My iPhone thoughts

Things I liked:

Hardware is very nice

• Feels good to hold in your hand
• Not to light. Not to heavy
• Screen is beautiful
• Looks to be completely scratch proof (I tried scratching it a bit when they weren’t looking :-))
• Didn’t run hot at all, even after playing with it with WiFi turned on for 15 minutes

Software is very fast and responsive

Gestures

• Zooming was very intuitive
• Scrolling was also
• Animations and transitions
• Consistent all thru all the applications
• Make the device feel light and playful
• Rotation transition when rotating the device in your hands is very cool
• Dropping the pin points onto the map after searching for a business was very cool, too

Emotional response

• I was surprised because I didn’t think it’d happen to me. But it did. I really loved the device.
• It was obviously happening to others standing around me that were waiting to play with it (see the 15 minute comment above!)

Things I didn’t like:

Text input

• It would take forever to tap out an IM or email.
• It’s obviously not possible to use while not looking, but I thought I might be able to use two thumbs before I tried it. After I tried it… No way.
• Their prediction seemed to only work in IM and email, not in their mapping software or in Safari. And even in IM and email, you have to click a really little teeny tiny prediction window to accept the predicted text, which I couldn’t actually ever get to happen.

AT&T / Cingular misleading web connection speeds

• Unbeknownst to most demoers, the phone was running connected to WiFi in Cingular, not connected to the wireless web via EDGE
• The WiFi was just installed yesterday at the Sammamish office (so said the Cingular employee I talked to about it) specificall for the iPhone launch. No other brand phones in the Sammamish office were connected via WiFi even though several were capable.
• When you turned off WiFi, the browser was a big pig running over EDGE

Viewing web pages

• It’s “neat” to see them in full rendition and zoom in and out. But … It’s only neat as a demo, I tried reading some news this way, and it was horrible.
• I crashed Safari on my personal picture library I wrote in ASP.NET with just a little tiny bit of Jscript in it.

All-in-all

I went there to buy one. I left without one. The text input killed it.

When I was on the Pocket PC team a long time ago, I knew that the soft keyboard was a tough sell for users. Granted it didn’t have predictive error recovery then, and it still doesn’t today. But it’s hard to give up a real keyboard.

Blind typing is a nice thing… Even a 12 key is better than a soft keyboard. iPhone fanboys will eventually learn that. And so will Apple.