Apple iPhone: The Keyboard and Browser
So I stopped by the Apple Store quickly to see tons of people packed around the huge set of iPhone's they had laid out on the table. I was really only curious about two things...
The Keyboard
The first thing I wanted to know about was the keyboard. How well would it really work with its "predictive typing?" Most people hate predictive input, so I was curious to see what Apple did with this "revolutionary" new technology (note Pocket PC started with the onscreen keyboard too).
Simply put: it sucks. Sure it grabs some misspellings and corrects them for you, but overall, the typing experience is damn near horrible. "Trusting the keyboard" as Apple puts it gets you a 70% accuracy rate at best. Enough to be frustrating. The worst part is, you don't know if its going to correct your spelling until you finish typing the word. So you type extra letters "trusting" the keyboard, and then end up erasing all of them because the keyboard got confused.
Web Browser
I was originally expecting the web browsing experience to require a ton of panning to read an article on the phone. After all, the "whole page" view just didn't sound like it would work to me. Luckily, Apple was very smart here and they find the "article" section of the page (I'm guessing any big block of text, but I'm not quite sure what the browser determines to be the article) and enlarge that text, leaving the page around it at its original size (to be zoomed in on). This makes for a very friendly browsing experience.
Exchange Support
There is a tab for Microsoft Exchange Server in the email setup. I didn't test this (didn't want to load all my email onto a store device), and it said it required IMAP. I'm not sure if this means that it uses the OMA HTTP trigger to "push" email or not, but I'm assuming it does. If it indeed does, cool stuff!
Conclusion
Overall, I found the iPhone to be a great media device. I love the touch gestures (why did Microsoft never get this right? Oh yeah, they wanted to copy the feel of a PC), and the overall interface. Very intuitive. Its not "revolutionary," this stuff has been around forever. What it does do, however, is impressive and well put together.
The biggest problem I see is its not really a business device. It doesn't store tasks (a big problem for me, I need to write todos down as soon as I get them), cannot accept rapid input, and only syncs email through the web (why is this???). Maybe version 2 will be more promising.