In a moment of weakness (also known as a visit to the Apple Store) last week, I found myself parting with more money than I can easily justify for a shiny new iPhone. What followed was somewhat painful; canceling T-Mobile this soon after I had come back to them hurt, just not as much as the early termination bill soon to arrive in my mailbox.

I’ll get the obvious cheers and jeers out out of the way (I don’t expect that you, dear reader, will have missed them in any of the other thousand iPhone reviews, so feel free to skip the following lists)

Cheers

• The User Interface is amazing - I can’t imagine going back to my once loved PEBL (loved until last Tuesday)
• Apple did some amazing bargaining with AT&T over cost of the plans - I can’t imagine how much this would have cost on any other carrier right now
• I actually seem to like the keyboard

Jeers

• EDGE can be slow - I mean, a couple of minutes to download a text email slow
• The battery life is a bit low - I’m not one of those guys who plays chicken with my cell phone, but at the tail end of a normal day, I look at the battery indicator and wonder how this thing is going to die. It hasn’t yet, but it generally gets a bit too close for my comfort.
• Text selection - I find it interesting that the company famous for bringing GUI concepts like cut and paste to the masses seemed to forget to add that functionality to the iPhone
• Including the YouTube app was a mistake - now I lose so much time just killing my battery whenever I have free moments. I could take some personal responsibility, but blaming Jobs is so much easier
• Ear buds - why couldn’t Apple released at least their in-ear headphones with the push button microphone?

Now that we have the major items out of the way, I would like to discuss how this device changes things for me.

I no longer carry around a creased and bled index card full of notes to myself (the exact title of the book you are looking for is x, it is also found by other name of y). Instead, I put a note into Ta Da Lists and if I need more information, search Google (or Amazon or IMDB). This is handy.

I now understand the usefulness of Twitter and its ilk. I couldn’t understand dealing with it via SMS or just a computer, but with the iPhone it helps keep me sane (like when I spend two hours to see if certain contact lens work (they didn’t and then did) with my poor eyes).

I’m no longer dependent on restaurants (take out or otherwise) that I am familiar and/or have a menu for. Instead, I select my apartment bookmark in Google Maps (or wherever I am) and type in the type of food I am looking for. Minor annoyance, sometimes the most obvious (and closest) place doesn’t seem to make the grade (a direct search does work in those cases). The benefit of being able to call directly from Google Maps has been wonderful.

All in all, there are a number of features that don’t always make sense (why you can only edit contacts from specific screens, why a missed call and a voicemail look the same on the home screen, etc.), but ultimately, the iPhone shows a different perspective in how a cell phone should work. For me, it has ultimately been an extremely positive experience, and I truly can’t imagine going back to any other phone. Nothing even approaches the iPhone with regards to the pleasant experience (even if I cannot stand ear buds - I am not using them, by the way) you simply cannot avoid.

Thank you, Apple. Now, go and finish 10.5 and make me some in-ear headphones so that I may lay even more capital upon your retail alter.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 9:56 pm and is filed under Writings, web2.0, mobile_computing, consumerism, design, future, ipod. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.