Saturday Jun 30 2007 - 8:00am
iPhone First Impressions
by Zach
under apple, technology, usability
with 12 comments
I got an iPhone on friday (like lots of other people except without all the disassembly) and I’m really really happy with it. Apple has just completely outdone themselves. It’s everything I hoped for, and even EDGE has turned out to be surprisingly tolerable. The google maps app in particular is really amazing, maybe even better than the real Gmaps. This is just one of the coolest pieces of tech I have played with in a long time.
That being said, I have a few nitpicks. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely thrilled and in love with my iPhone. If I’d tried to type up everything the iPhone does right, I wouldn’t have had a chance to sleep last night. That being said, like any first generation product, it has a few flaws. Here are my feature requests/nit picks. Almost all of these are features the iphone already has, just in a different application. If you have one and have your own suggestions, post them in the comments.
1) Landscape mode in Mail and Notes and Txt messaging.
In Safari you can switch into landscape mode and get a bigger keyboard. It’s a really sweet feature, I just wish more apps had it. It’d be nice for typing long items, especially in mail and notes.
2) Contact search in Phone.
In Text Messaging you can get a live updating list with a search box for your contacts when you choose the recipient. This would be awesome for the phone as well so you can quickly filter your contacts.
3) Single finger double tap zoom, two-finger tap unzoom in Photos.
These are nice features in the Google Maps app, and it takes a little getting used to to switch zoom methods depending on which app you’re in. It’d be nice if they just all had a unified set of controls.
4) You can only landscape counter-clockwise in video.
All the other apps that let you go into landscape mode work in both directions, but video locks you into the volume buttons on the bottom.
5) Related to 4: the volume buttons are counter intuitive in video mode. When you have it turned on its side, the button that’s now on the right makes the volume on screen indicator move to the left (because it’s the down button).
6) No way to mark all as read in Mail.
Since I’m using POP my mails aren’t synched up across my laptop and my iPhone. This means I’ve got a TON of unread emails on my iPhone that I actually read on the laptop earlier. A “mark all as read” option for the mailbox would help with this a lot.
edit:
7) IM
Not including this was just stupid on Apple or AT&T’s part. It’s going to be a week before meebo has a working app for the iPhone and Apple loses their chance to lock people in.
Bonjour support would be really neat. It would be nice to discover other people on the same wifi network. I guess this would only be really useful with a built in IM client or some way to transfer and deal with files.
9) A sketchbook.
The graffiti wall application on Facebook has blown up, and I’m sure drawing on the iPhone’s screen would be a pleasure. It’d be nice to jot down diagrams or sketches.
10) Notes sync and To-dos
I bet this will come with the new version of Mail in OS X 10.5 that supports Notes and To Dos.
Edit: Mark has a great line that really sums it up: “[The iPhone] is optimized for the consumption of media — web, movies, music — rather than the production of textual communications like a Blackberry.”
Edit: Check out the absurd list of first impression posts popping up at techmeme. Scoble describes the experience waiting in line.
1
Does it have Exchange support?
2
(Post Author)
When you add e-mail accounts it has 3 options: POP, IMAP and Exchange. I’m not sure how well it works though.
3
Why would Apple be at all concerned about people getting “locked in” to Meebo? And do you really think it’d be hard for them when Apple can put an IM icon on the home screen and Meebo can’t?
4
(aβ Member)
But um, what about…um Meebo Rooms… okay you win.
5
(Post Author)
Yeah, I guess apple can always release something. I’d be willing to bet AT&T was like “OMG IMs ARE LIKE TEXTMESSAGES NO WAI” and apple was like “Whatever, someone will make a web app and we can then tell At&T to STFU and push this update we have all ready to go”.
6
(Post Author)
I’m posting this from my iPhone. I’m pretty impressed with the keyboard both in portrait and landscape mode. Once you start trusting it portrait mode is actually really good.
7
I want this phone so badly! I want the higher 8mb.
Are you saying that there is no way to use Instant Messenger? It can’t be downloaded from the web, such as yahoo YIM?
Also does this do text messages? I wasn’t clear on that part from your description. Thanks for the info!
8
(Post Author)
Right now there’s no good way to IM. I’ve found a few sites that sort of work, and I fully expect there to be a useable web solution within the next week.
The text messaging is really sweet actually, it looks like iChat.
9
Gosh, I can’t wait! Thank you very much for your quick reply!
10
I found today that you can’t used the bluetooth to send photos o ring tones that you already pay for to your iPhone, Apple said the only use bluetooth is for the headset. Come on, looks like is other way to control us Apple and put this service for a price
11
(aβ Member)
@Xabier - that is unfortunately not very surprising. Verizon does the same thing by purposefully crippling Bluetooth so you have to pay for their picture-sharing service or some nonsense.
Have faith though - the iPhone is so immensely popular that it will be hacked in no time (I hope), letting us all use the hardware any way we see fit.
12
I’m posting this comment from an iPhone! Woooooo! I’d have to get used to the typing…