Earlier today I managed to go to the Apple store here in Austin, where I played with an iPhone (and where the iPhone sold out)… While I've decided to wait a bit longer to get one, I have to admit though that I'm very tempted to get one sooner rather than later! Expensive gadget the iPhone is, but the two year contract with AT&T is what I really rather not do.

Hats off to Apple for thinking outside the box, and be different when it comes to the mobile experience; congratulations to the iPhone design and development teams. The (mobile user experience) bar has been raised… and a new class of mobile handset (expectation) has been defined.

…and all I have to say right now is this: the iPhone is flawless.
What a great piece of design, and implementation the iPhone is.

Could the network be made faster? Sure, but at the cost of battery life and 3G coverage (U.S.); right now even with EDGE it is not that bad. Is the virtual keyboard hard to use? I had no problem at all – I was quite fast typing on it, probably because I am already used to the small keys on my Treo keyboard.

The iPhone approach to the user interface with animation and effects is just beautiful. The multi-touch is truly awesome. The Wi-Fi is great. The local applications and the browsing experience were both great, and the Safari browser rendered my JavaScript and CSS-heavy website perfectly.

I am still hoping that the iPhone provides access to native functionality somehow, via native or browser (JavaScript) libraries…

Nokia and SE, and others, who have had all-screen touch-screen prototypes must be kicking themselves, and they should — as I have written before “It is OK to break off the decades long premise of one-hand operation, and try something new (beyond concept phones).”

…it has been very clear to me that the future of handset design and differentiation is the software and the resulting user experience — and after playing with the iPhone, that believe is much stronger today than ever.

But more than anything else, as a mobile technologist myself, I'll say that the iPhone is a lesson for me… a lesson about (a reminder of) the importance of thinking “outside the box”; a lesson or reminder of all the artificial boundaries and barriers that we all create, or have created over time, but that we don't have to.

ceo