The other day, while my wife was shopping at Walmart, I decided to make a little trip to the AT&T Store nearby. They had a decent number of iPhone available on Launch Day, but I decided to wait until my current contract is up early next year.
It wasn’t too busy so I talked to the guy there at the store for a while about various smart phones, then I walked up to the huge fake iPhone display.
Sitting there was what looked like a normal sized iPhone display model sitting on the charging dock. I asked the guy if it was real and he said “Of course”, So I picked it up and looked at it. The screen was so clear and crisp that it looked fake. I tapped the weather button and up the weather came.
I’m not going to go into all the details that have been posted endless amounts of times on blogs. Basically, the iPhone was the most beautiful handheld device I’ve ever used! The interface was so fluid and simple that it took no instructional manual. It is virtually 100% intuitive.
I wasted no time though getting into the phone part of it and called my buddy Mattbob. He answered with a “Hello?” instead of his normal “Hey dude” since he didn’t recognize the number, and we talked for a few minutes. I decided to then dial my brother, eDoug, and “merge” him into the call. A couple “taps” later and we were all talking. Doug had crappy service at work though so I dropped him out and went back to Mattbob. Talked for a few minutes and was done.
I can’t say it would ever be that easy to do what I did on any other “Smart Phone”… I’ve owned Palm Treos and other Palm driven phones and it was never that simple. Those others were clumsy without the stylus.
The touchscreen keyboard wasn’t too bad either, took a minute to get used to it, but it was ok once you did, it even corrected my last name which isn’t a common “Smith” or “Jones”.
Out of 10, I would give it a 9.2 … The only negative I noticed was the speed of the WiFi connection with trying to browse, but it may have been the stores connection. Other than that, I really think it has some massive potential as they improve upon it and come out with new models down the road.
The coolest thing I can imagine Apple doing with it in the future is to create a “docking station” you can plug it into allowing you to have a full size monitor, mouse and keyboard. The docking station could also offload some of the tasks to make it faster and/or provide more storage, etc. This would basically allow you to have a PC in your pocket.