It’s useless for me anyway. If you have smaller fingers and thumbs then maybe it’s perfect for you.
Pros:
- Beautiful screen and type rendering.
- Nice camera. Much better than my RAZR.
- Everything works the way you’d expect. I was using Google maps and wanted to zoom in. There is no visible control for it, so I thought for a moment. Putting both thumbs on the screen and pulling apart seemed natural, and it worked. Somewhere Don Norman is smiling.
- The apps were awesome, especially Google Maps. Realtime traffic overlays!
- Just the right amount of non-gratuitous eye candy.
- The browser is easily the best phone or PDA browser yet. Newshutch and this blog worked almost perfectly. Some type was a little too small, but you can zoom in. I’m guessing sites designed with liquid widths and relative type sizes would work flawlessly on the iPhone.
Cons:
- The big problem that makes it useless for me: The keys are just too small and too close together. Perhaps with use I’d adjust to it, but I shouldn’t have to. Using both thumbs at once was just not doable for me. Using my pointer finger was a little better but still not great. I’m pretty dexterous, but my fingers are just too big for the tiny non-tactile keyboard. Backspace and enter are next to each other so when I’d try to correct missed keys I’d hit enter instead and then I’d have to start over. Frustrating.
- In the Apple store the phones use WiFi. I’m guessing that in the wild on AT&T the speed would be less than awesome.
- No Skype client? WTF? Maybe when the block on 3rd party apps is inevitably cracked…
- Not really a con, but an interesting retail experience issue: Everyone wanted to play with iPhones, but most of them were locked and required a code to use. People had tried to guess the code several times, so most of the phones were locked for one hour because of unsuccessful login attempts. This was frustrating to customers and retail staff. Eventually an Apple person came around with a laptop to unlock the phones.
Bottom line:
I only played with the phone for about 20 minutes in the store, so maybe I missed some keyboard setting that would have fixed my experience. Even so, waiting for the 2nd generation iPhone seems like the thing to do.
You know what would be great? If Apple just designed a basic model that was more phone and less PDA/iPod. Something iPod mini sized with a physical number pad would be perfect.
