iPhone Mini Review
So I have recently seen two iPhones, and spent time with one of them. So to follow up on my last iPhone comment I thought I would give a little mini review.
It seems to pretty much work as advertised. Contrary to what apple says, you don’t really need to start with one finger on the soft keyboard, you can bang away with both thumbs if you are already used to a Treo. This was a real shocker for me because I thought there was no way I would ever be able to deal with a soft keyboard. I still want to see if the thing is still working that well a year from now. On my old palm screen I was constantly re-centering the digitizer, though I don’t need to do that on my Treo, I think that has more to do with the fact that I don’t use the stylus much on the treo.
The bigger thing is having a real finger centered UI. They spent a lot of time thinking about what a stylus free interface would look like. From zooming in on almost everything (cursor placement anyone?) to making most controls be not needed (flipping through images rather than pressing a next button) the whole thing is amazingly obvious to use. I am just shocked at how little training and playing to took to just make all 16 of the applications work. Assuming that the touch sensor holds up over time, there is no question in my mind that this is the face of the future of computing.
The ease of use thing causes an interesting problem. Apple prides themselves on their uniform API. Because everything must do the “obvious” thing, and you use your finger to do it, there is no good standard UI to share with other apps. This make building new apps for it exceedingly difficult. I can understand why apple only released the dashboard API for it. Unfortunately this means that everything is supposed to be web based, and there are some programs that I want my data on the phone not the web. In particular my password encryption program, and my quicken. These should also cleanly sync to the data on my computer. This is one of three things that prevents me from getting an iPhone.
The other is the fact that you can only get it through AT&T. I might be able to change that, but I have arranged my life around the fact that it is free to call everyone I call regularly because they all have Sprint. It is goofy, but it is nice to be able to call my wife from the hotel when I am on site with a client and not worry about how long we are chatting for.
FWIW, the price is the final reason I won’t get an iPhone. But oooh is it shiny.