iPhone Debuts — In My Pocket

I was one of those people. I was one of the who-knows-how-many standing in line at the Apple Store for a brand new iPhone. And, I did it on vacation in Buffalo, NY, meaning I got it a full three hours before all my peeps in Portland.

Was it worth it? Now that I’ve had three days with the thing, was it worth the money, the time, the sales tax?

First things first. The Apple Stores were — I have to imagine I can speak generally here, extrapolating my experience in the NY store — awesome. They were managed impeccably. Lines were bled into the store at around 4 customers every few minutes, ensuring no logjams on the store floor itself. We were shuttled all the way to the back of the store and asked the simple question: “What do you want — 4 or 8?”

I said 8. I gather I wasn’t alone. Word from the store manager is that they were sent around 4 of the 8 gig models for every one 4-gig model of the phone.

“One or two?”

One for me. I’m not one of those eBayers I’ve be reading about.

So, there I was, asked to buy the phone before being allowed to see it, to play with it, to touch it. That, my friends, is a seller that is confident in their product.

I paid, and headed back around to the iPhone tables to play with the demo units. The floor sales staff had been allowed only a few minutes with the phones themselves, busy with the store setup prior to the 6 p.m. launch, so they were reasonably useless in answering questions. Though, thanks to Apple’s brilliantly orchestrated Campaign of Obviousness, there were precious few questions.

There wasn’t one person in line with me that hadn’t seen every one of the training videos Apple released prior to iPhone launch. They knew how to type, how to browse the net, how to email — they understood the device inside and out. By the time it was in their hands, they were old friends.

The same was true for me, thankfully. Here, I think, is the highest compliment I can possibly give to this device: it works exactly as advertised.

My expectations were quite high, and the iPhone delivers. I was up and running with reasonable accuracy on the virtual keyboard in about 36 hours. What’s reasonable? I make a ton of mistakes, but once I learned to trust the smarts of the auto-correct, I got very quick on the thing.

The applications are intuitive, navigation a breeze, and call quality? The best I’ve had. I’m switching from the Treo 680 and it’s like a brand new day.

Downsides? There are a few, and I think Apple knows them because these weren’t actually advertised.

1. Notes. This application is about as lame as they come. Can’t do anything with notes you take on the device besides email them — no syncing allowed. Seems like they’re ripe to sync directly with Leopard’s mail application, but we’re a few months out from that actually working. Until then, we’re hosed.

2. Copy/Paste. There isn’t any. Pretty short-sighted diss of a convention that the vast majority of PC users actually “get”.

3. To Dos. OK, this is the biggest one for me. To Dos that you create in iCal DO NOT SYNC WITH IPHONE. Apple has chosen to break fidelity with one of their core applications and ignore a major function. Of course, there’s no way to actually create To Dos on the phone itself, so that there’s nothing on the computer to sync to is just about moot.

4. SMS. Not so much of a downer here. The downside is that the SMS application was designed in such a friendly manner that it will encourage much longer chat conversations over text messaging. This will blow through the 200 base of SMS messages in the default plan and force users to spend more money. Beautiful execution here — AT&T’s lock-in to SMS suddenly reveals why there’s no native iChat client on the phone: if there was such a client, then I wouldn’t pay for the texts.

EDGE

One of the biggest cries I’d heard pre-launch was on the perceived sluggishness of the EDGE network, AT&T’s 2.5G data network, and Apple’s choice to stick with EDGE over the more peppy 3G networks of other providers. Your mileage may vary, of course, but in my usage here in Western NY, I’ve found Edge to be quite sufficient, even when watching YouTube videos over the air. For everyday email, SMS, and casual browsing, it works perfectly. For more power, a quick switch to Wi-Fi and I’m browsing at PC speeds.

This device does for the phone what the Mac did for me five years ago: it moves the interface out of the way, and let’s me get to work. And for the first time, getting to work on a mobile device can be taken seriously.