04 Dec 2008 1633H

Initial thoughts on my iPhone

Replaced my aging and increasingly unreliable RazrV3 last week. Loved T-Mobile service in C-town, just couldn’t be beat, but, since we’re now elsewhere, sucked it up and decided to get the iPhone. 

Initial thoughts:

I like it. As an information junkie, I feel I shall never be at a loss again about where to go or what to do. Probably as close as you get to becoming a walking, talking cyborg without having the connection actually in your head.

Wife not liking it so much. Says all she sees is the top of my head now as I’m using the device.

Allows me to do a number of things I used to carry around my laptop for:

• Access email, IM, and web in places where the infosec policy firewalls me

• Access my blogs and the OPML list of blogs I follow on Newsgator

• Access to Cantonese radio for Toronto, Hong Kong and also Chicago local news and weather 

• Photos, music, camera, video — all on one device 

Allows me to do a number of things I couldn’t easily do with my laptop

• GPS allows me to figure out where I am, real-time, on Google maps, either while in car or on foot. Shouldn’t be able to get lost in Chicagoland now. . . or be at a loss for what services are immediately accessible near my location

• Access internet services anywhere I get a signal, so, for instance, I can listen to Commercial Radio 88.1FM in Hong Kong — almost live, on the other side of the world! — in my car on these long commutes

• Google anything, almost anytime and almost everywhere

• Control the AppleTV when I can’t be bothered to use the remote 

• Send and receive cellphone calls & text messages

I like the contextually sensitive keyboard that automatically comes up when you need to do text entry on the web or elsewhere.

Will I be using this to transport documents back and forth from office to home, or using this in the future to do presentations? Hmm. The possibility is there but it is not realized. I would like to be able to run Keynote presentations off the iPhone. . . .

I don’t like that the keyboard targets are relatively small and feel they need to accommodate thicker fingers. And that the affordances for insertion are not immediately clear, but, generally, the learning curve was pretty low, since all the user behaviors are all well established and leveraged heavily. The gestures for multi-touch were new but not hard to remember.

Mail app lacks the spam filtering of the desktop version. Someone says I can route my email elsewhere, which is one less mailbox I have to worry about and also has a really robust spam killing function. 

NetNewsReader is so-so, drops a lot of feeds, but does the job well enough. 

Mobile commerce, here we come? Probably not likely for hard or soft lines, unless you’re in a store like Best Buy or Apple and the wait is ridiculous and you want to fulfill now. I do think the promise of mo-comm is contextual, and specifically, primarily about services, and around immediate gratification: tickets for movies, possibly restaurant bills, bill payments of all sorts, maybe books, travel, parking, maybe groceries even . . . 

Radio drops during busy times, sadly. Less than optimal. 

Battery life isn’t great: maybe like 3-4 hrs active, around 7 for standby? Charges quickly once attached with the USB dongle, but worried about replacing the battery later on. Will need to get a car charger and probably a desktop dock wouldn’t hurt neither.

A BT headset or wired headset is looking more useful by the second but given the short battery life, not sure how useful.

AYCE connectivity is pricey, and roaming internationally can kill you, but, actually, not too bad considering I am now completely wireless and laptopless, all the time. 

Need to figure out how to leverage this platform for my own nefarious purposes. . . . hmm. 

I am reminded about what Tim Andrews said to us back at Viant Quickstart in November of 1999: what you want to do is build the phone into a computer, don’t build the computer into a phone. 

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1 response to "Initial thoughts on my iPhone"

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09 Dec 2008 0754H

K writes:

So does this mean that Apple successfully made a phone in a mini-computer?

And now it's your turn.

Fire your weapon, soldier. Just be careful of friendly fire. NAME & EMAIL required.

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