iPhone Buzz

Last week I finally got the chance to play with an iPhone. As I blogged about earlier, my razor V3 was destroyed in the wilderness so I stopped by my local Cingular store to see if there was anything they could do. Incidentally there wasn't but while I was there I played with one of the iPhones they had on display.


The iPhone has gotten mixed reviews. Most professional reviewers loved it but the tech forums have gone both ways. I usually don't give too much notice to tech forums in these things because it seems to be human nature that if non-journalists are going to go through the trouble of posting a comment on a technology forum, its usually because they want to say something negative.

Anyways, I played with the iPhone for several minutes and my professional opinion as a technology professional is that it is unlike any hand-held device I have ever used! The ease-of-use both in the hardware and the software is truly a innovation in human interaction. Any software engineer who has had to create a user interface for customers know how difficult it is to make things "user friendly" for the average software users. Traditionally hand-held devices have not done a good job of this but gotten away with the fact that they are "hand-held" .


The way I usually measure the usability of a new hand-held device is by trying to do something and seeing how long it takes me to figure out. That includes trying to decide which buttons to press, menus to go through and how to enter data. The more "trials and errors" I have to go through to figure out a task, the less usable a devices is to me.

The designers of the iPhone really took this into consideration. When looking at the main menu you see a list of familiar icons (iPhoto, phone, ipod, maps, etc). Pressing on any of them takes you within one or 2 clicks of what you want to do. The integration of gestures on the touch screen, while may take some getting use to, can increase functionality much like the famous "click wheel" did on the blackberry.

One of the big points of controversy is the qwerty keyboard that is displayed when you want to enter textual information. While at first it looks very unusable (buttons are very small), the smarts behind it seem to work well with how human figures would use it and I was able to type very proficiently in no time at all.

So from a technology perspective its awesome. Now lets get down to price, $499-$599, and yes that is a huge sum of money for a device which will most likely keep me from getting one. Not because I don't think its worth it but because I have a 14-month kid and we need to spend that money on other things. Do I think it is worth the money, absolutely! This is a revolutionary device and people should not expect it to be dispensed from candy machines.