More iPhone Thoughts

Have had the iPhone for just under a week now, and wanted to share some more thoughts.

Overall, I am absolutely in love with this device. It feels fantastic in the hand, the screen is drop-dead gorgeous to look at, and in general it “just works” as you’d expect. In particular, the touchscreen UI is just as responsive, intuitive, and accessible as all of Apple’s promotional videos show.

Pause and internalize that for a moment.

Everyone I’ve shown this phone to wants one – no exceptions. The only thing that is keeping a few folks I know from getting one today is a lack of Exchange support. You can work around some of this by syncing your phone to a PC with Outlook on it; that’ll sync your contacts and calendar to the phone (though obviously you don’t get push email or the ability to create contacts on the road). Yes, I’ve seen the same rumors as you about Apple licensing Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology. I don’t know if it’s true (nor would I be able to say if I did know), but I can say that most of the fencesitters I’ve met are waiting for some sort of Exchange support and they’ll jump as soon as it might be available.

Some other thoughts in no particular order:

The Good:

• iPod support is great – I was even able to import WMA Lossless songs from my music archive into iTunes for Windows. It simply transcoded the music to 256 Kb AAC (the higher setting I chose) and it just worked. I could even add album art to the music that was missing it.
• UI is coherent and extremely well-integrated together. Everytime you have a “I want to mail my picture” sort of thought there’s a button just waiting for you right there.
• Camera is surprisingly good quality, though simple (more on the simplicity below). It takes easily the best “camera phone” pictures I’ve seen, and I’ve been using it to flesh out the contact photos in my Outlook address book.
• Virtual touch keyboard works fine. The larger screen makes the buttons a bit bigger than they might have been otherwise, and the predictive text technology is quite good – even with my fat, pudgy fingers.
• WiFi is beautifully integrated. Sitting in an open hotspot? No problem – the phone sees the signal, and asks you (once) if you’d like to use it. From then on, it’ll automatically switch to that SSID anytime you’re in the area without bugging you. I wish to god the Smartphones I’ve had in the past did the same – I ended up never using the WiFi support because it was such a pain.
• Voice quality (ie, “does it work as a phone?”) is fine. I, and one other iPhone owner I’ve discussed this topic with, haven’t had problems. The speaker volume (when being used as a speaker phone) is a bit quiet for my taste, but the audio quality has no issues I can tell. I suspect people who have problems are in poor-coverage areas.

The Bad:

• There are some minor annoyances in the iTunes Windows client UI. The one that bugs me the most is in the “select a folder” to sync photos UI. You can only select the top level folders on a drive, and not sub-folders. Since I store photos by year and topic (//server/photos/2007/summer BBQ), I can’t sync specific events easily. I’ve also had a few crashes, usually when shifting tabs, saving changes, all the while the phone was syncing.
• While the UI is generally extremely consistent, there are odd exceptions to the rule that highlight the 1.0″ness” of the product. The one that always gets me is the difference between zooming back out on a photo or in Safari (double-tap) and the Google maps applet (tap two fingers).
• Camera is very, very (very) simple. One button to take a picture – that’s it. No zoom, no cropping, no white balance, no flash, etc. The UI is nice and clean because of it, but I hope there will be some expansion here in the future.
• AT&T’s EDGE network can be slow. The built-in WiFi support helps a lot here, but you really feel it when you’re out of range of a hotspot.
• Applications are limited. The ones on the phone are nicely done and useful, but I’m already looking to external websites for “iPhone applications.” I’m hoping that Apple opens up the platform to software developers over time.

The Ugly:

• Said it before, but no Exchange support is currently the biggest blocker to people I know adopting this phone. Yes, even more so than price… but remember, I live in the Seattle-area/Microsoft influenced part of the country. I fully expect price to be more of an issue elsewhere – though it appears Apple’s sold over half a million of these guys in just one weekend, so they seem to be doing ok so far.

All-in-all, I really feel Apple’s set a new bar here for a mobile communications device (note not just a “phone”). I’m really looking forward to seeing what Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, and other mobile providers do with future devices. Competition is a good thing!

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3. Quick Thoughts on Zune
4. LucasArts Games Emulation on iPhone
5. Juicy Rumor: Apple iPhone? Or even Apple iGame?