techno.blog("Dion")

I am having fun with the iPhone. I checked out the downtown Palo Alto store and ran into Dave Winer in a coffee shop across from the Apple Store. It was quite a spectacle there, with copious TV crews and Scoble was having the time of his life in front of as many cameras as he could get in front of ;)

The line went a long way down the street and I had no intention of hanging out there. Instead, I went over to the Stanford shopping mall store at ~8pm and there wasn’t a line at all. Five minutes later and I had the phone.

I am already on AT&T (Cingular) and there were some glitches in the initial setup. I was told that the store wasn’t responding… the activation took ~30 minutes (it had to send me an email after the fact) and such… but fairly painless.

The Good

It is a beautiful device. Finger-flicking around is responsive and enjoyable. I was synced quickly enough and on my way, and it didn’t take long to learn the system. Very nice indeed.

The Safari browser is a real pleasure to use. Even though the screen is small, I am quite shocked at how well you can browse “normal” web pages. Great job. Hopefully they will fix the view issues for developers.

Spanning Sync is my friend, and it means that I have a nice calendar on my phone. Thank you.

The Bad

I miss Gmail for Mobile. Accessing Gmail via POP3 is so painful:

• I don’t want to manage my email in two places
• I can’t tell Gmail to only throw back email in my inbox, so I get a ton of mail that I normally have archived
• Labels gone. Organization gone.
• Search.

I really need a rich Gmail client :/

The biggest issue is the lack of power user options. There really isn’t much here. There isn’t a place to change the server port for email. Where are email filters? “Mark all email as read”. Please. Why can’t my “notes” be saved online? I want my Safari bookmarks to use del.icio.us.

The Google Maps application is nice, and it is great that it uses addresses from your contacts, but I wish that it tied into my “Saved Locations” as well.

In general the phone is very “sync” centric, which means you spend time working out how you can get your data into the Mac apps so they can sync over. Since it is meant to be an internet device, I wish I could tell it to get data from web services too.

The keyboard is working out OK for me. I have fat fingered a few things, but the system is so far very smart and working those out too. It is very liberal.

So far I am happy with the iPhone and it will be fun to play with it more. There is much to be done though, and I am sure Apple isn’t going to rest here ;)