I feel like I’ve joined some kind of cult. Buying a Mac is cultish enough, but getting an iPhone is like being inducted into the Jedi elite. Short of Yoda handing me the MacSabre from a pillow held by Obi Wan Jobs and giving me a set of flowing beige robes, this is as close as it gets.
Getting the US-bought iPhone to work on our cellular network (or any, other than AT&T’s, with which Apple is partnered) is a mission that only the most committed MacJedi would undertake.
Thankfully, I was a padawan learner to arguably the greatest Mac fan in the country, Brett Haggard, a larger-than-life tech journo who lives and breathes Apple. To unlock the phone took two hours of digging around in the innards of the iPhone’s operating system using a quirkily named application, Independence, which has a process called Jailbreak that displays a picture of Alcatraz as it sets the phone free.
There is no denying that it is a superb iPod and the kind of stand- out device that draws its own crowd — not dissimilar to my first all- white iPod five years ago. People stopped me, not quite in the streets, but everywhere they could, to ask for a glimpse of it.
It is a thing of wonder. The touchscreen makes using it so easy, the home key that takes you back to the default screen is inspired simplicity, the superb display shows off video brilliantly. The flip-sideways display when you rotate the screen for songs or video is great, as is scrolling through albums using their actual covers in Cover Flow.
There are many things it does well, and, sadly, many it does badly. The way it does some things is truly horrible. In this way, it is not dissimilar to the many other phones I review.
Its biggest failing is not Apple’s fault: it struggles to latch onto the Vodacom network, though I am told it works fine on MTN. Though it cleverly displays SMSs as a chat sequence, they aren’t editable (so you can’t save an address) nor can you forward them. Texting, using Apple’s virtual keypad, is the biggest challenge, and though it cleverly adjusts for typos it’s irksome and slow.
But, I keep asking myself, am I missing something?
Does the iPhone represent some new form of interface that I’m resisting? How did the first people to use the graphical user interface that Apple pioneered (we now know it as the icon-based Windows interface) feel?
How did the first people who used SMS feel?
The thing about the ease of using this touchscreen interface is that it’s still version 1.0. Compare that with other Apple 1.0 devices: the Macintosh, the iMac, the iBook, the iPod. Sure, there are just as many bad examples of such 1.0s gone wrong (Lisa, the Cube, Newton).
For surfing or reading e-mail the interface is superb.
This is going to sound really geeky, but I use the iPhone as much as an eBook as a phone. Often I don’t get enough time to read all the articles I need to at the office. So, having set up a mailbox on my domain, I send myself stories that I later read on my phone. I have been using a progression of smartphones and BlackBerries, and Palms before that, as e-readers. I know, it’s sad. Now I read the things I otherwise wouldn’t have time for. It started as a way to read in bed without a beside light and has evolved from there.
And it leaves fewer piles of newspapers lying around my already newspaper-cluttered house.
It just so damn easy to read an e-mail by flicking it up – that is, flicking your finger, quite naturally, as you might turn a page. The text and images are crisper and scrolling is smoother on a screen designed to show off video.
I feel like I am betraying the iPhone’s soul by using it for such a simple task; by keeping it stuck in the text-based black and white world of, well, text. It’s designed for the new world of video, with its built-in YouTube viewer and predisposition to dazzle you as a hand held video player through its iPod software.
Don’t tell the MacJedi Council.
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