Me and the iPhone (in the UK) at BarCamp Brighton 07, originally uploaded by lilserenity.
Bonjourno and all that,
Yesterday at BarCamp Brighton ‘07 (awesome) I was able to have about twenty to thirt minutes playing with Apple’s iPhone. Bear in mind this device hasn’t been launched in the UK yet, but it was usable with its wifi support. So I couldn’t try out the phone functionality.
That said it was interesting as I had read some of the press coverage and I have always been a bit of a Mac fan, even so much as only owning a Mac for a few years up until May this year (I’m pretty easy going with all platforms) so I’m Apple friendly material, I think their computers are great (but expensive), their OS is fab (but I like Ubuntu/Linux better) and the iPod is superb. (But my Sony Ericsson w810i is more practical).
So the iPhone, the wonder smartphone to end them all was in my hot sweaty palms. What did I think? Not much.
It’s alright but it’s not for me. Some people must love it and perhaps I haven’t used it enough, but to me yes the Multitouch user interface is nice but it took me a long time to do what takes me a few seconds on the w810i. Experience would help. I also found the built in Safari a bit of a pain to use actually, and being Safari some websites just would not play ball, Wordpress for one was being a bit awkward. (Hence my attrociously short post yesterday from the iPhone)
What else? Well actually my w810i has a lot more features on it plus the ability to load Java applications on which the iPhone as standard doesn’t. Sure it doesn’t have the excellent iPod music interface the iPhone does but it does a good job.
Overall I couldn’t call it disappointing but I won’t be buying one. It made me realise just how good a phone the w810i is in my honest opinion. I just felt it was a bit lacking really, that once the initial wow factor was over with, that I was left with yet another phone that did everything my w810i did and I was still $399 better off for not having bought an iPhone.
An interesting device to watch though as it evolves I am sure.
