Current mood:

impressed... mostly

iPhone
Last weekend, I had the chance to play with KB's iPhone, and I was impressed. My biggest concern had been the usability of the keyboard, and that actually turned out to be fine. I figured that if after 5 minutes I found it tolerable, long-term it would be no problem at all. So I got an iPhone this weekend. I needed a new phone anyway -- I had just been trying to decide which one.

As usual, though, whenever I try a shiny new product that everyone loves, it has problems for me. The issues this time: the iPhone is unsupported on windows 2000, and that took a little while to figure out. There's no error message -- it's just not recognized. I was able to activate on my laptop, but I'll have to install XP on my desktop if I want to sync with iTunes. Thanks to Apple, I may buy a retail Microsoft OS for the first time. Next, the activation couldn't complete normally, and after a couple hours, I got an email saying I had to call AT&T customer service. AT&T's customer service software locked up across all machines during my call, so I had to call back the next morning to complete the activation.

Also as usual, though, everything gets sorted out in the end. I actually kindof appreciate those problems. If I want to replace a motherboard or install a new OS, I know it's going to be about 20 hours of work just due to all the weird complications that come up, but I also feel like I have a lot of experience working through strange software and system configuration problems as a result, and that's a skill I appreciate having.

As for the iPhone itself -- it's both amazing and slightly disappointing. The amazing part is mostly Safari, honestly. The whole thing is very well put-together, and the slick interface is nice and all, but Safari is the thing that makes it stand out for me. Having a full iPod in my phone is pretty handy, too.

The disappointment is that, while the interface is slick, they've made some choices I don't agree with, and there's not much I can do about it. The biggest one is probably the lack of copy & paste, which I did know about ahead of time. A couple others are: no mass storage interface and no bland, unobtrusive ringtones (Sonar is tolerable).

I've thought a little bit about the copy & paste thing. At first, I was thinking that they'd kindof painted themselves into a corner with the touch interface -- they don't have any touch combinations left that can indicate "I want to copy this". After a bit more thought, though, I realized that it wouldn't be that hard at all. They just need to add a "Copy" button to Safari, the keyboard interface, and maybe other applications. After hitting that, you use the little magnififier thing to mark one end of the selection, then use it again to mark the other end of the selection (possibly after scrolling around). Done. And pasting just requires a "Paste" button in the keyboard interface.