iPhone part 2!

OK, I have a bit of an addendum to my  iPhone quasi-review I posted up the other day.

Mcchubb and I met up for lunch and afterwards walked over to the apple store at Bay St to play w/ them.  They had a big sign up that said 'sorry sold out today'  but they had plenty to try out.  I spent about 15 minutes playing with it.  I tried the browser out and since stephen had asked, I loaded up alivenotdead.com (perhaps the first time ever alivenotdead.com has been viewed on an iPhone Safari browser!)


Doh, some reflection got in there from the lights... also viewing my own profile on the right (this page).  The browser opens to a shrunken down version and you have to do the reverse pinching thing to zoom in... but this is really quick and let me say that the quality of the postscrīpt fonts is great.  it was able to handle asian fonts no problem too.  REALLY impressive web browsing I must say.

You may have also heard that there's a youtube viewer built in too.  I tried it out,  i need to do some reasearch, but its pretty clear the entire youtube library is not available.  I did a search and only TWO clips came up for 'hamasaki', only one of which was a short clip of my intended target:

There are 4900+ hamasaki results on regular youtube... I'm guessing that this is a special 'apple approved' version of youtube's library that makes sure they keep out blatant copyrighted stuff (i'm sure there's some legal issues w/ DRM and their agreements with record companies on the iPod side).

Video quality and load time  (via wifi) were pretty decent.  i load a lot of clips off of youtube onto my P990 to watch on the bus and train,  but thats via PC and conversion to MP4. This does it directly (but of course one at a time via wifi or wireless data plan...)


one more thing about the touch screen - i think it uses a capacitive method rather than a pressure sensitive method to detect your finger touching it.  its really sensitive (or at least the one i was using was set to be),  so even hardly touching it will register.   Also unlike my sony phone w/ its stylus,  using for fingers requires you to use the skin part of the finger tip, not the edge of your nail.  this makes it hard to do some fine detail stuff like click on an exact link on a zoomed out web page.  I found my thumbs were mis-clicking quite a lot. I think they put in some software to compensate for this though,  i think once you get used to it, this touch screen problem will be much less annoying.

again i was impressed w/ the speed and resolution of the graphics.   Mcchubb and I both had positive experiences.   We agreed that in many respects (in the immediate term at least),  Apple delievered on the hype.  There may be some growing pains that come to light in the future as people discover long term problems (deteriorating battery life, design flaws, etc)  but  i think they should have no problem selling 10 million by the end of 2008.

(but again,  I won't be running out to buy one anytime soon... the fundamental tech limitations are deal breakers for me, even w/ a nice UI... oh and I don't even live in this country right now).


Anyway,  Final thought: