iPhone: July 2007 Archives

We've received our iPhones and we must say first impressions are very good.  Here's a quick list of things we love about the iPhone:

• Call quality is excellent
• Speed of applications: this sucker flies!  You select something and it just appears, almost instantly.  Much faster than any "smart" phone used recently by our staff.
• Thoughtfulness: the iPhone has a lot of thoughtful features.  It's amazing that Apple was able to design this thing in the vacuum of Infinite Loop, without outside customer input.  Little things like being prompted if you want to switch audio sources, is the extra touch that identifies this as an extremely well though out product, from a usability standpoint.
• Display: simply beautiful
• Keyboard: truly amazing and much easier than we anticipated
• Speaker: loudness is quite, um, loud!  We're impressed with the ability to listen to a Podcast while on the toilet and not juggling with ear-bud wires.
• Delete Podcast/Video once complete: After you watch a video Podcast, iPhone asks, to paraphrase, "do you want to erase this video to recover some space?"  This is a great feature, because you may need to clear space for more pictures or to download mail attachments. 
  

Here's some things we'd like to see:

• iChat: we're sure that SMS prevails here, just like they don't want you running Skype on this thing.  The good news is third-party developers have come up with Web solutions--and the reality is you need to be connected to use iChat anyway.  The solution we like: beejive.com
• MMS: or lack thereof, rather.  People have been sending us MMS messages, with no response.  This is a strange oversight and we're not really sure why they would leave this off.  AT&T makes money on these messages, so why not on the iPhone?  Perhaps Apple just figures people can use email for that function.
• Video Podcasts in Podcast Section: this is a usability item that we dislike in all iPods and it's been carried over to the iPhone.  When you're in the Podcast section and you click on a video Podcast, it only plays the audio.  Why can't it play the video or ask you if you want to play the video?  In order to play the video, you have to go into the Video section and select Podcasts.  To us, this is a strange choice of UI design on what's a well-designed UI, otherwise.
• Web-Based Mail Attachments or Downloads: we haven't figure out if this is possible, but it seems that when you attempt to download an attachment from Gmail or other Web pages, you cannot open these attachments.  It would be nice if Google Mail supported the reading of PDF's online, but it doesn't, and the iPhone doesn't allow these sorts of downloads.  To make this work, you have to use Mail.app with POP access of Gmail.

More on the iPhone and other Apple opinion in the coming days.

Analysts have spent days pontificating over iPhone's sales this past week.  Some are throwing out numbers, such as 500k on the first day alone! 

"Shoppers may have bought as many as 700k units over the weekend," said David Bailey, an analyst with Goldman Sachs Inc.  The venerable Gene Munster threw his hat in the ring, with a sales estimate of 500k units.  Both these guys were expecting around 200-300k unit sales.

Here's our read: analysts everywhere expected the iPhone to sell briskly the first couple of days, but I don't think anyone expected this volume level.  We believe that once the word hit the streets that the iPhone works as advertised--and those initial reports were very positive--the floodgates opened, along with wallets, and by Wednesday, it was a sellout. 

We ordered ours 10 min after 6PM on Friday and do not have them.  The phones will arrive in mid-July and we'll give you our impressions.