Now that I’ve got my iPhone, I am constantly amazed about it. I’ll list just a few things about that caught my attention.
- It’s a phone !
- It’s a computer !
- It’s a phone and a computer integrated in a marvellous way !
1. It’s a phone.
Of course it’s a phone, that’s why you bought it in the first place. But the UI is soooo well done, it’s scary. It’s scary that it took all this time for someone to come up with a UI that is better than all that windows mobile smartcrap. It’s the smoothness with which your pin login screen appears to unfold when you press the home button. It’s the nice sounds it makes while you work with it. It’s the way your fingers seem to be able to type on those smallish onscreen keys yet you still manage to select the right letter almost all the time. You can read more iphone gushiness from Stephen Fry’s blog.
2. It’s a computer.
It’s a computer in its own right. You can install ssh and the sshd daemon on it, and you can login to it like any other computer. You are using the zsh shell, you can install the latest version of the python scripting language, ruby or Perl. The Apache webserver runs on it, cron is installed, all the Unix command lines work just fine ! Your address book details are kept in sqlite databases, so any tool like python which has integrated sqlite access can access and use them.
3. It’s a phone and a computer.
While the phone baseband modem and the computer are kept separate in the iPhone (at least, that’s what I understand) the results of using the phone are saved to the computer side, so you can for example, install a script that will get all your calls (from an sqlite db) and put those calls in your ical calendar so you can see when you called and who (if the phone number is in the address book).
And it’s all very well integrated ! So well, in fact that you tend to overlook a few problems at first. One of them comes up pretty quickly : there’s no cut-and-paste possible, so quickly picking up for example an rss link from safari and dropping it in a rss reader is not possible. Perhaps a cut and paste solution like iClip would be a solution, where you slide the text or link to a sideboard to store it in, go to the other application and slide it in ?
Other things are missing as well. No GPS, no 3G, no search in your contacts (though you can find most of them fairly quickly).
Still, it’s a beaut, and as Chris Pirillo says: it just put the bar higher for the other phones to compete !
