Nontrivial Exercises

Apple iPhone - My First Impressions

Apple new iPhone by mac-tomster

Just watched the SteveNote this morning and was wowed, awed, excited, suprised by the iPhone! I didn’t think it would be here, and it isn’t, exactly - has to pass FCC approval and target ship date is June.

Here are my first impressions:

• how can Apple call it an iPhone? I thought Linksys had that name?
• absolutely a true innovation with the UI - touch / hover sensitivity, only 1 button!, no stylus
• running some version of OS X with core animation and presumably some way to open real docs (e.g. email attachments) is brilliant
• true multi-tasking lets you download email while doing other stuff, e.g. surfing (on Safari)
• WiFi was a must-have
• I’m very interested to see how the touch / hover keyboard really works - will it be as fast as the Blackberry thumb keyboard?
• Cingular did the deal with Apple without seeing the product! That is absolutely incredible and shows the respect and trust (and power) that Steve Jobs has
• Steve flexed that trust / power muscle a bit by having Eric Schmidt of Google and Jerry Chan of Yahoo almost close enough to touch each other as they came up on stage in succession to make their appearance and congratulate Steve
• the fact that no rumor site got the iPhone exactly right - or even close - shows how amazing Steve is at running an organization and keeping secrets; if not even the CEO of Cingular had seen the iPhone before, then who else could have? This confirms my view that Steve should run the NSA (or at least work with them to show them how to keep secrets)

I must admit that until about a week ago I wasn’t excited about a new phone at all. I am now, but the wait and the price are both a bit much for me. It will definitely be interesting to see how things develop over the next 5 months.