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July 1, 2007

My iPhone Adventure

I did, indeed land myself an iPhone on Friday.

There was a lot of debate amongst my friends about where to go to be assured of getting product at launch. Richard, for instance, was a proponent of finding the small, out-of-the-way AT&T store in, like, rural Idaho - someplace without much of a line. For my money, though, the U Village Apple Store was the only place to go: as the flagship Seattle store, it was guaranteed a good supply of the phones ... and it's where the party was going to be. (I mean, waiting in line for Star Wars is as much the experience as the movie itself, right?)

We weren't disappointed.

Bill and I got to the U Village around 2:45 PM and took our places at the end of the line. Adrian was happily sequestered up front (#36!), but I managed to land at #195. The line would later grow to about 350 people before the doors opened at 6.

The mood was, well, happy. People were settling in, enjoying themselves, chatting with their friends and one another. One guy brought his ClearWire Internet service and was broadcasting it over WiFi for the benefit of the public. Another guy ordered pizza, and shared slices. There were three TV news trucks, plus newspaper folks walking around, doing interviews, shooting footage. The Apple employees would walk the line every 30 or 45 minutes, handing out bottled water and thanking people for coming; other folks would also walk the line, handing out flyers for their Mac-troubleshooting businesses, or four-color postcards advertising their new Web sites, games, or iPhone accessories.

(And, in perhaps the funniest, least-effective expenditure of marketing dollars ever, a Verizon Wireless billboard truck cruised the parking lot for two hours before launch. The crowd started laughing - loudly - when it arrived.)

I was surprised at the number of people I ran in to, or who showed up to join me in line. Bill and Adrian were there, of course, but over the next few hours I found myself joined by Richard, Melissa, Hessan, Pete, and Jeff (kids in tow). Elaine came, too. (Best. Girlfriend. Ever.)

The doors opened at 6, the cry went out, people started clapping. And, by 6:45 PM, Elaine and I were standing outside the Apple store, phones in hand, smiling and blinking in the sunlight. Four hours, start to finish.

I got home, opened the box, and plugged it in to my MacBook. iTunes came up and did what it was supposed to. I switched my current Cingular account over to the iPhone (it even detected my corporate-discount plan through Microsoft), entered my Apple ID, and clicked "OK" on the terms and conditions for both Apple and AT&T. It then tried to process my activation, but came back and said it was taking too long, and the system would e-mail me once it had been completed.

Twenty minutes later, I was up and running. I gave the phone a name, and the system auto-synced my calendars and contacts from my Mac. I then checked some options for the photos, music, podcasts and movies I wanted to have on the device (even with the 8 GB iPhone, I can't fit all of my media on it), hit "apply" and waited for the file-copy to finish. Bing, bang, boom.

So what's it like? Four words: holy crap, it's cool.

Some notes:

• The thing is gorgeous. The product shots don't do it justice. It's smaller than it looks, and the finish and polish are just stunning. The screen is the nicest, brightest screen I've ever seen on a small device. It has a great heft in the hand. It practically oozes high-tech sex appeal.
• The various systems on the phone are all tightly integrated in incredibly smart ways. The contacts engine, for instance, is available to applications elsewhere. When you're making calls you can easily look people up by name, of course, but you can also look up people's addresses when you're in the Google Maps application, or people's URLs when you're in Safari. This level of interconnectedness makes the phone super-useful, because you're not being forced to re-enter data that the operating system already has.
• The "home" button is mechanical, so it gives a nice, satisfying click when you touch it. Like the iPod, the iPhone works on the idea of getting people "up" to the top level of the menu in order to make choices about what to use. It's slick, slick, slick. I've been lost in the Cell Phone Maze Of Confusing Screens And Dialogs on other phones (*coff* 8125! *coff*), but that's just not possible, here -- if you're done with SMS and want to browse the Web, just go Home and then touch Safari. Clean.
• Making calls is simple (especially because of the contact list). Calls sound great, too. The speakerphone works as advertised (and yes, you can play iPod audio - music, podcasts, etc. - through the speakerphone). The gem, however, is the included earbuds; they have a small microphone on the wire that lets you use it as a headset. It's incredibly pleasant and simple - say you're walking along downtown, listening to music, and you get a call. Just click the button on the headphones, and take the call. When you're done, your music starts playing, right where you left it. I honestly don't see a need for a Bluetooth headset with this device.
• Scrolling through lists with your finger and "pinching" to zoom in or out is the most natural thing in the world. The fact that Apple has animated these systems so playfully means that it's fun, too. I honestly have found myself scrolling through lists just for the hell of it.
• As an iPod, the iPhone just rocks. The music player is fluid, fast - paging through singles and albums is far more fun than it ever was with the scroll-wheel on the iPod. As Jobs says, you can "touch your music" and it's true - CoverFlow and all the animation work really make it seem like you're reaching through the screen to touch the album art or playlists. It's addictive. And the phone sounds terrific, too.
• Safari is the phone's under-hyped feature. It's a full-blown, honest-to-God Web browser in your pocket, which means you can go, uh, anywhere on the Internet without having to use some kind of crappy, mobile-only interface. Suddenly, that cool Web site with bus arrival information is at your fingertips, as are Mariners schedules, traffic flow maps, magazine articles, live news, you name it. The Internet is with you everywhere. And since the iPhone Safari syncs with the bookmarks on the Mac, it's easy to build a list of links that are handy on the go, and then just drop 'em into an iPhone folder.
• Despite all the whining and hand-wringing, I find the AT&T EDGE network to be OK. It's not super-fast, but it's acceptable. And the WiFi works great, so when I'm home it's damn fast.
• Nobody seems to have noticed that Apple is now shipping an iPod with WiFi (and Bluetooth, and EDGE, and GSM) -- they've gone from no wireless at all to four different types of wireless communication in one release. This sets the stage for, well, all kinds of interesting things. (Welcome to the social?)
• The keyboard works great. The predictive-text thing makes text messages and e-mail a breeze. Some kinds of data entry are trickier, however - URLs come to mind - because the auto-correct logic doesn't work on them. Whatever -- it's still a hell of a lot easier than triple-tapping my RAZR to send an SMS to Elaine.
• Don't sell that Video iPod just yet -- the iPhone doesn't seem to work with my iPod accessories, like the Belkin TuneTalk. It also doesn't work with iPod games (e.g., Zuma).
• Parts of the phone are decidedly undercooked. The calendar, for instance, is clean, but lacks any kind of to-do information. This means I can't sync my daily tasks out of iCal and then check them off on the phone. As it is, the calendar shows you your appointments, but not what you need to accomplish. There's a way to go before it's a DayRunner.
• The notes, too, are just ... primitive. You can take notes on your iPhone, but you can't sync them with your Mac. This is absurd - what we all want is the ability to copy text files, PDFs, and other documents onto the iPhone so they're at hand when we need them. Think of your hotel or flight confirmations, a shopping list, or other things you'd like to have on your person as you go about your day. I mean, ideally, I'd get my Yojimbo archive copied into the phone, so I just have all my information, wherever I happen to be.
• The user interface is a bit inconsistent. The "edit" button jumps around a lot (on the top! on the bottom! Upper right corner!); some of the applications use the Widget-like "i" button instead of "edit." It's not a big deal, but it does seem like the sort of thing that Apple will smooth off and fix in subsequent releases.

And that's the big thing, here -- the iPhone is an amazing product (and doubly so for a v1), but the real excitement lies in what it will become over the coming years, as Apple enhances it with ever-more-clever software. They'll finish some of their applications (Notes, Calendar), smooth out the UI, and enable exciting new functions.

I can think of a good half-dozen interesting applications I'd like to see on (or build for!) the iPhone. I'm sure smarter guys than me have longer lists of more-interesting ideas, too.

Apple clearly has the heat in the market. Nokia, et. al. are going to have to work very, very, very hard to keep up.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to play with this thing for a while longer...

Posted by Gavin Shearer at July 1, 2007 10:46 AM. Posted to Apple.

Comments

Posted by: netsirk at July 2, 2007 10:26 AM

Posted by: Gavin Shearer at July 8, 2007 4:03 PM

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