GracefulFlavor

I had a chance to dick around with a friend’s iPhone last night for a good long time, and here are my impressions. Overall, I’m blown away by the device, and it quite literally does look like something out of 2010. It’s that good. It does everything so well that it’s impossible to believe this is a Rev A product. It’s not perfect, but the bright side is that it will only get better, and fast. Most of the nits I outline below can be addressed via improvements to the iPhone’s software, which I suspect we’ll start seeing like we do OSX updates for our Macs.

BEFORE I BEGIN: No, I didn’t get my own…yet. Until I can ditch my Verizon-powered BlackBerry 8703e for good, I need MS Exchange integration for my corporate email. It’s a must. I need calendar access with real-time changes. My BlackBerry has this, and I use it every single day to an almost sickening degree. Once the iPhone has this functionality confirmed, I’ll be in an AT&T or Apple Store five minutes later.

THE GOOD STUFF

• The packaging is minimal, classy, high-quality, sturdy. It’s the kickoff to the experience. Funny how other companies either don’t buy into this or simply can’t do it anywhere near how Apple can.
• Screen is outstanding — resolution is very crisp and overall gamma was very bright. Best screen I’ve ever seen on a mobile device. However, it is a smudge/fingerprint magnet, but that’s nothing a quick wipedown won’t fix. Consider it the nature of the beast.
• GUI speed: nothing in those Apple demos was fabricated. The GUI is fantastically responsive, and I found almost no way to get the GUI to lag behind my gestures in casual testing. In my limited testing, I am impressed.
• It’s ability to switch from EDGE to a trusted WiFi network is very seamless. WiFi speeds are, as you might imagine, very good.
• EDGE speeds didn’t seem too horrible when I accessed this blog, including my admin dashboard.
• Even with sustained heavy use, the battery seems to hold up well. I did not, however, use the device long enough to determine what a full charge yields, time-wise.
• Multiple clocks in World Clock as well as multiple independent alarms.
• The form factor is actually smaller than I expected, especially in terms of thinness.
• The build quality is rock solid — the unit doesn’t flex or creak in any way whatsoever. It’s monolithic.
• It doesn’t get even the least bit hot during GUI + data operations. I don’t know how it does under sustained voice load.
• iSafari (to steal John Gruber’s phrase for the iPhone’s Safari) is fucking amazing. Navigation is simple, the zoom feature works as advertised, the fonts render true to form. It’s the very first mobile web browser that doesn’t feel like a shitty mobile web browser.
• Widescreen video is utterly kickass.
• YouTube works perfectly and looks outstanding. It’s a perfect example of a Web 2.0 app ported to the iPhone as a Web 2.0 app and a standalone iPhone app. This is a good example of what the current SDK can yield — at least in theory.
• Camera is great in medium to bright light and with still subjects.
• Through all aspects of usage, it’s the only device that made me say, ‘Jesus Christ, look at that!’ in sheer awe about a dozen times. It has to be used to be believed.

THE DISAPPOINTMENTS

• The touchscreen keyboard. I can absolutely fly on my BlackBerry’s chicklet-style keyboard with my thumbs. Not so on the iPhone. In fact, when I try to do my thumb-fu, I get something that resembles a cross between hex and Ethiopian. As a result, I resorted to single-finger hunting-and-pecking, which is a huge step down for me. I hope that over time I could learn how to go back to thumbing the iPhone, but I don’t know: the touch-screen keyboard is awfully sensitive. Forums from around the web run contrary to my opinion here. Maybe it just takes some time. Consider the jury out on this point, but my first experience was iffy.
• There seems to be no way to empty Mail’s trash at once — you have to delete messages one at a time. If so, that’s asinine: if I have 150 trashed emails, I have to swipe + tap 150 times? There needs to be a button at the bottom of the screen that empties the trash/deletes all.
• No ‘auto-text.’ On my BlackBerry, I can create text expansion macros that allow me to type ‘u’ for ‘you’, ‘w’ for ‘with’, and so on. It’s massively useful and increases text input speed dramatically. The iPhone, given its touchy keyboard, needs this urgently.
• It sucks that the period and comma keys are set on another keyboard layer entirely than the standard ABC layer. The iPhone needs to interpret a double-space as a period (like the BlackBerry) and put the comma key on the ABC keyboard instead of one for symbols/punctuation. Apple can’t be so proud so as to refuse to learn a thing or two from other players in the space, especially one that has nailed text like RIM has.
• No clipboard. Yet.
• Notes app uses Marker Felt as a font and generally looks disconnected with the rest of the Helvetica-heavy GUI. It’s campy.
• No chat client, but I have to imagine one is imminent: an SMS conversation looks exactly like a mobile iChat.
• So far, no way to integrate with Exchange.
• Camera sucks in low light conditions and with moving subjects.

VERDICT

I will be getting one of these within the next several weeks, assuming I get my vaunted Exchange integration. Without question.