So how is it?

First Impressions

When it comes to mechanical engineering and attention to design, it’s easy to see why Apple garners so much hype. The curves of the iPhone fit well in your hand and the minimalist approach to the buttons works perfectly. There are only five buttons on the unit. A sleep/power button, a volume rocker, a switch to go into vibrate, and the home button. Some have complained about the recessed headphone socket (which makes it harder to use your own headphones but provides added protection to the connector), but if I had to nitpick, I’d say that home button has just about half a millimeter too much travel. Of course, it’s saying something when my main complaint about the build quality is half a millimeter, that’s saying something. The iPhone has a single monaural speaker which is one of the best I’ve heard. It works well both as a speakerphone and when sharing music or a YouTube video with a group of people.

Visually, the iPhone also does a great job. Everything is typeset in Helvetica Neue – it’s not really Arial nor is it Myriad (what Apple uses most of the time nowadays). The result is that everything is very easy to work with and read. The screen is very sharp and is viewable with polarized sunglasses (although when you have the screen turned to landscape mode, there are some rainbow effects from the capacitance sensors. For unclear reasons, the popular clownfish/anemone wallpaper did not make it to the final unit.

You can easily multitask and the operating system feels exceptionally responsive. Scrolling through emails and haven’t seen a dropped frame. There’s tons of eye-candy. Deleting email messages even uses the OS X Genie Effect to twist and distort the page. The photo slideshow can do a 3-D cube transition between images. The beauty of all of this is that there’s no penalty for these effects. The iPhone subjectively runs as smoothly and quickly as a Blackberry or Windows Media device that doesn’t have these transitions.

The iPhone is an interface that HCI gurus will be talking about for a long time. All you need to do is to watch the 20 minute intro to iPhone video you’re set. Visibility? Yeah – it’s there. For the most part, It’s pretty easy to figure out what’s what. I know exactly what the iPhone is doing and what I can do with the iPhone. (The less obvious stuff like pinching/expanding have been so hyped up that no explanation is needed). The feedback is incredible. I have never used an operating system with such incredible feedback. The limiting factor always seems to be the user rather than the iPhone – the animations never seem to drop a frame and never seem to be laggy. The sensitivity of the touch screen is perfect. The physical, cultural, and logical constraints and mapping are all intuitive which is a long way of saying that all of the icons and buttons make sense, you don’t have to memorize complex key commands to do what you want to do. There are certainly minor improvements that can be made from a usability standpoint, but the iPhone is so far ahead of the competition, it’s stunning.