iPhone--iLike

Emp. Peng. and I headed down to the Apple Store to ogle the new iPhone. To sum up: niiiiiiiiice. If Apple hadn't made it exclusive to the cell phone company with some of the suckier reception in our area, and if we were insane enough to spend $600 on a phone, we would have bought one right then and there.

The interface really is as intuitive as they say it is. I picked one up off the cradle and had it down pat in 20 seconds flat. The tipping to switch from portrait to landscape is nifty. Web browsing is, as reported elsewhere, a bit pokey but still faster than dialup. The keypad was much more accurate than I thought it would be with my fat-fingered keying.

The thing that amazed me the most about the phone: it worked. Apple made the display models (or at least the second one from the left on the island to the right of the Genius Bar in Columbus, Ohio) fully functional, and I mean fully functional. When was the last time you went to a cell phone retailer that actually let you check out how the phone worked as a phone? Apple did. One of the phones had been left on the phone keypad screen, so, on a lark, I turned my cell on and dialed. Yes, I called my own pocket. I'm still a bit stunned that it rang, from an unlisted number in San Jose. The test might have been biased, considering I was calling three feet, but the call quality was excellent. If nothing else from the iPhone bleeds into the rest of the cell phone industry, I hope the practice of letting customers actually try out the product catches on.