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My First Day with Apple's iPhone
Overall Initial Impression
When the iPhone ads started to play on television at the beginning of June, everyone I know was enthralled. Until they heard it was $500-600. Even my grandma wanted one until she found out the price. Until the prices comes down a few hundred dollars, they'll dominate the high end, which is a win for both Apple and AT&T, since Apple brings the high end customers (who spend the most) to the carrier's service, increasing AT&T's revenue. Of course, it's possible that Apple doesn't want to lower the price, they'll be happy with huge margins (perhaps up to 40 or 50% of the price of the iPhone), and sell fewer units rather than make tons of cheap units with a smaller margin. I'm pretty satisfied with my phone so far. I've had a few problems, mostly with the speed of the Edge network, and the problems I mentioned previously. It might take a while (more than 24 hours definitely) for me to feel comfortable that I spent $600 on it because I didn't use my iPod heavily prior to buying the iPhone, so I don't feel like I got a great iPod and a really nice cell phone. Stay tuned for my full in-depth review of the iPhone in the next week. I'll go over all the features in more depth and discuss the pros and cons, as well as what the future might hold and how Apple can corner the market on phones if it really wants to. Kurtis' Initial Impressions While I did not purchase an iPhone, I did get a chance to get some hands-on time with one at an Apple store on Saturday. My very first thought was that the iPhone wasn't quite as pretty as the iPod; particularly the plain jane backside of the device (compared to the reflective metallic finish of the iPod). The next thing I noticed was the display quality - it's actually quite nice. I still don't know if I would watch movies on it, but it is of sufficient resolution and quality if you don't mind the screen size. When I opened up Safari, I was quickly disappointed by the virtual keyboard. I found it difficult to press specific "keys' because they're each about half the width of one of my fingers. The trick to using the keyboard is to tap and hold your finger down and move it until the key you desire is highlighted (a little bubble pops up to tell you what key is highlighted since you probably can't see through your finger, which is nice). In a pinch, I suppose it's not a big deal, but I certainly wouldn't want to send lots of text messages or visit lots of web pages on the iPhone. I liked the orientation feature that lets you turn the phone to portrait or landscape mode, but I found that you can't use this feature 100% of the time. What I mean is, while you can use the feature while viewing images, for example, you can't turn the thing into landscape orientation while viewing the main menu. Not a big deal, but I don't see why I shouldn't be able to turn my menu on its side if it's more comfortable for me to hold the iPhone in this way. Maybe that will be allowed in a software update. Overall my initial impression from playing with the device for about 10 minutes (and subsequently losing interest) was that it was a bit over-hyped. Not necessarily by Apple, but by the Mac fanboys who have been spreading rumors for as long as I can remember about a new touch-screen iPod, which eventually turned into phone rumors of course. What I played with in the store was basically exactly what I had seen in rumors and then commercials. One could argue that is a good thing, the product lived up to its hype! But for some reason, I was left wishing for something more. I don't know what more I wanted, but the device just didn't feel new and refreshing to me. It seemed like I was playing with something that has been out for 6 months which has lost that excitement value.
Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Out of the Box Page 3: iPod, the Internet, and More... Page 4: Bugs and Issues Page 5: Overall Initial Impression 
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Add Comment
3 User Comments 1 - Posted by
MichaelHarper
on July 2, 2007 - 3:00 pm So I was totally ragging on this device, and on the fanboys, and on the hype... until this morning, when i held one. The EDGE network speed sucks balls, but the browser itself is awesome, and the pan/zoom functionality of the multi-touch screen is very intuitive and functional. The soft keyboard was more functional than my T9 phone, but less than some real QWERTYs I've tried. I need to play with the keyboard some more, but I'm leaning towards buying one.
2 - Posted by
Brian
on July 2, 2007 - 3:54 pm The thing with the keyboard, from what I have read from people who have used an iPhone longer than one day, say that it gets easier with time. Within a couple weeks, it becomes rather easy to use. So you can't really judge it entirely on your first experience like many people are. Personally though, as I hate typing on anything smaller than a full-size keyboard...
3 - Posted by
handrail
on July 3, 2007 - 9:26 am meh. all tiny keyboards suck anyway. i'm sure the iPhone one will be no different than learning to graffiti on a PDA.
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