Usually I hold something very precious to me in my hand, but I was out in public, so I couldn’t do that. Instead I played with Apple’s gadget du jour.
It’s lovely, but nothing could live up to the iHype.
Pinching is cool – it’ll be interesting to see what else Apple steals off Jeff Han, he’s a genius, so I don’t blame them for doing it. I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with his interface research, but it’s AWESOME. Like a HollywoodOS, only it actually works. (This is the same interface stuff Microsoft are using in their new Surface device.)
The screen is awesome, I watched some h.264 encoded YouTube videos on it and they were super crisp and clean.
Google maps is sweet – but Google Maps is sweet on all phones, it’s a great application.
Coverflow makes far more sense using a fingertip than a mouse. Bad news here though: Karl found a really stinky and obvious interface bug – if you touched an album cover “wrong” it skipped right through to the very end of the albums, which seems like maybe it could be a shortcut, but it didn’t make any sense when it did it, and it only did it in one direction. The interface is really simple, so it just shouldn’t do anything unexpected like this. (And there are so few applications on the device that their testing must have turned this glitch up, so I don’t know why they didn’t fix it.)
Anyway, it is a very pretty thing, but no matter how pretty a thing, it is still just a thing.
You got to touch an iPhone *and* retain a sense of perspective! One is jealous.
I’m sure there already are psychologists (or perhaps sociologists, or some other sort of ist) in the world who earned their doctorates writing about iLust, but if there aren’t, I want there to be. It’s a very special kind of mind virus. On a par with Scientology. Unfortunately for Apple, sometimes the virus entirely takes over the host, which results in a level of fanaticism which actually inoculates the still uninfected.
I think the iPhone is their new vector, Apple have realised that there’s nothing they can do about the Fanaticism mutation, so they’re going for a shotgun approach, if they can infect everyone all at once, they’ll be done. And then we’ll be done.
“One More Thing… iZyklon, coming very soon to a public shower near you.”
P.S. I can’t emphasize enough just how nice the screen is for video playback – much more like a Zune than the video experience we’ve come to associate with iPods (iPod Video is teh sucks).