iPhone: First impressions

No, I didn’t buy one. I did play with one for about 10 minutes yesterday at the Apple store, and a few things jumped out at me:

• Size: It’s slimmer than I expected for some reason. And though it’s wider/taller than other devices, the tradeoff of having a larger screen is worth it and it feels comfortable to hold.
• Interface: The word that comes to mind is futuristic. It works just like the commercials we’ve all seen, so in that sense it merely meets expectations. But when you compare it to your old, boring phone you see it’s a huge leap forward.
• Screen: Big and beautiful…no two ways about it. The graphics are lovely, but the mere fact that the screen is twice the size of a Treo’s or BlackBerry’s is the biggest game changer. It opens up a lot of possibilities and it would be hard to give that up if you switched to another kind of phone.
• Keyboard: The compromise regarding the screen is that you don’t get a “regular” keyboard. However, I found the keyboard workable, and I was using two thumbs right off the bat. I would gladly make this compromise to get a huge screen in return.
• Browser “tabs”: The web browser has a feature almost like tabs that allows you to keep multiple browser windows open…I thought this was really cool. This is one of many features about the device that pushes it beyond the category of “phone” and into “handheld computer.”

Those are the highlights in the first 10 minutes…the Chat-style SMS was nice, Google Maps looks good, yadda yadda. On the minus side, I couldn’t figure out how to “zoom in” on specific parts of a page in the web browser. Seeing the full page is a neat trick, but without the ability to zoom in the text is unreadable. I kept clicking on the links instead, which would open the next page.

I’m sure I’d get past that eventually, but the missing “line item features” like 3G and ActiveSync are really what’s standing in my way. At this point the iPhone is a 7 or 8 out of 10 in my book, and I can wait until it gets to be a 9. If these “line items” don’t matter to you, though, I say buy it.