Assorted Afflatuses

After months of complaining, whining and indecision, I paid a visit to my local Apple store to acquire an Apple iPhone. And, on the whole, I absolutely love it. Granted, I still cannot understand why people bothered to queue outside stores for hours on end. It's a great phone, to be sure, but it certainly does not merit a camp-out.

As many reviews have noted, the EDGE data moves data extremely slow. (For the technically inclined, the one test I ran with CNET's broadband speed test put my EDGE data speed at about 42.3 Kbps). But I have found, in my very limited usage of the EDGE network, that the speed suffices for viewing most non-graphics intensive web sites and retrieving email. My wireless network, connected to a modern high-speed Internet connection, sped the load times considerably.

Everything works as Apple advertised on television and online: applications load extremely quickly and I have only experienced one very non-eventful crash.

But beyond the fun and fancy features that everyone knows about, like the touch screen interface and the colorful animations, the most impressive feature of the iPhone is its sheer simplicity. Take voicemail as an example. On my old mobile, just configuring voice mail was a painful and befuddling experience. On the iPhone, I ran through a few simple screens that made the process effortless. I have not had a chance to try the visual voicemail system, however, if it functions as simply as the initial setup, I will doubtlessly find myself quite impressed.

In fact, I can only think of three features Apple should add: text selection, a system-wide landscape keyboard and a jog wheel.

The iPhone, to the best of my knowledge, does not permit the selection of a block or line of text. In an email, say, I cannot run my finger over a sentence and highlight it, as I might do with my mouse in a word processor. Instead, the iPhone forces the user to move to the end of the line and tap the backspace key until the text has all been deleted.

Apple also missed the boat with its landscape-oriented keyboard. In Safari, the iPhone permits text entry with a landscape keyboard, which is infinitely easier to use than the extremely skinny vertical keyboard present in the other applications. The landscape keyboard should be accessible in every application, not just Safari.

And, finally, Apple needs to add a jog wheel. Yes, the finger-flick scrolling looks cool and, in certain applications, comes in handy. But when I read my email, it would make one-handed operation much less of a hassle to have a wheel on the side of the device, like the old BlackBerry handhelds or Sony's long-dead Clié line of PDAs.

Nonetheless, save a scenario in which the other cell phone manufactures have some secret device stashed away in their R&D labs that the public has yet to see, I doubt anyone will overtake the iPhone so far as the software is concerned. Obviously, the people who feel compelled to have a seven-megapixel camera embedded in their phone should probably look elsewhere. For someone who wants an elegant and dead-simple smartphone, however, the iPhone fits the bill.