July 17, 2007

Thoughts on iPhone

As if you need to read another blog post on the iPhone right?

When the first iPhones started rolling out at the end of June, I had no plans to get one right away. After all, I was a Verizon customer still under contract, so not only would I have to pay a hefty $600 for the iPhone itself, I would have to fork out $175 to cancel my Verizon contract. I’d thought I’d wait to hear what problems the early adopters a.k.a. “beta testers” would have with the highly coveted super gadget.

Every 5 minutes I would get a twitter update about how great the iPhone is at this or that.

“Blah blah blah,” I said.

I still had myself convinced not to get one…that was until I held one in my hands. 2 weeks later, I broke down and bought one.

So after playing with it a few days, here is my mini-review of the iPhone:

Things I like:

• Activation was incredibly easy, and there was no “setting up” the iPhone, Address Book, iCal, and Mail synced with the iPhone and I was good to go.
• The user interface is incredibly solid for a 1st gen phone. There’s not much of a learning curve if you are a mac user or any user for that matter.
• The touch screen is very bright and shines right through all fingerprints
• For how small the screen is, I’ve had no major problems with browsing the internet. Zooming in and out, and scrolling side to side with your finger is so much easier than with a mouse.
• After a couple days, I could type faster on the on-screen keyboard than I could on a phone keypad.
• iPhone software updates will come directly from Apple via iTunes. Improvements will come in increments.

Things I Don’t Like:

• No iChat—obviously a business decision as there wouldn’t be much use for text messaging anymore.
• No Feedreader—Yea, I can use Google Reader, but I use RSS for as many things as I possibly can, and you can’t reach password authenticated feeds with google reader.

Obviously the good things by far outweigh my small quibbles. The iPhone is very solid for a first gen device, and it’s only going to get better with time.