There have been a number of websites that have published reviews of the iPhone, and they all seem to be the same: praise for the features that it does have, noting a few features that it doesn’t have (but then offering possible reasons), and then saying how it wowed them. Well, this isn’t going to be one of those reviews.

I had an opportunity today to play with an iPhone at my local Apple Store, and my rules were that if I was going to sing the praises of this thing, it would have to “wow” me. It didn’t “wow” me, and a few of the features left a bad impression, such that I’m even less enthusiastic about the product than I was before.

It’s common knowledge that I don’t have an iPod. It’s not that I don’t like them, they’re good products, but at their price, I can’t be convinced to go and get one–if I really want to listen to music, I can listen on my MacBook, or I can hum it in my head. I tried out the iPod features on the iPhone, and most of the new features there were primarily pretty features. Flicking through music was actually fairly simple, and I was impressed with the iPhone’s ability to determine when I was moving through a list and when I was actually intending to choose a song. Album artwork on the screen was really crisp; I tried to squint to see the separate pixels and for the first time on a screen, I couldn’t. Cover flow was interesting, however it required more flicks because the album art didn’t move through as quickly as the list. Although I like Cover Flow on iTunes, the interface on the iPhone seemed more limited than the list view, and I personally began to prefer the list view. However, I really didn’t see much to this part of an iPhone that was much better than an iPod. True, the flicking is a bit more efficient than having to move your thumb around a click wheel, but I wouldn’t necessarily give up an iPod to go for this just for the touchscreen. Apple would probably be smart to integrate multi-touch into a sixth-generation iPod, but even then, I don’t know that it would attract me away from iTunes on my MacBook unless the iPod’s price point was lower.

YouTube was actually an impressive feature. Video and audio quality was much better on the phone than it is on the actual YouTube, plus the illusion that it’s in full screen attracts you into the video more. I watched two videos on YouTube: Ok Go’s Here it Goes Again (on treadmills), and Jon Stewart vs. Gary England. However, I was fairly disappointed with the poor selection. Some videos that I know were on YouTube didn’t show up when searching; other videos did show up but when I tried to launch them, I’d get a “Error loading video” error. Hopefully these will be cleared up by the end of the year, but it was disappointing to start to be really into YouTube, and then blocked from some of the additional videos.

The calculator is nice, but it’s definitely not something that would have convinced me to shell out money for an iPhone. The Clock application actually seemed a little limited compared to the watch that I always wear on my wrist, which already does the same things. I couldn’t care more about Stocks, but since those are delayed up to 20 minutes, I wouldn’t even think that they’d be useful to true businessmen. By the way, why is it that Stocks gets permanent presence on the home screen, but developers have to have their apps run in Safari? L-A-M-E.

The phone was okay. Certainly it’s the best interface on a cell phone for viewing contacts, but I really thought that the interface was kind of clumsy for adding contacts. I’d think that Apple would let you be able to enter things in-line on the Add page, but instead you have to go to a new pane to type in each section. I would actually find it easier to add contacts in OS X Address Book and then sync. Even then, I find it really strange the way Apple thinks that all calls should be done through the address book, and how they keep putting down the keypad as “old-fashioned” or “20th century”. Now, if I didn’t know someone’s phone number, the iPhone certainly makes it easier to look them up in the Contacts list and then call. But if I know someone’s phone number by heart, I’m not going to navigate to the contacts, flick and flick until I find the name, scroll the name back into view, press the name, and press their number. To me, that seems like too much hassle compared to going right to the keypad and dialing the seven digit number. I’m still a big believer in the keypad. The only real thing that I find useful with Apple’s Contacts browser is that it syncs correctly with my computer address book so that I don’t have to figure out how to re-input data on the phone.
For Visual Voicemail, I never actually got a real opportunity to demo it. I pressed the Voicemail button, and instead of showing me the Voicemail listing, it actually called the number for Voicemail, which prompted me for a passcode. (Not knowing the code, I hung up.) Maybe someone can clear me up on this, but my impression was that Visual Voicemail was like an e-mail inbox for voice messages, with the bonus that I wouldn’t have to use up minutes by calling a voicemail service. But if iPhone still requires you to call the voicemail number to download these visual voicemails, then for me, that totally defeats the purpose.

The Photos app was okay, but again, not something that really wowed me. I mean, I already have a number of ways to look at photos. I tried out doing the pinch, and surprising, I didn’t do very well. It was kind of difficult to pinch open and shut the photos. It doesn’t help that I have big fingers, and there’s not a lot of space to do the pinch on, but whenever I did pinch, it didn’t do a lot of zooming in and out. I would have expected the pinch to zoom in/out a little bit faster than it did. The camera was okay, and the huge screen was certainly impressive, but this is definitely not a professional digital camera; it’s more of an iSight for the phone. But that does bring up an idea, what if Apple added Photo Booth effects…

Mail looked okay to me. I didn’t play with it too much, beyond reading the demo e-mails. Having photos show up in-line is certainly impressive, but I really can’t connect with that because people don’t e-mail me photos that often. (And no, I don’t want anybody to start! Just put them on Flickr.) I do understand that iPhone can also read PDF, Word, and Excel documents, but I have a few complaints about that. First of all, I really think that the screen on iPhone is too small to be able to just read those kind of documents, pinch or no pinch. Second of all, most people that send me Word or Excel documents send them to me as things for me to edit–being able to read-only is not that useful to me.
Finally, pursuant to my recent post about Yahoo! having “push” IMAP e-mail, it’s apparent that this “push” IMAP access is only available to the iPhone. I use Gmail, which only has POP access available on iPhone. The natural issue with this is that when Mail comes in, it will either show up on iPhone OR on my MacBook, depending on which device checks in with Gmail first. If Gmail had “push” IMAP, then I would be able to download, read, and edit my e-mail on Mail.app, Gmail’s webmail interface, or iPhone, and the others would all update themselves. Therefore, why can’t Gmail do the same thing that Yahoo! is doing? I’m sorry, but unless I want my e-mail to be tied to iPhone, POP access for Gmail is no good.

When I interviewed people on PreviewCast #037 last Friday and asked them what the one feature they were looking forward to on the iPhone, the #1 response was internet browsing/Safari. Therefore, in hindsight, it was kind of ironic that the one feature of the iPhone that not only didn’t impress me, but actually had a hard time working correctly, was Safari. I was using the iPhone at the Apple Store, and the wifi network was strong, and I even tried all of these websites on my MacBook on the store after I tried them on the iPhone, so I know that it wasn’t the network’s fault. I first tried loading various pages on Apple.com–the pages would load, but none of the images would load. I got a whole bunch of Safari’s classic question mark images–not for Flash–but for regular images on Apple’s website. The iPhone also loaded a completely CSS-free version of my website initially–only after reloading once or twice did the iPhone finally get its act together and show me my fully themed website (with the exception of my sidebar widgets w/ Flash in them). Other websites didn’t fare as well. I ended up reloading Larry’s amacgenius.com six times before the phone even admitted that the server existed. phpBB.com and PreviewCast never even partially loaded; Safari continued to say “Server not found.” But as soon as I was done on the iPhone, I’d open up my MacBook, and load up those pages right away. By the way, even over Wifi, iPhone’s Safari is much slower than Camino on my MacBook. As for resizing the web page, it works, and the resized page appears very crisp. The iPhone may have the “real” internet, but it’s no replacement for the “full-size” internet. When I got back on my MacBook, I literally had a feeling of relief (which had nothing to do with my underpants) being able to use Camino in full-screen.

I tried out the keyboard in two places: the Notes app, and writing my blog post from an iPhone. After reading remarks from reviewers and watching the iPhone keyboard video, I dove right in with two thumbs typing away. Like they said, I typed completely on trust–if I made mistakes, i just kept going. In the Notes app and in the beginning of my blog post, I was actually impressed with how the iPhone did tend to suggest the right mistakes. However, after progressing, the iPhone stopped suggesting mistakes, often letting very misspelled words pass through as words without even trying to suggest alternatives. Let’s just say that when I did my blog post on the iPhone, I trusted the keyboard more at the beginning than I did at the end. Either I need smaller thumbs, or the keyboard isn’t as smart as advertised.

In conclusion, if you put every other factor aside, the iPhone is definitely the best cell phone you can find today, leaps ahead of the next competitor. Most of the people who are giving praise to it are giving praise to it because it makes their iPod/cell phone/mobile internet experience that much better. But looking at the iPhone from my perspective, which is that I have never had an iPod, and while I have had one or two cell phones, I have never liked them and I currently don’t have a cell phone, I was not impressed enough by the iPhone to really have any kind of desire for one. Further hindering the attractiveness of this product is the fact that it starts at a really high price–$500. I don’t care how many iPhones sold this past weekend, I’m still with Steve Ballmer on this one: The iPhone is the most expensive phone on the market and a lot of people are not going to get one because it is way too costly. Even further hindering the attractiveness of the iPhone is the fact that the phone is completely locked to AT&T–there’s not even an option to unlock it. Personally, there’s a lot of reasons why I don’t like AT&T — we switched to Earthlink DSL just for some of those reasons. I really don’t want to sign my life away to AT&T for 2 years at the sky-high introductory rate of $60/month (that’s a guaranteed $1440 right there!), nor are my parents so willing. I know that there’s a way you can get it to work with GoPhone, but did you know that GoPhone charges $0.01 per KB for internet access? That can add up to quite a bit when you’re surfing the “real internet” (or in my case, trying to surf).

Now, this does not mean that the iPhone is a bad product–it is an excellent product. Just like how the iPod is an excellent product. I don’t have an iPod, but if someone gave me one for free, I would use it. Similarly, I don’t have plans to get an iPhone, but if someone gave me one for free (and I didn’t have to worry about rate plans and contracts and stuff), I would use it. But at their current price points, I really do not see anything that would attract me away from iTunes and the internet on my MacBook, and (maybe) a basic pay-as-you-go cell phone that makes calls and (maybe) does SMS texts. Actually, I am _considering_ getting a really basic cell phone that does this. But as for the iPhone, I really don’t expect to be getting one for another few years at the least.