It ain’t hype if you can deliver
Here are some thoughts and impressions from my first 18 hours with my new best friend:
Surprises & pleasures
- The screen is gorgeous. Oh my god. I mean… GORGEOUS! (Did I mention it was gorgeous?)
- Apple has a knack for making incredibly intuitive and useful user interfaces. As I’ve been exploring all the nooks and crannies of the phone, I keep muttering, “Nice!” “Oh, very nice.” “I wonder if it… yeah, it does. Nice.”
- I’m surprised at how much I like watching videos on the iPhone. I really didn’t get the appeal of the video iPod, but now I do. I think I’ll end up using this a lot while I’m traveling, and I’ll probably watch all my video podcasts this way.
- Touch screen typing is a non-issue, at least for me. Someone with larger fingers might have a different feeling on the subject.
- AT&T finally got the data plan pricing right. $20 for unlimited web and email, and 200 SMS messages. My bill will actually go down this month!
- I’ve read about varying experiences at AT&T stores across the country, but the crew at Pacific Place in Seattle were phenomenal. Jerry and Trish worked the line to let us know what we could expect, folks who needed credit checks were taken care of before 4:30, the door greeters looked me in the eye, asked my name, and shook my hand… everything was done exceedingly well. I was about #80 in line at 6:00 when the phones went on sale and walked out of the store with my iPhone at about 7:10.
- Despite an interface hiccup, the activation went brilliantly. Apple really did things right with this rollout.
- I can bookmark web pages using the del.icio.us bookmarklet. Woo-hoo!
Disappointments & kvetches
- As far as I can tell, you can’t copy and paste text. That seems to me to be a glaring oversight.
- I have really gotten used to carrying my iPod Nano around my neck using the headphone/carrying cord. I’d love to have something like that for the iPhone, rather than carrying the headphones separately.
- The thing I’ll really miss about my Treo is SplashID, which I use to manage usernames and passwords to my hundreds of online accounts. I don’t know how I’m going to function without that program.
- I REALLY wish the period and comma keys were on the same page as all the letters.
- On the Palm, I can drop documents into a folder to read on the device. The only way I can figure to do something similar on the iPhone is to email them to myself and read them through my Gmail account. Why couldn’t I have a docs/notes folder synchronized through iTunes?
- Web sites that use Ajax have limited functionality on the iPhone, because you can’t hover over text. So, for example, I can add to lists and check off items in Backpack, but I can’t edit or trash an item because those options only appear when I hover the mouse over the text.
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