Yes, I know all about jailbreaking the iPhone. I’ve done it a couple of times already on my own device and agree that it’s very cool. But, the ability to install 3rd party applications (not webapps) is still lacking on the iPhone. But, this will all change after next month when the SDK is supposed to become available. I can’t wait!

Julie;20142 wrote:

lazyb:

Emailing notes / todos is a nice work around. But, I really need to be able to search for specific details and cut and paste info to edit the notes.

One thing about the iPhone keyboard that I realized today… It’s hard to use it when you’re a in a car on a bumpy road. I was trying to text message someone today and had a heck of a time (yes, I was a passenger). I think physical keys work much better.

Hi Julie,

I agree with you about the lack of a search function and cut and paste. I’m hoping that these will be added via a software update. However, I can live without them if I have to because the iPhone as a whole is such a pleasure to use.

I haven’t tried typing on a bumpy road so I can’t comment on that. All I can say is that I find entering text on the iPhone less taxing than on any other device I’ve ever used. Speed and accuracy, for me at any rate, far exceed what I was able to achieve on my Treo.

Using email as my central depository for notes and to dos is working really well for me. Did you know that you can also email web pages to yourself from Safari on the iPhone?

To me, the iPhone seems to be the first handheld device that was designed around the idea of being connected to the internet 24/7. I’m really looking forward to some of the web applications that are going to spring up over the coming months.

Anyway, just my two cents.

Trevor

Emailing notes / todos is a nice work around. But, I really need to be able to search for specific details and cut and paste info to edit the notes.

One thing about the iPhone keyboard that I realized today… It’s hard to use it when you’re a in a car on a bumpy road. I was trying to text message someone today and had a heck of a time (yes, I was a passenger). I think physical keys work much better.

radleyp;19869 wrote:

The typing video is pr, and tells me nothing. Clicks are not tactile feedback and, what’s more, I always turn them off.

Julie, have you used Deepfish? It renders webpages fast, but I think scrolling around a page most of whose content is blurred is, at best, a compromise.

I asked about the one-handed use because on another site I read comments about how the lack of a feedback keyboard made one-handed dialing difficult and, in any case, requires you to look at the keys. I certainly don’t understand why the iPhone does not have voice dialing.

I’ll get around to playing with it, when I have the time. Since my contract with Verizon isn’t up for a few months, it’s not urgent and, in any case, I am not going back to AT&T which gave me poorer reception. Contrary to the AT&T ads of recent vintage, I experienced a good many dropped calls, and for me this device must first and foremost be a good phone.

radleyp:

I’ve used both a Treo 650 and a Blackberry 7100t. The keyboard on the iPhone blows both of those away. I have big fingers and I always found typing on the Treo difficult; the Blackberry was better because of more intelligent word prediction. But using the iPhone keyboard is much less of a strain; I use the one finger hunt and peck method and trust the software to correct my errors, which it does almost perfectly. Believe me: having used the iPhone extensively for three weeks, I’m achieving a speed and accuracy which I could only dream about on those other devices. The “tactile feedback” provided by the Treo and Blackberry put a strain on my finger muscles and was less accurate to boot.

The web browser on the iPhone is fantastic; it’s the closest anyone has come to the full internet in your pocket. Over wifi, pages load very fast; it’s much slower over EDGE, but useable. Double tap on any element on a page – text, pictures etc. – and that part of the page zooms in to fill the screen. Double tap again and the page zooms out again. You do not have to keep scrolling. Using the browser is a pleasure.

One-handed use is simple, particularly if you a dialling from your favorites or recent calls list. The dialpad itself has very large keys and is also well suited to one-handed use.

People’s experience with different wireless carriers is always going to vary. I was on t-mobile before and call quality was almost always terrible; since switching to AT&T I’ve had much better reception. It’s more a function of where you live and work, rather than any one wireless carrier being any better than any other.

Trevor

A great review, as always. I don’t want to quibble about whether the iPhone is a smartphone or not; all I can say is that it’s smart enough for me!

I’ve owned plenty of Palms, Windows Mobile devices, and smartphones in the past (including a Palm Treo 650 and a Blackberry 7100t). For me, the sheer joy of using the iPhone on a daily basis means I could never go back to any one of those devices.

The great thing about the iPhone is that it’s connected all the time. Not being able to synch notes with the desktop is a non-issue when you can easily email notes to yourself and have them available as stored emails. I have created a “notes” folder on the desktop, and this appears on the iPhone too. Problem solved. If you want to get fancy, you can set up email “rules” to have notes filed in particular folders.

I use the same approach for to dos. Basically, the notes application on the iPhone is my day to day scratchpad for new ideas, tasks, and miscellaneous bits of info. I then email them to myself and file them in the appropriate email folders. (NB. You can create email rules to do this automatically.)

For GTDers, you could set up folders for all your GTD contexts, for example. I’m not that obsessive. I simply have one folder for actions I have to do today, and another for everything else. This works fine for me.

Anyway, I hope this showed how the iPhone can work pretty effectively as a PDA without having a dedicated to do list or synchable notes.

There’s just so much to love about the iPhone: I’ve been using it extensively for the past few weeks and it hasn’t let me down yet. Great phone, great iPod, great PDA, great web browser and a whole lot more besides.

Trevor.

That software was released after I posted the review. It’s great that someone came up with a solution for that problem, but I feel like it should be a default feature that an iPhone owner should not have to pay extra for.

Are you going to get an iPhone when it becomes available in the UK?

Great review again, only problem is that us Brits have to wait even longer to get one.

One of the negatives you mentioned is that the iPhone can’t be use as an external drive like the iPods can. Well with this software it can.

http://www.ecamm.com/mac/iphonedrive/

Cheers

Tim

The only time I use it with one hand is when I’m in the car and the phone rings. Otherwise I use it with both hands. Hold it in one, fiddle with the screen using the other.

motobrief;19881 wrote:

One thing that I didn’t lose a ton of sleep over was this whole “3rd party app” tempest in a teapot. …snippage… I had an expense app that I used, but the sync was terrible and the desktop app that I pulled data from was horrid.

So what are some of these “can’t live without” 3rd party programs? What kind of stuff do you need on the iPhone? I see the complaint about text files — I wish there was something done with iPhone Notes.

I’m sure we’ll see 3rd party apps eventually and have no doubt that people could do some awesome stuff with it. I suspect the current limitations have more to do with wanting to get off on the right foot with base features (poorly written apps pinging the network all the time would make the iPhone’s battery life look terrible) and with restrictions demanded by AT&T (we don’t want no stinkin’ Skype on our network!). An SDK will show up eventually, just wait and see.

The two largest apps I want are a text/notes manager that syncs back to my desktop and an on-device list manager, a la SplashShopper. http://www.splashdata.com

I grab notes constantly from web sites, white papers and online ‘zine articles that I copy to Mark/Space notes, sync to my Palm, and read later on: waiting for a concert or movie to start, waiting for a plane, at lunch, etc. I don’t want to have to hit a web page (which I can’t in a plane) to get those notes – I want them on the device once I sync them.

A list manager (especially if it also syncs!) is something that goes way beyond a grocery list. It can become a To Do manager, an outliner, and a mini-database manager. I have lists of everything from MAC addresses of devices, port number functions on certain web services, log in codes, credit card numbers, and a bunch of other things. Every handheld I’ve had came with one, from the Newton to my Palm, and they are all missed.

I’m sure the Notes thing will be repaired once Leopard ships (not sure what will happen on the Windoze side at that point), but the list manager is an app I’ve never seen Apple come close to. Perhaps Leopard will also come with the SDK. That would be a fun treat! When it comes, though, it’s good that there is already a huge understanding of how an iPhone app “should” work, and the expected interface, rather than releasing it early and having the development community (and by that, I mean the big corps like Microsoft who would flood the market with web-heavy apps trying to up their income with web-hits) try to define it. Like the early years of Macintosh programming where there was no way to get a non-Macintosh interface sold (anyone remember AutoDesk 1 for Macintosh, which basically duplicated the DOS PC version?), we’re in the formative years of iPhone public understanding. Apple, as our benevolent dictator, wants to show us the true path. Then they will allow us to walk it ourselves.

Smitty

icruise;19867 wrote:

It’s pretty obvious that you haven’t used an iPhone. One handed use is perfectly possible (for both dialing and typing, although dialing is the easier of the two) and Safari really does make viewing full-sized web pages feasible. The difference is in how quickly and intelligently it zooms to display the portion of the page you want to see. The keyboard is just OK, not much better or worse than the tiny mobile keyboards I’ve used (the intelligent error correction mostly makes up for the lack of tactile feedback).

Agreed that the one-handed use is not that bad, but the tactile feedback of my Palm Tungsten|C is far and away better than the iPhone. The WiFi and fast processing of that puppy is why I’ve not moved to a converged phone/handheld in all these years: when I can talk on my phone and take notes by thumb-typing almost as fast as I can type on a regular keyboard, why would I want to sacrifice and get a smaller keyboard, like the Treo?

My biggest complaint about the iPhone screen keyboard is that it doesn’t rotate in every application. It’s a good (as in OK, doesn’t actively stink, but not great) layout, works well, the correction is great (even learned some of my wacky login names), but it would be nice to have tactile feedback. I just don’t want to sacrifice dedicated space on the unit for the keyboard, so it’s not a deal breaker for me. For some it may be. But there’s no way to add it on without changing the design of the whole unit, so whining about it won’t change it. Go build a Bluetooth mini keyboard that has an iPhone holder and market it. You’ll then see exactly how many people really want tactile feedback on their iPhone.

Smitty