Having played with the iPhone for a day now, I can offer some insight:
- Phone interface done very well. Notice, not "right", as its missing a few things (no copy/cut & paste). There are places where it is slightly counter-intuitive to operate controls, but once you pick up on the tricks, its smooth.
- Scrolling done RIGHT. Its unbelievably smooth, and really responds quickly to finger strokes.
- Browser is better than I expected. I've browsed the majority of the sites I visit often, and I fully expected that I would need to find alternative interfaces. Not even remotely. CNN, Devnet, Digg, Slashdot, most major sites are really rendered very well.
- Zoom is just frickin cool! You put two fingers on the screen, and pull them apart from each other, and the section of the screen zooms in. Honestly wish my browser (on my desktop) did it. So wonderfully helpful for poor eyesight.
- Brightness beyond imagination. You can make this sucker bright enough to light a room.
- iPhone cannot receive or send MMS directly. There are sneaky ways around it (email, etc), but I have to think this is one they'll fix in an update before long.
- Mail works great. Fast, smooth, very easy to use. It also sync'd perfectly from my Macbook with no configuration required.
- Wireless is smoking fast. It auto-detects networks you prefer ("Friendly"), and the network speed is way more than needed.
- Very fast browsing on a very slow network. EDGE is rightly trashed, but in the drive through at McDonalds, I had time to load dev net, read two posts, load another forum, read a post there, and shut it off. There wasn't a long line either. No other phone I've had could have pulled that off.
- The keyboard takes some adjusting to. Some words it seems psychic about, and really makes it easy to type. Others? Not so much. But its fast enough to be comfortable and useful.
- Every app seems to have a guessing function for things like urls, words, and so on, and its pretty smart. That helps speed things up for you.
Overall, its a fantastic phone, a pretty solid PDA, and an *amazing* iPod.
Great stuff, truly. Now to dig in to learn more of the finger gestures, and look into special 'apps' for it.
