The iPhone
Jul 3rd, 2007 by Eryk
Having been released on Friday, the iPhone is pretty much old news. A week ago I, like many in the tech industry, scoffed at the iPhone. The phrase “Expensive Fisher Price toy” was used often and, knowing Apple, I was generally in agreement. Then, on Saturday, I was in Bridgeport Village and happened to walk by the Apple store. There was a security guard standing by the door and the whole place was packed. I couldn’t resist. I had to go in and see for myself what it was like.
The whole store was covered with iPhones. In addition to the 30+ phones on display, there were giant plastic iPhones hanging on the wall and iPhone posters everywhere. I worked my way through the crowd and found one that wasn’t being used. I must admit that after only 20 minutes, I was hooked. The glass was sleek and sturdy and remained grease and smudge free, even when I held it up to my face. The interface was clean and sleek, in the usual Apple style and the multi-touch display worked amazingly well. But above all, it was FAST! For those of you who have ever used a pocket PC phone, when was the last time you were able to describe it as fast? I’ve used three different pocket PC phones and they’ve always been laggy, even out of the box.
In that brief period, all my reservations about it were alleviated. You’ve seen that iPhone commercial that says, “This isn’t the mobile internet, or a watered-down version of the internet, or the kinda sorta looks like the internet, internet. It’s just the internet.” I’ve always reacted negatively to that particular commercial. People don’t browse mobile web pages from their phone because they can’t get to normal pages. They browse mobile pages because they load faster! But then I used the internet on the iPhone. Yes, it loads the whole page and it’s not any faster than a normal phone. But it’s not any slower either! This is because it seemed to load a scaled version of the page. It filled up the whole screen, but the page was shrunk. Despite this, much of the text was quite readable and the images still looked great! I could actually see the whole page in the same time it took for my phone to load a mobile page. If I wanted to see a particular section in greater detail, I could simply zoom in. Then it blew up that section of the page, keeping the information that it already had while downloading only the extra details. When I zoomed back out, it didn’t need to reload the whole page again, it just kept it in cache. I was very impressed.
The best thing about it are the little details that are missing from pocket PC phones. You can have more than one webpage open at a time, like a tabbed browser. When you access voicemail you get a list of your voicemails and can listen to them individually and in any order you like. There’s an ambiant light sensor that turns off the backlight when it’s not needed and a proximity sensor that turns off the screen when it’s being held up to your face. Based on what I saw (and what I later read on Apple’s site), I’ll probably get one. My wife’s pretty mad because we were all set to switch to Verizon when our contract expires in December and now we can’t. However, I think it’s completely worth it to stay with AT&T for the iPhone. It’s a tad spendy, but you get what you pay for. There’s nothing like it anywhere and it’s probably the best handheld device I’ve ever used. Still, I can’t help but laugh with I think of “Steve Jobs” on Saturday Night Live:
