Back in January I said I couldn’t wait to get an iPhone. Of course, I did wait, but not in line. The order was placed online the evening of June 29th and the confirming email said shipping would be within 2-4 weeks. Much to my surprise the iPhone left Shenzhen, China six days later and after Fedex stops in Anchorage, Indianapolis, Allentown, and Pittston the amazing logistics system dropped off the iPhone at the lakehouse the next day, Friday. From late that morning through the afternoon I was captivated.
I don’t claim to a product reviewer but this posting will be my attempt to share reactions and opinions about the iPhone. The bottom line is a big "thumbs up" — my expectations have been exceeded, especially with regard to the sleek look and feel and the ease of entering text on the flat screen.
The Phone. Activation of cell phones has generally gotten much easier than it used to be but for the iPhone with AT&T it was truly simple. I had already upgraded iTunes to the latest version which supports the iPhone. I placed the iPhone in the cradle and plugged the USB cable into the ThinkPad and followed the directions on the neatly laid out pages in iTunes. Within minutes I had a new mobile phone number and my contacts, emails accounts, and calendar had all been synchronized. My mother received the first call and the quality was crystal clear. One thing I don’t like about the iPhone is the exclusive arrangement with AT&T. The iPhone has a SIM (Subscriber Identify Module) card but you can’t take it out. Customers should have a choice to change from AT&T to T-Mobile or other GSM operators around the world and I hope Apple decides to open the iPhone to more operators over time. In spite of the AT&T lock-in and their slow network, I am pleasantly surprised by the coverage for both voice and data. (The Palm Treo 700P with Verizon gets no data coverage at places where I spend a lot of time. The phone features are a joy — favorites list, call list, easily searchable contacts, large keypad, and simple voicemail setup and use. The speakerphone is very high quality. I have to say that so far I find it a really great phone and much easier to use than the Palm Treo, which had been my favorite of many phones I have tried over the years. The Palm has deeper functions, like details on each call in the call list showing date and length of call. Nice but can’t say I have used that feature more than once or twice. The iPhone has the things you really need and the functionality is intuitive and easy to use.
WiFi. Over time the best feature of all may be the iPhone WiFi support. I have been writing here for years about the ubiquity of WiFi and it is truly happening — JiWire is now listing 150,195 WiFi hotspots in 135 countries. The iPhone is not the first mobile device to offer WiFi but, once again, the simplicity of the implementation is simple to exploit. I keep my WAP SSID (the wireless access point service set ID)is private by turning off the broadcast "feature", so the signal was not visible. After turning WiFi "on" and entering the SSID and they WEP key, I pressed "Join" and in seconds I was connected. The iPhone automatically switches between the AT&T network and WiFi, if a signal is available. The iPhone remembers the WiFi connections you have made and automatically connects using your authentication data. With more and more WAPs out there WiFi will be used more and more with the obvious benefit of significantly faster speed.
SMS and email. SMS is very easy to use. It is integrated with your contact list. Just browsing through your contacts and a press on the mobile phone number and you are ready to send your text message. A favorites list is maintained for those with whom you message a lot. The email support is so simple that I wasn’t sure it was working. Using the AT&T network or WiFi if available, email from all your accounts are retrieved every fifteen minutes. You can have the latest 25 or up to 200 at your fingertips. Scrolling through them is a breeze and you can set a large font to make them really easy to read. Some people prefer the Blackberry service but I have favored Palm for years — until the iPhone. It is significantly easier to use. One drawback is that Thunderbird is not supported.
Browser. The Safari web browser is probably the weakest feature of the iPhone. The nice part is that if you just turn the iPhone sideways it changes the display to the wider view. Scrolling is a breeze and the .com button speeds up entering URLs. Bookmarks are synchronized through iTunes to the desktop version of Safari. You can choose to sync with Internet Explorer instead — can not imagine why anyone would want to do that — but there is no choice of syncing with Opera or Firefox. I found the adjustment of font size to be erratic — sometimes works and sometimes not — and most of the web sites I have visited on the iPhone are unreadable, including some sites that claim to be "m dot" mobile web sites. Maybe I will master how to do this. Safari, at this stage, is not nearly as good as Opera on mobile or desktop nor Firefox on the desktop. On the many mobile phones where it is available the Opera mobile browser is far better than Safari and Opera Mini works well on nearly any phone — and "mini" does not require a $500 high-end phone. Most people don’t spend a lot of time surfing the web with their phone but that is changing. When it comes to web browsing, the iPhone is a great step but it has a lot of catching up to do.
Entering text. A lot of the pre-launch speculation suggested that entering text without a keyboard would be very difficult. I have not found that to be the case. To the contrary, once you get the hang of it, it becomes quite easy. There are a lot of smarts built in that guess at what you trying to enter and if it gets it right you just tap the space bar and continue on. There are a number of shortcuts that speed things along. A picture is worth a thousand words so if you have doubts watch the video.
Video and Maps. Speaking of video, the iPhone has YouTube built in and if you are in range of a WiFi signal then watching movie clips (in the widescreen mode) is enjoyable. Google maps is also built in and just tapping the screen zooms in to what you want.
Photos. Most mobile phones can take pictures and display albums but, once again, the iPhone has made it really simple. Scrolling through your pictures with your finger is fun and turning the phone sideways gives you the widescreen view. Maybe the novelty will wear off but I am quite impressed. The camera doesn’t have any options, like zooming, that I have found. Push one button to take a picture and one to see the pictures you have already taken. An animated shutter opens and closes. The pictures are 1,200 x 1,600. There is no flash, so low light situations will not produce good photos.
iPod. In some ways the iPod feature of the iPhone is better than the iPod itself. You can sync selected playlists and listen to music while you are surfing or checking email. The built in speaker phone is better than expected fidelity. It is amazing how people are complaining that the storage is "only" 8 gigabytes. Obviously the capacity will grow to 16, 32 and at some point a terabyte. I started out with 1,200 songs, a hundred pictures, 1,500 contacts, my calendar and email. 1,200 songs is plenty enough for me when I am mobile. I may end up reducing the number of songs and add more pictures. At home or traveling with the ThinkPad I can listen to the full library and albums. The limited storage and no removable storage card will be an issue for some but not for most.
Stocks and weather. In partnership with Yahoo! there are built-in stock and weather applications. You can easily add as many stocks and locations as you want and then scroll through them with a glide of your finger. You can select the time period for graphs of stock prices. If you click for more weather or stock information the browser opens and takes you directly to the right page at Yahoo! Stocks and weather are available on many mobile phones but the integration and simplicity on the iPhone is impressive.
Security. Even with "just" 8 gigabytes of information, there is always the worry of losing your mobile phone. The iPhone — as an option — lets you turn on a passcode feature and after a minute of idle time goes by you have to enter the 4 digit code to unlock the phone.
Applications. The strength of the Palm has always been the availability of a very large number of applications. the iPhone, at this stage, only has the ones that most people need, but it is clear that there will be many. By supporting mobile web standards in the desktop version of Safari, developers will be able to create applications which look and behave just like the applications built into the iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone’s services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps. I would prefer a more open approach but it is clear that Apple and AT&T only want extend capabilities that they feel will not compromise reliability or security. The good news is that the iPhone is a wake-up call for mobile device makers and network operators. Hopefully they will respond and increase competition. I expect that within six months there will be a lot of new iPhone applications to choose from.
Synchronization. The word may be hackneyed but on the iPhone it is truly seamless. You get home or to the hotel and connect your iPhone to the ThinkPad, iTunes automatically starts if it isn’t running and all your music, contacts, calendar, and photos are synchronized.
Settings. One feature I really like is that all the settings, options and preferences are in one place — just tap the "Settings" button. On the Palm 700W with I found the complexity overwhelming at times and Windows Mobile unusable. Too many settings, options and preferences scattered across the various applications. The Palm OS is better but has the same basic problem. The iPhone has an operating system too, but it is transparent. Most people will not know or care about it because they don’t have to. I have yet to "reboot" the iPhone. If things get really gummed up you can restore the phone to factory settings through iTunes and then re-sync your data.
Overall. Looks like Apple has hit a home run with the iPhone and raised the competitive bar quite a bit. In some ways there is nothing revolutionary — except when it comes to holding it and using it. It is much more slender than I expected and it is a joy to use. While Microsoft is trying to take Windows to the mobile phone, Apple is trying to hide complexity and make the device simple and fun to use. After two days of use I am sold. Maybe I will get disappointed as I use it more. At this point I would say that within a week I will have a Palm Treo and an iPod for sale on eBay.

• iPhone – continued
• January patrickWeb story about the iPhone