issaferret | iPhone! (Reply)

I’m going to talk about the iPhone now that I have one. As a kind of mercy, I’m going to cut it here for those of you tired of hearing about the damn thing.

So: I picked up an iPhone Sunday. The acquisition was a kind of experience itself. I went to the brand new Apple store down here, and buying a cell phone and transferring the number from my old vendor was … painless. There were hiccups - the prequal phone suddenly wouldn’t scan, and my rep’s cardswipe quit on him, but instead of feeling like buying a car (with a lot of unnecessary upselling and waiting), I was helped out, I bullshitted with the staff, and despite taking almost an hour from start to finish due to various minor delays… I walked out smiling.

Not that buying this shiny piece of work wasn’t worth the trouble.

So, the toy itself: Apple knows how to make user interfaces. It’s slick, it provides intuitive controls I’ve had no trouble guessing, and it’s pretty. The functionality so far is pleasant for the Phone, iPod, and for the ‘other’ bucket that web browsing, games, and other convergence-powered doodads fall into.

This thing’s a light-weight hiptop. The keyboard’s not great (though by twisting it to one side many apps will switch to a longways keyboard for an improved experience), but for checking your email, reading the odd webpage, or a little bit of IM, the experience is pleasing.

Apple’s concession to the chimps in the RIAA was to make it difficult to make your own ringtones. Instead of being a two step process in-app, it requires three steps and a bit of file renaming. I now have fifteen ringtones I made myself in an hour or so; I bought one of them because I still have a bunch of iTunes music I can’t otherwise make into a ring. The speaker hasn’t yet disappointed me; it’s crisp, if a little tinny, but I don’t feel like I have to go feed music through an audio program to make it work as a ringtone - nor am I disappointed when playing movies without headphones.

One of my first purchases was a PuTTY-based SSH client - I can now log into my website from just about anywhere; the latency isn’t even too bad! the screen’s a little small, but it’s got geek cred.

So yeah, I’m having fun with this.

(crossposted from The Dream Library)