I was lucky enough to have the chance to play around with somebody’s iPhone for about five minutes the other day, and I have a few thoughts about the interface:

1. First of all, the scrolling interface for websites, Google Maps and YouTube is absolutely stunning. The ability to simply move around the page with your finger is incredibly intuitive and easy. As with anything seen in a commercial, I was a little bit skeptical about this, but playing around with it myself has me convinced.

2. Typing with the iPhone is terrible, especially for someone used to working on a Blackberry. When the phone is turned vertically, so that the keyboard keys are smaller, it is virtually impossible to type anything. Every character that I attempted to type was the incorrect one. When I turned the phone horizontally, I was able to type somewhat effectively, however the lack of physical feedback offered here was still a major problem. This phone is great for browsing the web and using fun applications, but it’s got a long way to go before it can compete with something like a Blackberry or the Treo for business productivity (i.e. email).

3. The Internet connection was incredibly slow. I tried to load eBay, I tried to load ESPN, and neither would load within about a minute. (I’m able to use my Blackberry in the very same location and load pages a lot faster.) Interestingly, however, the YouTube application that lives on the iPhone loaded relatively quickly.

4. While I used the iPhone several people hovered around me, stretching to get a look. This phone certainly is a phenomenon.

This post was dictated using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 8:37 pm and is filed under product usability, HCI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.