Shiny new iPhone

John is the proud owner of a shiny new iPhone. And not just because of the "hype." Anybody who knows my cell phone usage will attest to the fact that I've always chosen practical phones that delivered the best solution and value, and that I've always kept my phones until they fell apart. I passed on the RAZR because it didn't add any new functionality (just smaller form factor), and passed on the Treo and Blackberry smartphones because I have not had a pressing need for slow and flaky internet access when Google SMS has served all my mobile information needs just fine. However, since AT&T and Cingular merged about 2 years ago, I've been shopping for a new phone because all 4 phones on our family cell phone plan are using old SIM cards on the legacy network. We can't get many AT&T/Cingular features until we upgrade to new SIM cards on the new network, so I've been waiting 2 years for a good time to upgrade.

The iPhone, is the phone I've been waiting 10 years for. All other phones on the market suffer from, in my opinion, an engineering atrocity...they all have keypads. Keypads, in general, are useless. Phones are primarily used for making and receiving phone calls, and with the advent of cell phones and built-in address books, almost nobody actually dials phone numbers anymore. How many of your friends and families' phone numbers do you remember by heart? Probably only a handful, because you call everybody from the address book. Therefore the keypad is just wasted space when it could be a soft-keyboard only when you need to call a number not already stored. Wasted keypad space means all other phones on the market are either twice as thick, twice as long, twice as heavy, or have a screen half as big as it could be, depending on what your priorities are. The iPhone is the first phone in the US market that does an acceptable job at eliminating the wasted keypad. And contrary to reports that the soft keypad is wonky, it actually works pretty well, and gets easier as you use it more. I certainly don't find it any harder than Carrie's Blackberry, the keys are actually bigger. If they're too small, you can flip the screen, and the keys get twice as big (almost full size)! Thanks to no keypad, it's very compact. It's as long as my old Motorola V551, as thin as Carrie's Motorola RAZR, and less wide than a Blackberry. There's been plenty published about people's thoughts. Here's some of my own thoughts from a real-life tech person that you all know:

- Multi-touch, multi-orientation screen: Revolutionary interface makes navigation a pleasure. "Flicking" is very intuitive for scrolling, and squeezing and stretching to zoom makes a much larger effective screen area that's easy to move around. Combined with the screen that automatically switches between portrait and landscape when you flip it, makes the photo browsing application the best I've ever seen or used (and I've used them all).
- Cell phone: Best cell phone I've ever had. Super complete and easy to navigate addressbook (includes all details from Outlook Contacts, including notes and birthdays). Visual voicemail is revolutionary (pick and listen to voicemails like you read your email). SMS texting interface is revolutionary (displays like an IM chat window, so you can follow the whole thread). Touch screen interface makes it trivial to conference call, swap calls, un-conference, check menus, use speakerphone, all in-call. A counterpoint, however, is that AT&T still has its head up its butt. It took me a full week to get my phone (despite promises of 1-2 business days). And it took over 3 hours and 5 agents over the span of 3 days to get the phone activated, working correctly, and the rate plan set up properly.
- iPod: Eliminates the need to carry my iPod-mini. Apple is right that it's the best iPod they've ever made. Works iPod functionality like any other iPod, except that you can now scroll through your albums by album art like in iTunes, very pretty. Perfectly integrated with the phone...songs fade out when a call comes in, the included headphones even have a built-in mike to answer the call...music comes back on when you hang up. It uses the same iPod interface as all the other ones, so the docking station, car chargers, USB cables I have now are all still useful.
- Portable video: Eliminates the need to carry my Creative Zen Vision M (a video iPod like hard-drive based video player). With 8GB of storage space, I have enough room to carry a dozen full-length DVDs with me to watch on the airplane. The beautiful 3.5" 16:9 320x480 screen is more than big enough to enjoy movies on the go, and "airplane mode" allows you to turn off the radio devices to watch on the plane. Battery life is up to 7 hours when watching a movie, so plenty of time to be entertained.
- PDA: Eliminates the need to carry my Palm Pilot. With auto sync'ing to Outlook Contacts and Calendar, I have all my business information available at all times. The Contacts sync'ing is impeccable, though I do wish I had some more control over the sync. It currently pulls all your contacts from Outlook, I'd like to filter it by Category (personal, business, etc.) Also, to be fair, I haven't gotten the calendar sync to work correctly yet. iTunes (the way you sync everything) currently does not handle recurring meetings nicely and bombs. [UPDATED 07/26/07] iTunes now syncs the calendar correctly. In response to numerous support calls, Apple posted several troubleshooting steps, a re-install of iTunes fixed it for me. One hopes a fix for this is coming. iTunes has been smart enough to realize that I only want Contacts and Calendar from my work laptop, and that I only want music, photos and video from my personal desktop.
- Web device: It's the only smartphone with a full-featured web browser, so you can read webpages as they are designed, not just the watered-down mobile sites. And it has POP3, IMAP and Exchange access to hook into mail systems. I use gmail, so it hooks up to that decently, albeit slightly wonky, because gmail isn't a traditional mail service. I don't need my work email, so I haven't tried that yet. Web browsing over the cellular EDGE network is adequate, though painfully slow. But the iPhone hooks into Wi-Fi networks as well (unlike most smartphones), which speeds it up exponentially. There isn't a chat application though, which frankly, sucks. It's a big gap in the device functionality to not hook into AIM, Yahoo IM, or MSN messenger. Not a deal breaker since the SMS interface is so good (and 200 messages/month are free), but not real super. The SMS interface displays text messages like an IM window, which makes it much easier to track a conversation. Currently though, the iPhone does not support MMS. Which means no sending and receiving picture messages, oddly enough. You can email them back and forth, but the POP3 interface is a bit wonky, and means you can only communicate with email accounts (not most cell phones).
- Customization: There's some interesting glaring omissions in the iPhone's functionality which may be fixed moving forward. Though you can use any photo for contacts and wall paper, the same is not true for ringtones. So far you can only use the built-in ring tones (which all kind of suck), even though you have a whole library of mp3's loaded on the device. Also, there are no 3rd party applications available yet, though Apple has said they plan to open it up. [UPDATED 07/25/07] An application has just been released that converts mp3's to ringtones and lets you push it straight to your iPhone. Trick. It actually works! Also, 3rd party applications are starting to appear...most are enabled via Safari, but at least one legitimate iPhone binary has been published and works. +1 for the iPhone.
- Wow factor: This is, without question, the coolest device on the market. It's cool to look at it, cool to play with, cool to use, and cool to show off. It's public awareness is so pervasive that nobody is ambivalent about it. Every single person is aware of what it is, and either loves it or hates it. Which makes it very exciting to be a part of.
- Price: The iPhone service is just another $20/month for the unlimited data plan (and include 200 SMS messages), which is actually less than most carriers' Blackberry plans for smartphones. The voice service will work with any existing AT&T voiceplan (which I've been a customer of for 8 years). For $599, the hardware price is a little steep for a cell phone. But it integrates a cell phone, an iPod, a Zen, a Palm Pilot, and a web browser all into one. It's really more of an ultra-mobile laptop than a cell phone. And seeing as I haven't bought a new computer in 13 years, this seems like a long overdue purchase.
- Summary: Overall, I'd rate the current iPhone a 8.5/10.0 (UPDATED 07/25/07). It has the potential to reach 9.0/10.0 if it fixes a few things: Outlook Calendaring, IM client, ringtones, 3rd party apps.