I got a chance to use Aaron’s new iPhone yesterday, when Elijah and I met up with him for the afternoon.
Friday evening after work, Aaron stood in line briefly at the new Cingular/AT&T store just west of Eastview Mall. After a customer earlier in line came out empty-handed, he learned that the store had sold its last 8 GB model. Aaron — sensing that it was not to be — left at that point for wings at Duff’s, celebrating his friend Matt’s birthday in Buffalo.
After the celebration, he and Missy stopped at the Apple Store Walden Galleria, sauntering in around 9:30 p.m. The Apple Store was the only one open in the mall, and of course would not close until midnight that night for the launch (which is one of the strangest parts of the iPhone debut, to me). About twenty people were lingering, most clustered around the display models. He told me he was trying one of those out when he saw a gentleman who had just purchased one — Aaron had just wanted to try one, and had no idea they’d still have any for sale.
Since it turned out that they did have stock of the higher-capacity iPhones, he bought one. He was already in my access logs by 8:24 a.m. the next morning:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
I got to see it on Saturday, when we decided to see if the Apple Store Eastview had any remaining PowerSupport Crystal Films — we both now swear by these for adding some protection to our video iPods.
At the mall, he let me run the iPhone through its paces while he graciously watched his nephew. Having loaded a few Web sites, clicked around through the interface, and typed a little bit with the on-screen keyboard … well, I can say that it’s awesome. Solely as a handheld computer — throwing out all of the things it currently lacks, like some sync features and an SDK and so on — it’s a fantastic device.
Once I got to see it in person, hold it in my own hands, I felt like it was just right. It’s a natural extension of many trends — the iPod’s media-savvy, smartphones’ calling capabilities, and Web-connectedness.
Three things were immediately surprising. The screen is incredible, bright and crisp oh so hi-res. The phone calls were wonderfully clear — compared to the choppy and processed audio of every Verizon Wireless phone I’ve used, this was a winner (and on par with the GSM Treo 650 I had briefly two years ago). The Safari browser is much better than I expected, being both clear and readable in both portrait and landscape at multiple zoom levels … blissfully, much better than the display I got from the initial version of the iPhoney simulator.
The iPhone is not perfect, but it does seem futuristic and it does all fit together very well.
Now, if I can just store my 1500 existing Palm notepad notes on it, and create new ones that will sync to my desktop, I think I could live with it. I’m still not sure I can afford it, but that’s a story for another day.
Thanks to Aaron for letting me play!