Yes! That’s an iPhone in my hand and that’s my dog, Lupo, on the wallpaper and I want to share my experience playing with it for the first couple of days. This might be a long article so this is actually the first time I’ll have a “read more” link at the bottom of the post.

So.. I guess first thing you might be wondering about is if the phone SIM works in Manila.. or if I replaced the SIM with a local one. The answer is NO and NO and damn I wish it did. So how did I activate it? I didn’t. The first time you open the iPhone there is a “welcome message” that says “Please Activate by connecting to your iTunes.” Of course I didn’t do that but instead connected it to my mac and ran some de-activation script. The iPhone gets an error message about the SIM every time you turn it on (not from sleep but from complete shut down). But after that it was smooth sailing. I was able to load up my tunes and videos and connect it to any WiFi network. So yes, my experience with it is really just as a glorified iPod Video with email and browsing capabilities.

Using WiFi was great. It had access to the built in Google Maps app allowing me to browse through the maps just like you would in the browser version. Except this was built for the iPhone and there are some custom buttons and interface elements. But I think Apple did a great job in choosing Google Maps as one of the first apps on the phone. It just looks great specially when you are using the satellite images. The screen resolution of this thing is impeccable. As my friend said, “not a pixel can be noticed.” Yup, its almost like looking at glossy paper… at 160dpi.. that baby is 10dpi better than broadsheet newsprints.

I passed it around the office for everyone to get a feel of the iPhone. People were taking photos with it like it was Brad Pitt or someone famous. I don’t blame them, it’s not everyday you see a gadget like this… not yet at least. I hear that Apple is looking at asia after europe hopefully it will arrive here in a year’s time or so. I also hear that only one carrier will be providing it in the Philippines.. and that they are bidding for rights to this already.

So what does it feel like holding one of these babies? Personally I find it too wide to fit my palm. An understandable compromise since they wanted it to have a big enough screen. But what people notice is that its actually thinner than it looks in photos. I agree, when I put it in the front pocket of my pants along with my other mobile phones I barely notice it. My Nokia N80 is so much fatter.

The photo above shows the iPhone side-by-side my Nokia N80, my iPod nano (1st Generation) and my wife’s Nokia 6300. From the photo you can see that the iPhone is the widest and tallest gadget of the bunch. But it’s almost as thin as the 6300 if not just as thin. This makes me curious about the rumored iPhone nano. It might have the same form factor as the 6300… making it just right for calls and music, but not for browsing and video.

I still really think that the iPhone is a bit too tall and too wide. It really is close to impossible typing with one hand, as most of us are used to when typing SMS. Plus, trying to go from the “home” button to the top of the screen takes quite an effort with one hand.

But my experience with it isn’t about SMS, but about browsing. And this is where the iPhone excels. It has a built-in full featured Safari browser. So no transcoding of websites similar to what Opera mini does. It still isn’t as big as your monitor so you have to zoom in and pan to read some of your favorite sites. But some sites are actually creating iPhone specific pages that work perfectly with the 320×480 screen resolution (portrait). And this is what Apple proposed developers to do when it was released, built your apps using the Safari browser. Which was a bit of a let down since it means you have to be online to use any of these 3rd party apps.

The site above is digg.com’s iPhone version. I was pleasantly surprised to see how the dropdown list used the iPhone’s interface, complete with sounds. If you go to the digg iPhone site using your desktop browser it will look like any dropdown list, so I guess it is Safari calling this behavior. This gets me excited at the prospect of designing sites fitted to iPhone.

There are so much things to talk about but I think this post has been a bit too long already. But before I go, I wanted to show you guys one last thing.. the photo above was taken by the iPhone’s 2 megapixel camera… in full resolution (I didn’t downgrade the image, just cropped it, so it might actually take long to load) It is actually decent looking, although it is a bit grainy. Yup that’s the iPhone box behind my 12-inch Powerbook.

Posted in Crit, Design, Inspiration, Personal, Seen, Tech |

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