Iphone

So as many of you probably heard,  the much hyped 'iPhone' went on sale on Friday in the US.  There were news reports of people standing in line for several days to get their hands on it first...  especially around here in the Bay Area, where Apple Die Hard nuts are the hardest...

Well turns out my friend Wilson C(who is more of a mobile gadget / general tech nut than an Apple-specific nut) was able to get one on 'opening day'...  How?  well he just drove by the apple store at around 5pm, realized there was almost no line and got one with only a short wait (not zero wait... but he said it was like 45 minutes to an hour by the time he finished his purchase and walk out the door.  

I went down to visit him on Saturday so I got to play w/ the iPhone a bit.  also throughout the day we tried using it for different tasks...  so I got a bit of an early adopter's review for those of you who may care to know how if its up to the hype or not.

Here it is in-hand!

Those who know me know that I too am a mobile phone aficionado - I currently own a Sony Ericsson P990 PDA phone -- and i have been pretty skeptical of the iPhone since it was first announced last January.  It doesn't do very much that my P990 can't do,  but it lacks a lot of the most important features, like 3G, open software platform,  Asian character input... and some physical limitations... you can't replace/swap the battery, memory or sim card.

That said - once you actually use the thing, it is pretty impressive.  slim and sturdy in construction...  but the graphics are probably the most impressive aspect.  When using it in iPod mode, the 'cover flow' feature that lets you scroll through your song collection by album covers is a good example... its fast and smooth and high resolution.    I also really liked the fact that it uses the accelerometer to tell orientation.  Its not one of those things that you think is all that useful,  but when doing side by side comparisons w/ my phone, I suddenly wished I had it on mine. :-P   I hope in the future they expand its use to recognizing motion or gestures.

User input is a bit of a mixed bag though....  there's no stylus and no keyboard(thumbboard), so its all finger tips on the touch screen.  This works well in some aspects (like the thing where you use two fingers to zoom in and out,  flicking your finger to scroll, wiping across a list item to erase it, etc),  but not so great in others (we were all having a lot of trouble typing text -- i think i missed one out of every two letters...  supposedly this is overcome pretty quickly and it has some autocorrect features (that i never got to try since I was only doing place names).  

Also it was a bit buggy.  While listening to the ipod part,  then opening the Google maps app it quit out of both of them suddenly (this happens on my P990 all the time too though!)  we were having trouble using google maps to find restaurant locations a bit too.  Wilson's friend who was trying to bring up restaurant locations was having trouble at least.    

On the plus side, the Safari browser looked really good, and the pinching zoom thing makes it really useful.  Again I felt like I wish my phone could do it. ;-)

Another minus was the slowness of the edge data network.  I guess I am spoiled w/ living in Japan / HK... 

We stopped by the Apple store in Burlingame because Wilson wanted to get a cover.  We ran into a familiar face:

"sorry, no more iPhones today!"  hey, its Paul!    he showed Wilson how to do some secret reboot trick or something.

They had a bunch of different covers on sale, but they were all quite pricey.  I think the rubberize one that Wilson got was like $30.  I'm sure there are people in China working on cranking them out already.  As soon as its released in asia I'm sure I can pick up one for $2! ;-)

I've gotta go meet up w/ Mcchubb for the baseball game, so I'll cut my 'review' short, and say that I think the iPhone does live up to the hype,  the interface and graphics speed.   I'm curious how it would compare side by side w/ some of the newer sony walkman phones (like this one) though.

ps - review part two is here!