Close encounter with the iPhone

Residing in the San Francisco Bay Area, home of Apple Inc.'s headquarters, it's kind of lame for me to not have played with the iPhone until today; especially when I've been bashing it, so I owe it to myself to blog my first physical encounter.

The overall experience is quite positive. Just as everybody else has stated, the device is well built with good workmanship, slim and sophisticated, exactly the size and weight you'd expect. Brightness of the screen was just right (I was indoor) and the touch screen (that uses the more advanced Projected Capacitive technology which eliminates the need of a thin film above the glass surface) is responsive. The pinhole camera takes surprisingly bright and sharp pictures.

I am most impressed with ironically, the Notes application. It has a yellow legal pad background and employs cute little fonts, compared to the boring undecorated plain white background and the uninspiring Tahoma font on the Windows Mobile devices... well, there is no comparison. (If only I'd figured out how to focus my camera...).

That is not to say I am a convert. There were some unexpected results. Namely, the rotation feature worked but was terribly sluggish (took a second or two). And even though I had wireless connection (was able to view company web pages), Maps and YouTube didn't show before my patience ran out. The biggest disappointment of all was the browser itself. The commercials suggested a light tab on the screen will auto zoom auto crop to a particular section of a web page; that didn't happen. Instead I needed to use two fingers to carefully zoom out the page according to screen width, which coincidentally made the fonts too small to read, which meant I ended up having to scroll left and right. If this is the iPhone version of the internet, I prefer the watered down mobile one, at least my Windows Mobile wraps line for me so that I can avoid finger aerobics.

I had three characters wrong out of fifteen using the large on screen keyboard (my Pocket PC phone achieved 100% hand writing recognition of the same words). I've read that the experience gets much better over time and I have no reason to doubt that. But I was puzzled as to how was I supposed to input characters outside the 26 alphabets (such as Chinese). OS X as far as I know has hand writing recognition, but that's seemingly and inexplicably missing here on the phone. I feel so left out.