After the trauma of waiting in-line at the AT&T store, I was finally able to get my hands on an iPhone at the Apple store 15 miles away. First reactions:
1) The screen is breathtaking. I’ve never seen a screen like it on a mobile device.
2) Interface is everything I expected. Apple has rewritten interface design with the engineering in the iPhone. They haven’t complete solved the mobile phone interface problem, but they’ve come close.
3) Touch typing. No issue for me. Not as natural as a tactile keyboard like a blackberry, but it works well enough for me. Keep in mind I use a zero-touch keyboard interface as my primary keyboard, so I am more comfortable with that aspect than the average user.
4) iPod interface is beautiful. Basically, everything you see on the commercials is real. The screen rotates smoothly when you hold it in landscape mode. Coverflow and scrolling are smooth and very nicely done.
5) Email – One of my mail accounts is working perfectly. The other (with a lot of IMAP sub mailboxes) is not working as my subfolders are not showing up on the phone. To my surprise syncing your mail settings is an option in iTunes, so it pulled mail the minute I unplugged it. I will continue to work on the IMAP issue and am hopeful there is a mail prefix setting or something I can change to get it working. Deleting an email has the coolest visual effect I’ve seen on a phone.
6) Web – Very nice. Real web sites display well. Lack of flash is understandable. Lack of Java is annoying as it renders useless several sites for me. I’d like to see both get added in a software update.
7) Maps – Pretty cool, but not a feature I expect to use a lot.
8) Video – works perfectly.
9) uTube – nicely implemented.
10) Visual voicemail – requires blowing your current voicemail box away (no big deal for me). Interestingly, your personal greeting is recorded on the phone and then uploaded to the server. The greeting recorder application makes me think Apple could easily add a voice memo recorder to this device, something I would welcome. Also, the AT&T visual voicemail server seemed to be very overwhelmed for the first 30 minutes I tried and could not successfully connect.
11) Quirks? My music/iPod application stopped playing (and appeared to crash in the background) twice while browsing the web. Something that definitely needs to be fixed if that is a bug.
12) Interface – I’ve got to plug the interface again. What a great user experience. Application presentation (mail, web, etc) seems almost perfect.
That’s it for now. More later as I play with the device more.