Thoughts on the iPhone



The iPhone looks good - how could it not? It looks drool-inducingly good. And as a widescreen iPod it probably sounds magnificent. But David Pogue's writeup on the thing only furthers the question that I have: how fast can you go on something that doesn't have a nice tactile keyboard response?
Typing is difficult. The letter keys are just pictures on the glass screen, so of course there’s no tactile feedback.

Software helps a lot. You can afford to make a lot of typos as you muddle through a word, because the software analyzes which keys you *might* have meant and figures out the word you wanted. Its best guess appears just under what you’ve typed; if it’s correct, you tap the Space bar to accept it and continue. I typed a couple of e-mail messages with lots of typos but eventually 100 percent accuracy, thanks to this auto-correct feature. (My testing didn’t involve proper names, however.)

Bottom line: Heavy BlackBerry addicts may not want to jump ship just yet.
At the moment, I'm guessing I'd be able to do predictive text faster than use a touchscreen to SMS, but I'm hoping to be proven wrong... Reading through Macworld's coverage of Jobs' speech, I was kind of surprised by this bit:

"We want to reinvent the phone," he reiterated. "What's the killer app? The killer app is making calls! It's amazing how hard it is to make calls on phones. We want you to use contacts like never before."

Is it really hard to make calls on phones? Even on my Sony Ericsson K750i, which annoyingly doesn't let you search through contacts beyond the first letter, I can't say making calls was hard. Now if they'd managed to integrate Skype and made international calls free - I mean, it's smart enough to switch from a cellphone data network to Wi-Fi, surely it could do VoIP?

The Internet browser looks amazing in that small space though. Everything will hinge on how good that Multitouch interface is...

Popagandhi has more love for the phone

Comments

Anonymous said…
I call you on the telephone
but you're never home ...

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