IPhone

While in New York, Lindsay and I stopped at the main Apple Store to play with the new iPhone. No, I didn't buy one on the spot, as a number of you may have expected. I do however think it has some fantastic new features.

Design-wise the iPhone is a beautiful machine. It has hand-friendly corners, the biggest display I've seen on a phone, a unique interface, and a good weight. After writing this and a number of other posts on my trusty Blackberry, the touch screen keyboard lacked the feedback a real keyboard offers. I'm not quite to the touch typing level with the BB, but I'm pretty close, which I'm not sure how a screen keyboard would compare. There was a suggestion feature that tried to guess the correct word from the letters used. Perhaps the click feedback of a button could be mimicked by a slight vibration, like a video game.

The ability to view entire webpages with zoom is nice. That is to say, the phone loads whole web pages zoomed out so you can see the whole page, to read the text you zoom in by drawing two fingers together over the part you want. To compare the web browsers of the iPhone and Blackberry is like comparing the Gopher browser on the original AOL and the newest version of Safari. Both do use the Internet, but in a completely different way.

I certainly see myself as a candidate, so it's more of a when question than an if question. I'm composing this message while listening to my iPod Nano. Having one less thing to carry, charge, and worry about is valuable to a frequent traveller.

The iPhone also has the ability to use 802.11, increasing the speed when WiFi is available. I wonder how long it'll take someone to write a VoIP client (lSkype, maybe) to bypass the cellular (and much more expensive) network when there's a WiFi signal.