I am not the first, nor will I  be the last, to put my $0.02 in on the iPhone…

I spent a bunch of time playing with one at pool on Tuesday.  Our resident Mac zealot got one on opening day…

The numero uno thing that I was wary about was the keyboard. I am a Blackjack owner and love it long time. It is a familiar interface and I dig the “tactile nature” of devices like that with a hard keyboard (same thing with a Blackberry).

Let me just say… the iPhone keyboard is pretty kick ass. In the 30-45 minutes I played with it, I probably typed better slash more accurately on the iPhone than I do on my Blackjack.

I love the Safari interface. It is intuitive and I don’t have to look at “mobile versions” of websites.  If you were to go my website from most mobile clients I have it feeding a mobile version rather than the full monty.  (thank you, Alex King!) Although my site is not terribly graphics heavy, it is segmented and that can often cause clutter on small screens. What I liked about Safari on the iPhone was that it got the full monty and I could zoom in/out as necessary. Zooming in/out may sound like a “process”, but, again, it was very natural.

The SMS “grouping” is pretty cool to look at – as the messages are threaded in “balloons”. But… No MMS.

EDGE ain’t that bad – if you are in a big city. I would not want to give up my 3G Blackjack to go backwards, though. Connecting through WiFi is nice – especially with so many hotspots out there…

The phone is smaller than I expected – it is slimmer than my Blackjack… It is also WAY sturdier than I expected.

The landscape mode is kick ass. Just turning the phone puts it in that mode. However… It really only worked in Safari.

The voice quality was pretty good, but as I am a Bluetooth junkie, it was difficult for me to tell in “actual use” as I did not connect my headset to it.

Email was something I would have liked to have played with a bit more. (It is tough to “play” with email on someone else’s phone – I felt like I was prying….) There is an Exchange setup app – but it requires IMAP. The POP3 stuff I saw looked nifty.

And, yes, it also plays music. ;P

Which gets me to what is sure to be an annoyance for both Windows and Mac users alike…  EVERYTHING having to do with the iPhone when connected to a computer is done through iTunes.  Music, mail, contacts — EVERYTHING.  I am honestly not sure I am willing to have my life ruled by iTunes.  One of the benefits of the Blackjack is that plugging it into a computer gets me management of certain items through ActiveSync, but, more importantly, the whole phone shows up as a hard drive on my system.  Copy.  Paste.

The 3G thing is a killer for me. I’m with the Blackjack, at least, until they get that running.

Some of the stuff I was reading:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/03/iphone-review-part-1-hardware-interface-keyboard/

http://www.phonescoop.com/articles/review_iphone/

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9739169-1.html?tag=nl.e501