I got my iPhone up and running.
After reading about various horror stories that people were having with activating their new iPhones, I was a bit apprehensive about deactivating my perfectly good cellphone in hopes that soon after I could get the iPhone activated. I didn't need to worry. The whole process was done before I had a chance to snap photographs of each step the iPhone was taking while activating. Whew.
(For those who have activation concerns, I "upgraded" my existing AT&T account to the iPhone. I did have to add the $20 data plan, which was no big deal. I used to have the same plan on my SmartPhone, until the SIM card went crazy on me and I got a surprise bill for $249. But that's another story...)
After activating the phone, I pressed the on/off switch, slid my finger across the slide panel on the screen to unlock the phone, and I was ready to go.
The first thing I did was connect to my WiFi by entering my network's password. That gave me my first chance to use the on screen keyboard. I was typing slowly and deliberately and I got everything working just fine. I got a rush of excitement.
Next up I loaded Safari and browsed a few web pages. The full page view is nice. The zoom in/out, two-finger, pinch gesture is easy enough and scrolling up and down as well as left and right is easy too. It does get a little old having to zoom in whenever you visit a page though. Entering a URL isn't too difficult using the onscreen keyboard either--of course, as long as the URL isn't too complifacted :-).
I also briefly tried out Google Maps, syncing my email, the calendar, and the weather app. My overall impression: Very nice.
For kickers, I took the iPhone along for a ride to see what it would be like to use the keyboard while in a bouncy car. (No I wasn't driving :-).) It was a little trickier than just sitting down. I found myself accidentally tapping on keys as the car ran across bumps in the road. It's not terrible, but it does get frustrating.
How did the screen display under the bright, summer Phoenix sun? Amazingly well. Better than any UMPC I've used on the go. There may be other devices now that are on par with the iPhone's display, but I haven't used them, so this was quite a pleasant surprise. Apple did a top notch job here.
As a Tablet PC and UMPC user, what do I think of the iPhone's touch capabilities? Very well done. Everything requires a soft touch which has the downside of allowing false triggers. However, the upside that everything feels easy to use. The gestures are also quite easy to use. Although, I found in Safari, that sometimes the gestures didn't trigger when I thought they should, leading me to try and retry them several times, sometimes causing too many gestures to occur.
I'd heard that the capacitive digitizer used in the iPhone detected the proximity of the finger, kind of like a Tablet PC does with the stylus and an active digitizer. However, it appears to me that you always have to make contact wtih the display for the touch event to be detected. No biggy, but I did wonder if hover was going to be possible.
Last big impression I had: Almost five minutes into using the device, I started thinking about how I could program this or that for the iPhone. But, of course, there's no open SDK. It's unfortunate. Yeah, a developer can write web apps, but that's not the same. I hope Apple remedies this situation soon, because I imagine there are a lot of developers like myself that have ideas spinning in the heads which would be extremely useful.
Oh, one last thing. There's no copy/paste. That's going to cripple my thoughts of using the device for on-the-go blogging. Why? Because, when creating links I don't want to have to type URLs over and over. I need copy/paste. Sure, there might be ways to program around this, but then again, doesn't this bring us back to the question of an SDK?
Oh, yeah, another thing that's not so hot: The audio quality. You may have read about this online. With the volume turned all the way up I can barely hear or understand people I'm talking with over the phone. They sound like we're talking via tin cans and a string. I'm curious to see if this bothers me long term. As a work around I discovered I could just turn the speaker phone on....lol. At this point everyone can hear, but at least I can too. Maybe this says a bluetooth or wired headset is mandatory?



Incremental Blogger