New phone
Today we had a new arrival in the family. Until now we've been calling it "the iPhone", mainly because it's an iPhone - who could guess. Unfortunately for me, it belongs to my wife but this post will not be about jealousy; instead I thought I'd drop some of my immediate thoughts and comments after being allowed to watch over a shoulder for a couple of minutes. Even though the iPhone isn't new on the market, I write this anyway because I want to.
Packaging
It's very elegant. Instead of coming home with a rather big box made up of a mix of carton and transparent plastic, it's a quite small, black box made of smooth carton. On the top is the image of an iPhone with its home screen displayed. The edges of the phone are reliefs.
In that box, together with the phone and charger, is a bunch of small papers, five to be exact. There are two quick start guides or something like that, one in Swedish and one in Finnish, one legal information for each language and two Apple logo stickers on the last paper (maybe I'll convince my wife to put one of the stickers on my Lenovo Thinkpad - or not). The quick start guides may be more of introductions to the cool touch features than information on how to get started. That leaves out real documentation which I cannot see anywhere, but who should need it, right.
All-in-all the packaging is very elegant and eco.
iPhone - My ego: 1-0
Physical installation
Applying the SIM-card. That shouldn't be too hard. We're looking for some slot or something to pull out where a SIM-card can be placed and then applied to the phone. We cannot find anything of the like, but the inner packaging where the "quick start guides" were located we see a figure explaining how to do just this. Something that looks like a tuning fork or a clip should be applied to the bottom of the phone. This small tool is finally found and can then be used to pull out a small container where we put the SIM-card. It's quite cool, cute, elegant but my final feeling is "why"? Now we have to make sure not to lose this stupid little tool if we would ever want to switch SIM-cards. Maybe a standard clip will work, but I'm not convinced.
It's been equalized: 1-1
Startup
My wife did all of this - kudos to her - but I heard her groaning a bit in the background while doing it. I'm not sure this is required, but she had to install iTunes on hew EEE in order to get the SIM-card validated or something like that. I really hope this is not the case, since even if every person has a computer today, it shouldn't be required to install a phone. But then again, iPhone is so much more than a phone.
After all, I think now have the lead: 1-2
UI
This is where it starts to get very interesting. Just to unlock the key-lock (or is it screen-lock) is so super cool. Just slide your finger to the right and voila, you're in. Looking at a web site and doing the zoom-in and zoom-out is also very cool. Graphics are very nice and they've nailed the scrolling and switching page thing. Pre-installed applications are quite OK. Not too many eye-brow raisers but having YouTube and Maps directly in the phone is nice.
There are some negative things though. The keyboard is a bit hard to use, but maybe you get used to it. They should have spent more time on being able to type numbers and the most common special characters (like @ and . etc) on the first key-page. Maybe there are some special gestures or something which I'll learn. The check box is also a bit strange. It's like a physical flip-button which says | or O. It's not obvious what means turned on and off.
Overall, they made a three-pointer here: 4-2
Continuing
I've also looked very briefly into how to develop own apps to the iPhone. Even though there seems to be ways of developing on a Windows machine, it turns out that you are really forced to have a MAC OS computer. This smells so bad that I could almost refuse to get one for myself, but I will probably surrender in the end.
Small comforting goal in the end: 4-3
Summary
As a quick summary for this very brief review I can say that I like the iPhone, it feels like a mature phone and they have really spent time on the user interface. I feel like it lacks in functionality, but I can't pin-point what I'd like to see more. It is truly a fun phone, but maybe it's not the best business phone yet - that's yet to be evaluated by me.