iPhone – First Impressions – Whoa!

Our Company / June 30, 2007 / Alykhan Jetha

Normally I don’t get excited about phones, “smart” or otherwise. I’ve had a BlackBerry 8700, Treo 650 and my current phone is a Nokia E61. With all those phones I was like “yeah whatever”.

The iPhone on the other hand has totally impressed me. This thing is !@#$@#$ cool! I mean holy #$%#!

It is so easy to work with and setup. I was productive within 15 minutes of activation. Most of that 15 minutes was simply synchronizing all my photos, bookmarks, contacts, email accounts info, etc… I’ve been answering emails, checking various web sites (i.e. our stats), took some notes and I scheduled a few appointments.

The keyboard does take some getting used to, but it’s much better than I expected and quite useable. While there is no tactile feedback – there is audio feedback and it works well. I see no problems getting used to it. I’m already pretty quick on it and I’m almost at the point I can use two thumbs. I’d say that I’m as fast on the iPhone as on my E61 – maybe even a bit faster.

Even my 3 year old son was able to scroll (pan?) through a bunch of his photos. He was so excited, he didn’t want to let the thing go. It’s nice to hold and looks awesome.

I also synchronized it with our beta of Daylite 3.5. I put through over 4600 contacts and organizations. And other than a slight slow down when you auto-complete in iPhone Mail (understandable), it just works. The scrolling is butter smooth. There is no slowdown when editing (unlike all other phones). Now, I don’t see the need to have that many contacts in my iPhone, I was just interested to see what would happen with that many.

Another really cool thing is how it works with IMAP email. For example, I can’t check my mail on my E61 because I have too many emails and it chokes even though I asked it to get only my most recent. On the iPhone, it just got my most recent (real fast on WiFi) – no hassles, no choking.

This sucker is a home run for Apple. The other phone companies will have to raise their game. The iPhone will alter expectations. After using an iPhone, people will just mock the great majority of the other “smart” phones. Yes there are missing features, but the other stuff will just wow you and you’ll forget (or forgive) about the missing stuff.

Apple still has some work to do and I think we’ve see a software update real soon, but the executives from Microsoft, Motorola and others should be worried – very worried.

Until next time…
AJ

P.S. For a more detailed review of the actual iPhone, see John Gruber’s post on Daring Fireball.

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