First impressions
Well, I activated that iPhone that I won last thursday as a door prize, using the prepay method (works remarkably well, and it’s cheaper to boot!) and carried it around for some testing during a weekend trip to Ellensburg, WA.
As an iPod, it definitely won’t replace my nano. The audio output is weirdly recessed and won’t mate with the audio cables for my car adapters. Can’t imagine lugging it with me to the gym (and who the heck wants to get a phone call while at the gym anyway?) It won’t replace my big iPods either because of the 8GB limit. So basically it’s a total bust as a music device, much like my other “music-enabled” phones that require special cables and have a tiny capacity to boot.
As an email device, it’s actually less functional than my current consumer-grade phone running the J2ME Gmail client, because it’s just a POP3 client so it can’t search the several gigabytes of emails that are stored in my Gmail account. Plus it doesn’t suck down my Gmail contact list. The one thing is does well is display HTML email with graphics. But for the 90% case of just scanning emails and sending one-line replies, a small screen is fine.
Interactive web browsing is just as painful as on any WAP phone, with interminable waits for page loads and the usual drops in dead spots. It looks prettier while you’re waiting, and the multiple browser windows are nice, but unless you’re on wifi it’s not a great experience.
So, in spite of all this, why did I reach for the iPhone when heading out to the coffee shop this morning? There is one thing this device can do that none of my previous devices could: it’s like an ebook or magazine reader. When connected on wifi, you can browse a magazine (I chose the Atlantic) and fairly comfortably read through it. All the device’s signature features - touch scrolling, two-finger expand/shrink, horizontal/vertical orientation - are designed to make it easier to read relatively larger chunks of text. In fact, having just complained about it’s size, I might actually be happier if it were the size of a paperback so I didn’t have to scroll around so much.
There’s another thing it can do remarkably well, which doesn’t interest me but fascinates my kids: it does YouTube pretty well. Within about 10 seconds of giving it to Adrian, he had already loaded up Potter Puppet Pals (19,407,183 views on YouTube), which apparently is the hit of the boys’ carpool.
In short, rather that replacing the two other devices it’s supposed to replace, the iPhone is threatening to become a *third* mobile device that I lug around in my backpack. Sigh.
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