The iPhone is gadget heaven. It really does restore your sense of childlike wonder. I’ve had a blast all weekend running my greasy finger over its glassy surface.
It’s a Crackberry for the masses. Finally, mobile email, messaging and web browsing is fun and easy — how did it take so long?
I’ve had a Treo and cell phone email for years, but never, ever used them — they’re a mess. Now I’m an iPhone text addict — a 41-year-old acting like a teenager.
I bought one on Friday and have been out around town with my kids all weekend. The little angels monopolized it, surfing the web and watching YouTube. They figured it out immediately. I showed them one thing — how to use your fingers to shrink and zoom — that was it. I took some calls, surfed the web and sent some email.
I found it’s not all roses — there’s serious issues using it for work — but in general, we’re true believers.
The Good and The Bad after the jump. Plus camera phone samples.
iPhone picture samples — one third their original size.
The Good:
1. The Web, in all its glory. Using Wi-Fi, the Web is a dream. You flit from site to site like a butterfly. A greasy finger is the most natural way to scroll around pages and zoom in — it’s easier than using the mouse on a desktop machine.
2. Corrective text works great. You botch letters in almost every word you type, but if you get three out of seven letters in the correct sequence, it guesses the word you want. I’ve been whizzing through email, no problem. One thing in my favor: I’ve no Crackberry muscle memories to unlearn.
3. Google Maps: fast, fun and traffic updates for free.
4. The camera – It’s a lot better than any other camera phone I’ve had. See samples above (I had to seriously downgrade the files to upload them to WordPress).
5. Entertainment — The screen is spectacular. It’s as good as watching high-def on a HDTV. Even the white earbuds sound pretty good.
6. Syncing is painless. It slurped over all the contacts, calendars, music and videos. Not a glitch. It’s so painless, you take it for granted. But having used PlaysForShit devices, easy sync is a blessing from above.
The Bad:
1. No cut and paste. No document editing. No webpage saving. The iPhone’s not much good for blogging.
2. AT&T’s EDGE network stinks. It’s dead slow.
3. No universal landscape keyboard. The keybaord can be rotated into landscape mode only in Safari. Seems natural to have a large landscape keyboard in email and notes also.
4. A host of missing features: No search for contacts, no MMS picture messaging, no cut and paste, no Flash or Java in Safari, no Bluetooth file transfer, can’t be used a PC modem, no camera zoom, no video recording.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
