I went to Macworld today and spent an hour in the expo hall watching a live demonstration/presentation of the iPhone. I also checked out the cool rotating display case you’ve maybe seen bad video of online already. It’s smaller than I expected in person.
Here’s some miscellaneous thoughts I formed during or shortly after the presentation…
- The web browser looks pretty awesome. Sites load slower than on a computer (the iPhone in the demo was using wifi).
- The SMS application looks good but functionally not significantly better than what Treos have had for a few years now.
- It has a notes application I hadn’t previously noticed.
- It doesn’t look easy to use one-handed for anything more than calling people on your short favorites list. It’s really designed to be held in one hand and controlled with the other hand.
- Being able to quickly navigate a music library by tapping letters of the alphabet is pretty awesome, but would be much more useful on a ‘full size’ iPod with much larger libraries.
- I think I might actually use the coverflow mode to browse through album covers.
- The email application shows attached images inline in the message itself. That’s pretty darn cool.
- Typing on the on-screen keyboard does not look anywhere near as easy or fast as a real thumb keyboard. It might be worth it for the awesome huge screen.
- People in the audience around me were so impressed with some of the cool, but not mind-blowing, features that I suspect they may not know how powerful smartphones of today already are.
- A visual interface with that much pizazz on a handheld device of any kind is pretty freaking cool. I’m excited for the future of all handheld devices.
- The Google Maps application is neat but isn’t much more useful than the one I have on my Treo now. The interface is slicker and there’s some cool graphical tricks that are fun to watch. The satellite images are neat, but I almost never use those on the web anyway.
- Current CDMA/EVDO networks (Sprint/Verizon) cannot handle data and voice simultaneously so some of the features of the iPhone would not work at all on those networks, if Apple had chosen to release iPhone with those carriers. They demoed sending an email out with an attached photo while talking on the phone with someone at the same time, for instance. EVDO Rev A does support this, and I think Sprint and Verizon are both rolling out Rev A upgrades currently.
I’ll add more thoughts as I come up with them.