this is totally gonna work…

This weekend has been one of the best birthday weekends I’ve had in a while. First, I got to see my Oregon Ducks beat the USC Trojans to put themselves right in the hunt for the BCS. Second, I scored a couple of copies Leopard which I’ve installed on my laptop. And lastly, I joined the ranks of happy iPhone owners.

When the iPhone was first announced I thought it would be a success, but I wasn’t particularly interested in having one myself simply because I’ve felt that the U.S. wireless industry has had a very difficult time coming up with a compelling product for me. I had a Crackberry from work, which was kind of fun to check scores with or play Sudoku. But if I had to pay for it? No way buster. I wouldn’t pony up for that. Simple telephony would be plenty for me.

Well, that was until a couple of co-workers bought iPhones and I finally got to put my hands…er fingertips…on one. Oh man, I was in love at first touch. The screen is gorgeous and the feel of the interaction is brilliant.

So I waited and waited until my actual birthday came along. Today I walked into my local AT&T store and five minutes later walked out with a brand spanking new iPhone. When I got home I plugged it right into my Mac, iTunes launched and in twenty minutes I had a working iPhone.

What I Like So Far

Google’s announcement of IMAP support for GMail support couldn’t have come at a better time. Setting up IMAP in the iPhone was a snap following Google’s updated instructions. They’ve also done a nice mapping of standard IMAP actions to GMails behavior. Check out this page for details.

I had a mail in my inbox in which someone sent me a link to a YouTube video. I simply clicked the link and -poof- the built-in YouTube player fired up with the video. When I finished watching the video I clicked the “done” button and I was right back in my inbox. Slick…very slick.

I like the multi-document support for Safari. You can have several Safari instances running which is nice when you want to maintain a couple of different browsing contexts. This is utilized by the mail application when links are opened. Opening a new link won’t trounce whatever you were last looking at.

Did I mention it’s just plain beautiful to look at? The screen is glorious. The icons are bright and crisp. Video looks fantastic.

What Gives Me Cause For Pause

I have a pretty long password for my wireless access point and not having the ability to see what I typed in was a little tricky. You do get feedback from the virtual keypad as you hit a particular letter, but it’s not as handy as viewing the field.

The synchronization via iTunes is a little goofy as you can only do it through playlists. Of course the solution is to simply create an iPhone-specific playlist and synchronize things that way. Not a big deal, but it seems a little crufty to me.

Overall

Maybe I’m just in the honeymoon phase and that two-year contract will feel like a ball and chain. But right now I’m very excited to be the proud owner of a new iPhone.

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.