bluefacedpixie

So I’m coming to the end of a two week stint with an iPhone, and thought I’d pass a few remarks.

First of all, I didn’t do a crazy line – my dedication stretched to convincing D to drive me to the Apple store on the 6th at the end of a date night. Although the AT&T store on Capitol Hill was sold out, I walked into the University and basically walked straight out again. The only line was for the demo machines.

Secondly, I ostensibly purchased for work – it’s pretty important to compare the funky iPhone keyboard to the capabilities of my baby (XT9, not L).

Thirdly, the AT&T service plan seems pretty good (better value than my current T-Mobile deal) although two-years is a like a nutcracker around your privates. But I’ll be canceling within the 30-day grace as I can’t afford the $600 early termination ($200 per line) to move our phones from T-Mobile.

So what do I think?

The hardware is unbelievably sweet. From a device perspective it shows what the device of tomorrow will look like. This is Star Trek Next Generation control panels (or “adaptive software user input”) in action, and it’s really nice! The phone is smaller than expected, not heavy, nice to touch and the little touchy, wipey user interaction works well. No tactile feedback isn’t much of an issue for me, and I churn though different phones every month so any strangeness lasted less than 5 seconds.

The iPod is drop dead gorgeous – the sound is good (although they f**ked up the ‘standard’ earphone jack and you’re forced to use their headphones, so I feel a class action lawsuit happening), the flicking through album covers is pant-wetting gorgeous and the screen size is good enough to watch for a period (I’m flying in a week and will try it in earnest).

The software/applications is/are sketchy – Safari and maps crash regularly, Mail doesn’t filter junk so it’s almost useless (and crashes), Calendar doesn’t have to-do’s and you can’t sync notes to your computer. Indeed the whole “being tied to iTunes” both makes it seamless and annoying as my main iTunes is a basement music server and my address book is on my personal laptop and my calendar on my work laptop – ugh! Indeed I had to use a Plaxo account to get some co-ordination. Something I have been resisting for years, and my junk mail has increased tenfold since the sign-up – co-incy-dink?

The phone is good. And the UI is very good. Perhaps the only phone where speakerphone, call merging and call holding are all easy. It’s a little strange the “phone” is the only way you can get to your address book, but I’m sure that’ll be hacked someday. One under-reported thing about the iPhone is that it has a custom voicemail that lets you a) see who called (I think, even with the phone off!) and b) dial in only for that message. This is priceless, especially when jumping between meetings or cars during the day. However it’s this special magic that seems to tie the phone to AT&T and the long contracts, as it’s Apple-fu working with AT&T that make this work.

The keyboard could be better, but makes the device usable. I could type with it quickly, although it was agonizing to enter passwords and many of the applications do not remember information you type into input fields. This is extremely annoying, especially as there is no copy/paste (in itself a debatable but defendable choice). In terms of professional assessment, I think it looks very pretty but I still have a job.

The whole internet thing is pretty good. I’ve pulled it out my pocket and used it in the office rather than my computer. It’s a shame the data plan doesn’t include some wi-fi membership though as wi-fi costs everywhere you want it to be free (airports etc).

It’s as US-centric as get-out. Seriously. The URL keyboard only has .com, international phone numbers appear US-ified beyond recognition, there is no support for phone cards, and the address book doesn’t display UK addresses/numbers well. But this can all improve in time.

So my conclusion? It works as advertised, it works better than expected, it is gorgeous. It wouldn’t take much for me to buy one. It’s the whole cellphone/two year ball and chain and Apple Version 1 combo that’s the delay. But the iPod rocks, and that’s why I may never buy the iPhone. There’s bound to be an iPod like this soon, and there will be no reason for an iPod fan to not buy it. The price of the new iPod will tell us how fair the iPhone price is, but just now I think that (sticker-shock aside) it’s not too bad – the Nokia N’s run to the high hundreds. (If you only want a wifi-touchscreen device I recommend you run for the $139 discontinued Nokia N770’s.) But a cheaper iPod would break the iPhone for me, as I don’t need “one device” more than a great iPod and a reliable phone, for a reasonable price on a good contract. But we’ll see.