iPhone == Hot

Last night I went out to the Chestnut Hill Mall 1) to try and get over jetlag, and 2) to see if there was a line for the iPhone at the Apple Store. I took care of (1) by getting some caffeine at Teavana. And yes, (2), there was a line. Pretty long, probably 75+ people at 6pm.

90 minutes later? No line. The Apple store was just banging out phones and activations. Pretty impressive.

So, impressions after playing with the phone? Pretty fscking sweet. The phone itself is a wonder to hold. If thin is in, this thing is definitely in. It is also relatively light weight. The glass gets pretty smudgy, but but awesome contrast and 160dpi screen make it so that you can see through the thumbprints no problem. And hell, what Apple product owner doesn’t have his or her share of chamois and microfiber cloths to keep their kit clean and print-free? Remember, Apple was the company that brought polished stainless and scratchable polycarbonate into a pocket device. The world has never been so anal.

What really sets the iPhone apart is the slick interface. Everything, and this is so oft repeated for Apple products, “just works”. It is responsive, the animations are quick and make the experience of not having tactile feedback almost okay, and the single button at the bottom takes you back home in a jiffy.

Gripes? It is a two-handed device in some ways. When you get into some menus, the way back is a smallish button in the upper left-hand corner. Hard to get to with your right thumb — the thumb a right-handed person would use. The “pinch” for zooming is very much a two-handed operation. You have to hold the phone with one hand and pinch with the other. The sensitivity of the screen takes a bit getting used to as well, with me punching buttons repeatedly until I figured out I had to wait a bit on each button. Not a huge deal, and maybe adjustable.

Finally, the keyboard. It sucks, but not as bad as it could. It is a touch small for two-thumb typing, IMHO, and again, you might have to use two hands because you probably want to use your index finger to hit the little virtual chicklets. My thumb was making a lot of mistakes. Of course, one would get better at this over time. It is probably, in the long run, almost as good as a chicklet thumb-board, I’d say like 80%. I’ll try composing a longer email or something.

Final gripe? All the phones in the store were set up for WiFi instead of EDGE, so things seemed so darned speedy. Switching to just EDGE and the experience really slowed down. No 3G here, and it shows. Still bearable, but WiFi performance by default at the store might be a little misleading for some potential customers.

Safari was cool and handled a lot of really complicated pages that would make my HTC Wizard (T-Mobile MDA) choke and die. iPod usage was fine, and so was the YouTube module. Google Maps is nice — I wonder if it’ll work with a bluetooth GPS device like the Google Maps Windows Mobile version does.

In the end, I ask, is it the Jesus phone? No. Is it the slickest smartphone I’ve used? By a huge margin. Apple has made having a high-functioning phone a real pleasure instead of a pain. It keys off of the generation of people that want web, some email, and music + videos. With the soft keyboard, it prioritizes the younger generation that is doing a lot of texting using shortcut phrases, and not composing lots of emails on the plane. It is optimized for the consumption of media — web, movies, music — rather than the production of textual communications like a Blackberry. It works well as a phone, and has just enough gee-whiz that will make it a hit.

All in all, a wonderful UI experience that takes smartphones a huge step forward. That super cool phone you got last month looks pretty dumpy now.