Apple iPhone hands-on: Pros and consDuring a Q&A with Apple's vice president of iPod products Greg Joswiak, I finally got to play briefly with one of the highly-anticipated iPhones.
While the 89mm screen takes up the vast majority of the front of the device, housed beneath it is the inward curving Home button, which for some reason I thought would be touch sensitive; however, it's clickable. While the room we were in was dimly lit and conducive to making displays look vibrant, the screen didn't fail to impress. It is bright, colourful and seems like a very high resolution for its size. To get an idea of how to type messages on a buttonless phone, I ducked into SMS. The text message list is grouped by sender. Going into a thread shows a conversation history (both sent and received messages) in cute coloured speech bubbles. Using two thumbs to type a quick couple of words, the touch-sensitive QWERTY worked well--my accuracy might have been better if I had longer than 3 minutes with the phone. However, I think the virtual keys and the lack of a tactile click feeling won't be everyone's preferred way of text entry.
With other journalists in the room still waiting to have their turn with the iPhone, I quickly went back to the Home screen--the Home button gets you back here from anywhere almost instantly--and into Maps. Google provides the mapping service widget. A map of the local San Francisco area swiftly appeared and a red push-pin marker dropped from the top of the screen to mark the location, although we're not sure if that was a bookmark or if the iPhone was approximating our location with triangulation from mobile phone towers--something to check on the show floor later. Orientation changes as expected when the iPhone is tipped on its side, allowing you to see Web sites, videos, maps and photos in landscape mode. Multi-touch is a fantastic feature for zooming in and out and panning. Apple isn't mentioning how much system memory is onboard, but we didn't notice much of a lag between menus or applications--mind you we didn't push the iPhone's multi-tasking abilities to the extreme. We were unable to demo the synching process with iTunes, and are disappointed that Wi-Fi can't be used for synching or for direct communication with other iPhones, the latter being one of the major selling points for Microsoft's Zune. Joswiak claimed an advantage of the wired connection is that it's faster and that it charges the device at the same time. Will the iPhone be a success? Undoubtedly it will be in the US if comments by Macworld attendees are any measurement, but a lot could happen between now and the time it takes for the iPhone to launch in Australia, which representatives from Apple Australia could not narrow down from Steve Jobs' "2008 in Asia". Addressing the iPhone's lack of 3G connectivity at a time when HSDPA services are flourishing internationally and the impact of future WiMAX technology, Joswiak said that Apple "made some choices that make sense today". Reports of poor battery life could potentially have hurt Apple if it chose to go with 3G from the get-go. Certainly the iPhone is an amazing device and credit must go to Apple for its seamless integration of hardware and software. But what impact will the iPhone's Wi-Fi limitations, closed system, wide and long design, and lack of next-generation mobile technology have on sales?
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