Decius wrote:

I can tell you that in the first hour it works a little better than I thought, but I’m still not sure it works as well as a regular keyboard.

The iphone looks really slick, but every time one of my friends says "you know, I think I'm going to get one" I caution them about the keyboard. I have a Sidekick. I do a LOT of chatting and texting on it. The reason is that the keyboard is big. Big enough to efficiently type with two fingers. Often I talk to people who say "Oh, I don't care, I don't do a lot of texting." Then I look at their phone. They have a 9 digit keypad. Of course they don't do a lot of texting. Texting on a 9 digit keypad is extremely tedious. If they had an efficient interface, they'd do more of it. Once you have an effective way to use it, it becomes a very valuable tool and you don't want to give it up. It is often very helpful to be able to send short, asynchronous messages to someone instead of bothering them with a call.

Now, sure Apple's phone might not be marketed at me. They might be going after the users who never have never had a real keyboard on their phone and don't know what they are missing. But Apple is a computer company, and their whole story is that their phone works great with the Internet. The Internet is about transmitting and not just receiving, and nothing "works great" with it if it doesn't have an efficient transmitter.

Add to this the prospect of downgrading your ipod hard drive or having your ipod hard drive size directly connected with phone upgrades, and I'm just not sure I see anything here that I really want. Sure, it looks slick, but it will make it harder to do what I need to do with my phone and my ipod.

I'm not saying it won't be successful. LOTS of people will be willing to sacrifice substance for form. I'm just saying those are not the kind of people that talk to me about purchasing an iphone.

Here is a telling quote:

The new phone may resonate with a new kind of mobile user, said Donald Norman, a product designer who is co-director of the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

"Apple says, 'We're not selling to the person who lives on his Blackberry, we're selling to the person who listens to music and surfs the Web,'" he said.

Apple, you don't understand the Internet.

Isn't voice recognition up to snuff to eliminate the need for typing for IMs?

Jello wrote:

Isn't voice recognition up to snuff to eliminate the need for typing for IMs?

Wow, we've just gotten to the point of discussing a phone converting voice into text and sending the message as text. There's something very bizarre about that.

For me, at least, texting is typically for when i can't or don't want to actually talk, so I think i'd only use it about 10% of the time, and in truth, i don't think voice recognition is good enough to rely on, especially not in a low-power device.

Decius wrote:

I can tell you that in the first hour it works a little better than I thought, but I’m still not sure it works as well as a regular keyboard.

The iphone looks really slick, but ...

You know, the sidekick's keyboard isn't really a keyboard either. Given that neither of us has handled an iPhone, I think it's enough to leave it at "Some people will be pissed, others will find it ok." and i don't necessarily think that's going to be along the lines of who's more technically minded.

I send a shitload of text messages, on my keypad. Yeah, predictive text pisses me off sometimes (thanks, patents!), but more because of dictionary implementation than anything else (hint:learning is more fucking important than a large initial dictionary!).]

The Internet is about transmitting and not just receiving, and nothing "works great" with it if it doesn't have an efficient transmitter.

As long as safari is good at keeping URL history (and has bookmarks), everything will be mostly fine. A large percentage of my browsing on my main computer is to a handful of common resources. On a phone device, that's far even more the case.

I'm cautiously optimistic, at least.

Add to this the prospect of downgrading your ipod hard drive or having your ipod hard drive size directly connected with phone upgrades

Yeah, this is my biggest problem... I don't want a fucking iPod nano, especially not now that i have a big, beautiful screen... this is a battery consideration as much as a space consideration. All it does is make me even more interested in a device that looks exactly like the iPhone, but is only an iPod. With a big disk. Alas, it won't happen anytime soon, that's pretty much sure.

"Apple says, 'We're not selling to the person who lives on his Blackberry, we're selling to the person who listens to music and surfs the Web,'" he said.

Apple, you don't understand the Internet.

We'll see. Apple isn't perfect, but usually when i hear people saying "WHAT? APPLE'S CRAZY!" it turns out Apple was just ahead of them.

see, for example : "NO FLOPPY!? THEY MUST BE RETARDED!"

and : "iPOD!? WHO'S GONNA BUY THAT OVERPRICED WALKMAN!"