Month: June 2007

Here is a rundown of all of my iPhone reactions….

Once inside the Apple Store…

This was so much fun but at the same time slightly spooky. The employees were more pumped then what they’d be at a football game. It was like they’d seen Jesus for the first time. I wanted to know what drugs they were doing in the store room to get that excited.

Inside the store we were doing iPhone cheers. “This side say ‘I.’ That side say ‘Phone.’ (crowd screams) I…Phone…. I….Phone.”

Once you got into the store, they were also like “Congratulations you made it.” It was like I had just run the Marine Corps Marathon. They also were like, “We’re so glad you joined us for this momentous occasion.” It’s like I was having a baby and it was an iPhone.

Thinking back… I think all product launches should be like this. They must have scripted that so much. They probably instructed the employees exactly what to do and say. The thing is… IT WORKED. We were all pumped. People were high fiving eachother. iPhone love was OOZING.

The Setup

I was at first skeptical of the setup process. I was sure something would not end up working and I’d end up on the phone with an AT&T customer service person by the end of the night. BOY WAS I WRONG.

I put the phone in its cradle and within 10 minutes I was making calls. It was just easy. As much as I love my guys at the AT&T store, this is the way phone setup should be.

Now on to the phones features….

Keyboard

This will take a little getting used to. Give it a week of learning how I type or mistype. I’m confident I’ll be typing on this as fast if not faster than I could on my Samsung Blackjack.

The keyboard is contextual. If you’re writing an email address, there will be an “@” button. If you’re in the browser typing in a URL, there will be a “.com” button. This is smart.

iPod

I love finally having a device which does video. (just had the iPod shuffle before) Coverflow is slick. I can see myself using that a lot. It’s easy to scroll through find what you want and you’re on your way.

My only annoyance… if you want to watch a video podcast as video, you have to go to it through the video interface. You can’t go to it through the podcast interface. From the podcast interface, it will play as audio. This seems semi anti-intuitive.

Safari (The Web)

So everyone was nervous about the EDGE speed.  It’s not as bad.  Maybe just because I’ve been using the mobile web for a while, my expectations aren’t that high.

It’s neat how you can see the whole page of a Web site.  If you just want to see one column of the New York Times home page, you just double click on it.  Now you’d think that the column would be off the screen and there would be lots of scrolling.  This is not the case.  It figures out what the size of the column is and will scale it to the size of the iPod screen so you don’t have to scroll to see that column.

One annoyance with a touch screen is that when you click to zoom in, it may think your clicking on a link.  You get taken to another page instead of zoomed in.

Mail

The mail app is cool but… I WISH GMAIL DID IMAP.  If I delete an email on my iPhone, I want it to delete on my mail server too.

So last night, I setup my GMail account to forward to my Yahoo account.  I can still get email at GMail but I’ll answer from Yahoo.  Plus I’ll be able to answer using my iPhone and it will have the PUSH email functionality, like the Blackberry.

Once I did this, all was good and right in the world for mail.

Widgets

The weather and stock tracker widgets are nice.  I can see them being useful.  I hope hope hope *fingers and toes crossed* that they’ll open these up to outside developers soon. I think making iPhone compatible widgets would kick soooo much ass.   I already have ideas for about five I want to make.

SMS

The conversational SMS thing is so slick.  I’m not a text messaging monkey like some people I know but I have gotten into some crazy text message threads before. I like this a lot.

Exterior of the iPhone

It has a button to turn the ringer off.  This is pure genius.  Why doesn’t every phone have this?  I don’t to be the guy who has his iPhone go off in church or at a work meeting.  At work it’d be funny because people would be like, “dang you have an iPhone.”

I haven’t used ringers on my last few phones because it’s been too hard to switch between having it on and off.

There is also a button on the outside which turns the screen off.  It also locks the screen.  When I’m using the iPod functionality, just click the button and you can throw it in your pocket.   Want to check your email, just click the button, run your finger across the screen, and you’re ready to go.

Conclusion 

I’m impressed with the phone so far.  I’m sure I’ll write more later.  This is all for now.