It’s been about 3 days since I first got my hands on the iPhone. My Treo 680 has seen very little “action” in the meantime. So how has the iPhone been treating me so far? Surprisingly, it has exceeded my expectations. It took me just a day or so to switch the iPhone to be my main phone. I will share my impressions on the iPhone in a series of posts rather than a single long one.

The Hardware

Apple’s minimalist packaging is about 1/3 the size of my Treo 650 box. While small, Apple managed to pack a few goodies in the box. Here’s what you get :
- a tiny wall charger
- a sync/charge cable
- a dock
- earbud headphones
- Apple stickers
- a tiny amount of documentation

You have to download iTunes directly from Apple in order to sync your iPhone with your Mac or PC.

The iPhone feels really solid in the hand. The touch screen attracts fingerprints like crazy, but it’s easy enough to wipe it clean. I have a screen protector on the surface and that’s it; currently I’m carrying the iPhone without a case. The iPhone is about the same width as the Treo 680, but is slightly longer and slimmer. It fits easily into a shirt or trousers pocket.

The iPhone screen is very beautiful to look at : bright, crisp and clear. It’s usable both indoors and outdoors. The large screen makes an awesome viewfinder for the built-in 2 megapixel camera. There are only four buttons on the entire device : a ringer switch (same as the one on the Treo), a volume up/down switch, the power button and the “Home” button, which is the only one in the front of the iPhone. At the bottom of the iPhone are the speaker, the microphone, and the dock connector port. The back of the iPhone only has the camera.

Overall, it’s a very simple design that just works.

The User Interface

It took me almost no time at all to get used to the “one button” concept of the iPhone. Coming in from a Treo 680 with 40+ buttons, this was a revelation to me. Navigating the iPhone is very easy; I never even thought at any point in time, “how do I do this”? The user interface is so intuitive that even my 6 year old son was pinching, zooming and sliding photos in just a couple of minutes.

I find that I don’t miss the physical QWERTY keyboard of the Treo 680. The iPhone’s keyboard is just as easy to use. I immediately used 2 thumbs to type. Since I send a lot of text messages (SMS) throughout the day, I actually got used to it quite fast. The error correction is not perfect, but it’s easy enough to fix or ignore.

Each application in the iPhone is slightly different in terms of user interface. For example, the Weather app, Notes and the Calculator look totally different from each other. Yet, it only takes a few seconds to figure out how to use each one.

There are no menus on the iPhone. To customize the iPhone, most of the built-in applications have a centralized “Settings” application.

In the next few days, I will discuss web browsing, using multimedia, third party applications, and more.

Filed under: iPhone

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