I had a short opportunity to play with the wife’s iPhone last night. Verdict: at least she’s pretty.
Pros:
- Beautiful display: vibrant color, very visually pleasing interface
- “Real” web browser: viewing web pages as they are designed without odd reformatting for a mobile browser or viewing mobile versions of the same site is very nice. Multi-touch spreading fingers apart to zoom is nice (once you remember that’s how you’re supposed to do it, instead of pressing the magnifying glass, like you’d instinctively do).
- Fast: applications were very responsive and the zoom/fade effects didn’t seem to hinder performance much
- Cover art: looks good, even in cover flow.
- Speaker: the internal speaker was decent and allowed you to play music and video without headphones. This would be great for sharing your media.
Cons:
- Dirty: the screen is constantly smudged from fingers or your face
- Zoomed web pages: viewing true web pages is nice, but it’s difficult to view the page with zooming and while you’re zoomed, there is constant panning around. It’s not bad for such a small device, but a true 16×9 aspect ratio (640×360) would work better, I think.
- Screen rotation: the screen was constantly rotating one way, but not rotating back. I wasn’t twisting it around, either. Just had it in my hands viewing normally.
- Multitasking: The main source of other applications (the web browser) doesn’t stay running in the background. This makes IM very difficult since you can only receive IMs when you’re viewing the browser. Returning to the home screen meant stopping what you were doing and doing something else instead. Having an OS X-like dock at the bottom for applications with flags to let you know what’s open would have been a much better idea. This thing can multitask, right? It is “OS X,” right? It’s got flash memory, so surely that’s not the problem, right?
- Widescreen: can’t view widescreen videos in “portrait” mode (at least I couldn’t…this could be part of the rotation issue I kept having)
- Navigation: some screens you could “flip” back and forth, others you had to use the <- back arrow. On top of that, navigating your media library felt horrible. Maybe it was just the way L had her stuff set up, but I couldn’t find an easy way to play a playlist on shuffle.
- Keyboard: it wasn’t horrible, but I felt like text input was an afterthought. I couldn’t imagine typing “important” emails on it. (As you can see from my previous mobile posts, I have a hard enough time, even with my WinMo phone)
Anyway, it’s a neat little toy. It can’t hang with the big boys (smartphones) and is definitely not the second coming of the Newton. It’s so prolific now that it’s taken the place of the RAZR for being the “look what I got” phone. Unfortunately, it isn’t (and will probably never be) the same price as a RAZR. A larger capacity, better multitasking, and consistent navigation would help it be a better “convergence” device, and a better keyboard wouldn’t hurt, either. I would like to see the true second coming of the Newton, though. A true 16×9 high-resolution screen, a higher speed cellular data network, and a USB host or more Bluetooth device support would go a long way for me.
