Some Early Observations About The iPhone, Part 2

As I pointed out yesterday, this is not a full-fledged scientific breakdown of the iPhone. It’s just some stuff I’ve noticed while using it in my everyday life. Yesterday, I took a look at some larger things about Apple’s iPhone — availability, ease of set-up, and AT&T’s EDGE network.

Today, I’m going to look at some of the other things that I’ve noticed about the iPhone while I’ve been using it for the last week or so.

• It doesn’t import Firefox bookmarks. You can import IE, and (I assume) Safari bookmarks, but not Firefox. Drag. And it meant that I had to import my Firefox bookmarks into my IE Favorites prior to getting them onto the iPhone.
• The virtual keyboard: not that awful. Ah yes, the infamous virtual keyboard. I’m a hunter-and-pecker (though a lot of people would just assert that I was the latter) and so it’s not as much of a problem for me than those who can type a zillion words per second all by feel. What I did have a problem with was the word suggestions: it took me some time to understand that when you tapped the suggested word, you were rejecting it, and not accepting it. For me, at least, it wasn’t very intuitive.

  The bigger issue with the virtual keyboard is that it is inconsistent across various applications: for example, there is a very helpful “.com” key for the web browser, but that same key doesn’t show up when you are sending an email. Why not? I can think of a lot of different ways that key would be useful in the email application — the most obvious one being when you are sending an email to someone who is too new to already be in your contacts.

• Cut, Copy and Paste? Nope. Once again, a simple basic tool for anybody writing and sending email or making notes to themselves. Or even wanting to open the same web page in two separate browser windows — something that I do a lot.
• Handling Email Attachments. While it handled attachments from Excel, Word & Acrobat just fine — allowing me to read them with ease — when forwarding these attachments, I ran into a problem: it was all or nothing. I couldn’t select or deselect individual attachments prior to forwarding them to someone else.
• My phone number is at the top of my contacts list. Such a simple thing. And so awesome.
• What happens when my battery runs out? This worries me. It’s one thing to be without an iPod for a few days — I’ve got a half-dozen music players, but not so much my communication device.

All in all, I really like my iPhone. (See what I mean about unscientific?) Was it worth the investment? Probably not: a smarter person (like, say, Kirk) would probably wait for a version that addressed some of these issues, and/or at least worked with a 3G network.