I’ll wait that long this time. 🙂
If Verizon added better phones (and international access, which I know is mandatory for some folks), I think they would take off.
I used my iPhone to go to Airnav.com and download a pdf file of the ILS approach plate at BJC. Awesome! I cannot wait to have WIFI in my plane.
I didn’t like that the battery was not user changable too, but the guys at ipodjuice.com have an alternative to sending it to apple. Looks like soon they will have their own iPhone battery replacement service.
– Laura