iPhone? Revolutionary is not an overstatement
So I don't know why some people were suprised, but I got an iPhone last Friday. No, I did not wait in line.
I went down to the Apple store at around 3pm on Friday and there was a line around the block. I went back at 9pm and there was no line, but there was a strange mist of post-shopping-orgy energy in the air. People looked like they needed a cigarette. The store was oddly vacant except for this localized swarm of people around the iPhone display tables. I tried jumping up and down a bit to see if I could actually see an iPhone inside the swarm of droolers but I couldn't so I just went to the counter and bought my own.
You activate the iPhone with iTunes. It was really easy. You just use your apple id and associated credit card. My activation took forever though, it didn't get activated until like 2pm on Saturday. Friday night it just said "Please activate" and all I could do was lock and unlock the keyboard, which I did many times. The animation is really detailed and nice. It was a night of torture. I woke up at 6am wondering if it had been activated yet. (It hadn't).
So having used it for a whole 2 days now, I'm still amazed. I had high expections coming from Apple and it has exceeded all of them by far. It really is revolutionary from a user interface perspective. In one weekend it has made every other PDA out there obsolete. I see people with their Treos poking away with their little stylus and they look at me with this sad look in their eye. Once you use an iPhone, you're going to have a whole lot less patience for the other interfaces out there. Even a mouse seems a little outdated to me now.
That's why I don't think "revolutionary" is an overstatement. Apple has started a whole new language we can use to talk to computers. Yea, we can get notebook computers with a touch screen, but the interface was still designed for a mouse. A touch-based interface requires a complete reworking of the basic interface concepts. Apple has done it, and in ways that are so natural and intuitive and undeniably better than anything that preceded it, that it really is going to affect everything that comes after it. It's like central air conditioning or something.
The camera takes great photos and does well in low light.
The screen clarity is amazing. It looks almost like printed paper. It's twice as clear and legible as my laptop screen. It's easier to read my mail on my phone than my computer now.
The web browser is great. No Flash support and no SVG support, but javascript seems to work well. I tried using a javascript pop-up date selection from travelocity and it worked, but was kinda hard to hit the right date with my finger. The browser has excellent touch-based controls for standard HTML form controls though. Sometimes sites with a lot of javascript can be a little slow. Connection speeds are fast when connected with WiFi but AT&T's data speeds are a little slow. Still usable, but not really at mid-conversation-googling speeds.
You can run nextbus in the browser but a widget would be really nice. Links to quicktime video files from the web browser stream and play really well.
The microphone on the headphones it came with works great. I think the sound quality of calls I've had on the headset are the best I've gotten out of any phone ever. It's weird hearing people's voice in stereo. No straining to hear anything, that's for sure. It's like they're inside your head, it's kinda weird. It sounds like your own voice sounds when you talk, except it's someone else's voice. I could see it driving some to madness. Probably doesn't mix well with LSD.
The battery seems pretty decent. Both of the last two days it's seen pretty heavy use and the battery has lasted all day. When I got home on Saturday night it was almost dead.
My only complaints so far: You can rotate the phone and get a horizontal format keyboard in the web browser, but not in the chat or mail applications. Also since a lot of video sights use Flash to show their video, Flash support in the safari app would be nice. I'm sure it'll probably come with an update.
And of course I can't wait for the video iChat version of the iPhone, but that'll be on different hardware.