iPhone - My Impressions

Work has an iPhone that people can take home for an extended period of time. I recently got the iPhone over the weekend. Here's the blog post I wrote for work about it:

My first impression of the iPhone: “This is really cool”. If you’re somewhat of a nerd, geek, etc. you’ll probably giggle at some of the ways the iPhone displays. But I’ve had it for 4 days now, and the equivalent of new car smell is gone.

The iPhone’s many virtues have been extolled in countless blogs and websites, so I’ll focus on what I believe will keep it from mass adoption. The first and most obvious drawback is the smudged screen, and learning curve in where your finger will actually register on the screen. You get over these things with familiarity.

The second big drawback is that Safari for the iPhone doesn’t support flash. Could this be a licensing dispute between Apple and Adobe? Either way, it handicaps significant portions of some of the coolest sites. I hope all CM’s non-flash replacements are up to date.

The third drawback is that Apple wrote their own custom apps for Google Maps and YouTube. This means that for whatever reason, Apple thought they had better functionality for these apps then the creators and overwrote that functionality. When navigating to a site that embeds Google Maps, the map can be viewed, but the user cannot click and drag the map…because Apple didn’t want you to double tap and drag.

These incongruencies with what a user expects from other touchscreen and touchpad devices as well as Apple’s need to override functionality could be a downfall of the iPhone.

On another note, the phone functionality experience wasn’t all that great. All the iPod Touch needs is broadband internet to become THE mobile device.