iPhone & a mini review

First impressions

It's much thinner than I expected, and feels smooth and expensive (no kidding) and gorgeous to hold. This is something I want to pick up and bring everywhere. The touch-screen works beautifully - not least because of visual and audio feedback for every single action. Zooming in on maps, thumbing (literally) through photo albums.. Yes, the user-interface is the best on any device, ever.

The "fake physics" used in every control (when you scroll a page by flicking it, it bounces when it gets to the end) is amazing. So fast and smooth. Subtle, obvious, immersive: damn those guys are good.

Typing will take a little more practice. I would not want to type this much text for example.

The built-in applications work great. Typically Apple, they appear limited until you discover new features. An age-old problem for mobile phones: how to you manage cut-and-paste between apps? Apple solution: don't do it. Just think of the reason anyone might want to cut-and-paste, and find a way to make that happen - for example, emailing a YouTube movie address to your contact is a button press.

Nerd issues

Wifi works very well indeed. But why can't I do my syncing over Wifi? I want to sync my music, videos, updated contacts without docking. Sure, syncing music and video would require an iTunes rewrite, but I should be able to sync my .Mac contacts, web bookmarks at the very least.

Web site designers are going to be working overtime to be optimizing web pages for the iPhone. Of course, most web pages just work, but imitating the iPhone look, feel and user-friendliness is going to keep them busy (and happy).

JavaScript rendering on web pages is SLOW. This will cause me to rethink some of my own projects. Also, the automatic screen rotation is a double-edged sword. Do you design your web apps for landscape or portrait? How do you know which is which? There will be some challenges here (fun ones though!)

Applications have no exit button. You don't stop them, you don't worry about stopping them. You press the one physical control on the device to get to the home screen, and launch another. Man, how Windows Mobile got grief for not having a close button. Just goes to show how perception, marketing, expectations, design conquers all.

File system. The iPhone has a file system. Do you know this? No. You can't explore the file system, or browse for files, or do anything that exposes the fact this is a computer. Again, compare to this WIndows Mobile which you KNOW is a computer trying to be a phone. For 99.99% of people, not caring a jot about a file system is great news. For anyone expecting to save email attachments, not so great. But again - why do you want to save attachments on a phone?