stripethree

So I finally got a chance to fiddle around with an iPhone and by most points, I was impressed. In about 20 minutes of trying everything I could think of, multitouch worked wonderfully. The screen is impressive especially when viewing the web and using Google maps. I do have one very, very big complaint. The keyboard. I found it painful to use. One handed, two handed, either way it just didn’t work for me. I can type faster on my W810i, which does not have a full keyboard, and with less mistakes. To their credit, the feature that guesses what word you are trying to type when you make a mistake is pretty damn accurate. Now, granted, I’ve heard over and over again that you have to get used to the keyboard and blah blah it’ll adapt, and I hope this is true. I’m not spending $500 to find out though. I found it easy to get over the lack of tactile feedback for knowing when I’d hit a key, I apparently just didn’t have the knack to hit the right key. The idea of the virtual keyboard though is brilliant, and it really shines when it isn’t there. Wait, that makes no sense. Of course it does, because that real estate is taken up instead by a large Google Map, a longer list of contacts, etc., etc. The keyboard in landscape mode, for me, was damn near unusable. Maybe my typing is just that bad (talked to me on AIM lately?) or maybe it’s because at this point I think I can code in Java or PHP faster than I can type plain old English. The transition from portrait to landscape and back seemed painfully slow on this particular phone, but I can’t help but wonder if the sensor was thrown off by the rather hefty security lock that was attached to the back of the phone.

The device itself seemed solid. There’s no way to know what kind of abuse this in store model had seen, but it was in excellent shape. A few dings on the bottom, no doubt from being dropped on the counter, but the screen was flawless and the software never seemed to hesitate other than the aforementioned screen orientation issue. I wonder about the Edge speed though, I thought it was a bit sluggish and I tried a couple experiments. I loaded a handful of pages on the iPhone at the same time as I loaded them on my W810i using Opera Mini. Every time, my phone was faster (and yes, I’m a Cingular/AT&T customer). Granted, my phone doesn’t have a 3.5″ screen and the pages didn’t look as good once loaded, but I found this a bit odd from a performance aspect. I didn’t get a chance to listen to any audio on it, but video playback was smooth and crisp. I could already see myself having this thing propped on the stationary bike watching Entourage or Burn Notice while at the gym.

Overall, I was impressed, but not surprised that there were some shortcomings. Multitouch would be fantastic on an iPod, and I really think it’s just a matter of time before that happens. However, I also know that Apple never seems to rest, and Steve never seems to be satisfied, so I imagine version 2 will be even better. We’ll see; it could be great, but I still can’t see paying $500 for one.

I also downloaded the 30 day trial of iWork ’08 following the Apple event last week. With the enhancements to Pages and the addition of Numbers, my hopes were high that I could purge Microsoft Office from my non-work related machines (I don’t use Keynote much, but it’s a nice added bonus). So far, I’m again impressed. Pages is not a leaps and bounds improvement from the previous version, but it is more mature, more polished, and so much more straight forward to use than Word. It doesn’t try to be everything to everyone, and it is certainly targeted at ‘Joe user’, who just wants to get stuff done quickly and easily, but still wants that ability to make something look like it took hours and hour to create. I’ve liked Pages since the first version came out, and now, it’s just that much better.

Numbers blows my mind. I’m by no means an Excel expert, but I have to deal with it at work sometimes, and I have monthly budget and car maintenance/parts spreadsheets that I use frequently at home. The spreadsheets I see at work make my head hurt and I have no idea how someone keeps their sanity while updating and maintaining these spreadsheets. I am thankful it is not my job, and that at home, I have the choice to use something else. Excel will no longer be handling the stuff I do at home. What I found the be impressive: even though Numbers breaks from what users are used to with Excel and other programs, I found that it was almost too easy to learn. Faced with something I’d done ten thousand times in Excel but never in Numbers, I kept thinking, now, what’s the logical way that this should be done? More often than not, it was exactly how I thought it would be instead of wading through menus, submenus, and dialog boxes just to get something simple.

Hopefully it’s not just the ‘newness’ of the software that has me singing it’s praises, and I will definitely find out. I plan to use every ounce of that free 30 day trial before I make the decision to buy the new iWork. At $79, it’s going to be hard to not buy it. I can see my cursor dragging Office to the trash bin already…

Lastly, there’s iLife ’08, which I have not yet tried, but at which I am a little bittersweet over. Upon watching the keynote that introduced the new iLife suite, I was excited at the overhaul to iMovie. I watched that portion of the keynote multiple times and was ready to drop $79 on the new version. Then I saw it.

iMovie requires a Mac with an Intel processor, a Power Mac G5 (dual 2.0GHz or faster), or an iMac G5 (1.9GHz or faster).

Damn. Thwarted. I was thinking about this, and originally thought, well, it’s got to be a processor speed thing. At least, I hope so. The awful thought that this was the beginning of the end of support for the G4 processor dawned on me and I hoped that it isn’t the case. I don’t remember what the speed ratings of the last G4s were, but they can’t be that far off. Then again, the G5 was a whole other beast and benchmarks have shown that the new Intel processors out run those, so… I don’t know. I’ve got no reason, yet, to ditch my G4 Powerbook, and iMovie alone isn’t going to sway me. Barring something unforeseen (yeah, now I’m jinxing myself), it’ll be a while before I buy another computer, so I guess I’ll have to make do with iMovie 6. The chances I will get the new iLife remain slim; any iTunes updates are free, the iPhoto updates are cool, but not ‘must haves’ to me, there were only a few changes to iDVD, and I don’t use Garageband or iWeb. So basically, $79 for ‘events’ and other stuff in iPhoto, and I don’t have or want a .Mac account so I won’t be taking advantage of the new .Mac web gallery, as tempting as it is. If I could have the new iMovie and be publishing photos and movies to a .Mac account, that’d be ~$200 Apple would be kindly and happily taking from me. Alas, it’s not to be for now and I’ll be sticking to my home grown PHP gallery software and figuring something out for video.