“Sent from my iPhone” … That’s the somewhat snotty default signature that iPhone tacks onto your mail messages. So what’s it like?

I’m typing this post using the I screen keyboard I safari in horizontal mode. Making a blog post on my sidekick caused me convulsions, on my iPhone it’s slightly less painful. Punctuation is a pain. You will note there is no picture for this post: the file upload button is disabled I safari despite the fact that this is an 8GB iphone. And the is no select/copy/paste in the text system, so I can’t even paste in a URL from google images. But I’ve successfully reached the end of this paragraph. I would guess I could have typed this in about 5% of the time on my macbook. I don’t thing mobile devices are ever going to he better than a computer.

the biggest annoyance is the lack of a system-wide on screen “back” button. Clicking a link in your email takes you to safari. The only way to get back is to go the the main screen and then mail. And getting to the main screen involves pressing the only mechanical button on the front of the iPhone which for some reason requires about a million pounds of force. Dancing your fingers on the multitouch screen and then havinf to slam the home button is literally painful.

so does the iPhone live up to the hype? In a word, hell yes. Antialiased fonts. Animations everywhere. Nifty one finger scrolling with auto-dampened deceleration. This is a phone that makes it *fun* for me to scroll through my contacts. For those of us that were wondering what the heck was the point of LayerKit (CoreAnimation) last year, iPhone is the answer.

Even rickety old QuickTime gets an iPhone makeover. Much fuss is made over the lack of flash support. And yet there is YouTube right on the home screen. And the YouTube videos are somehow higher quality on my iPhone than on my $2000 MacBook. How do they do it? Apple is taking their classic walled garden approach here. The message couldn’t be louder: dear web 2.0, you will not get jack on the iPhone unless you partner with us and re-encode all you video. Oh and you have to use QuickTime. Not a bad strategy. With 99% penetration on the web, flash appeared to be the hands down winner of the web multimedia race. Now with Microsoft and Apple entering the consumer electronics arena, we can expect to see a genuine rematch between Flash,Silverlight, and QuickTime.

unfortunately this also means i won’t be able to make a decent blog post without custom iphone apps for wordpress. This post took me about an hour.

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