I was able to drive to the mall today and go inside the local Apple Store to use one. I played with it for about forty-five minutes. There’s absolutely no shortage of iPhones, anywhere. So, consider this my mini-review.

I will be posting later today about ALL OF JUNE… everything you wanted to know about what happened during my June, but in a single post! You can’t wait? I can’t, either! But for now, be content with this little iPhone review.

PHONE
The phone is usable and attractive. Pressing the keys, however, gives no proper tactile feedback, unless it’s playing sounds I can’t hear (which it probably is). Even so, it’s something that you have to get used to. Seeing it fill the whole screen, however, is very pleasant. It’s nice to know that the phone was designed to fill everything, and take advantage of everything on top of that. The reception is better than any phone I’ve used to date, and the person I spoke with on the other end commented on that before I could. So it improves the quality from both ends. Consider that this was from inside an Apple Store inside a mall (yes, you can call from the Store’s iPhones!), and then imagine what the reception is probably like out in the open.

EMAIL
The email isn’t very special, but it certainly looks nice, like the rest of the iPhone’s interfaces. There’s no downside to the email application, except for the fact that the iPhone MUST be turned upright to use it, so you cannot use the elongated horizontal-iPhone keyboard to type your messages. Otherwise, it’s like any other email app.

The coolest feature of text editing anywhere, though, must be the Magnifying Glass. If you hold your finger over the text you are typing (to move where the cursor is, etc), a virtual magnifying glass will pop up over your finger, and you can drag the cursor to where you need it to be. Very cool, and very, very useful.

SAFARI
Anyone who uses Safari knows that it has an incredibly fast rendering engine, and I’m happy to say that it transferred over to the iPhone nicely. Web pages display just as they do in the desktop version of Safari (so yes, zeldawiki.org does need to be tweaked a bit), but with an added twist: The “zoom” standard of multitouch interfaces has been applied to web pages as well. To zoom in on the page, you take any two fingers, place them on the screen, and “pull” the fingers apart. Likewise, to zoom OUT, you push them together. To move the web page, you simply move a finger around the screen. Moving it will create a sliding motion that will continue after you remove your finger, and “friction” will slow the web page down. In this way, you can “toss” web pages. It’s very cool, and a very effective way to view web pages.

However, if you have to view an entire page at once or simply want to, text is obviously very hard to read. Perhaps the virtual magnifying glass would do well here as well, but alas, there is none.

YOUTUBE
If you’ve ever used Kinoma Player EX 4 before, which is an application for the Palm Operating System (Palm OS), then you’ll be very familiar with this interface. You can immediately go to the top videos, or choose to search for anything else. When you do select a video (and there will be preview images in a menu-style format to give you an idea of just what you’re selecting), the screen flips horizontal, and the video begins. That’s about as far as this application seems to go. I did not choose to find out if there were any social aspects to the YouTube app, such as commenting and viewing comments.

STOCKS
Since I own stock, I wanted to see this app. It uses the sliding menu just like everything else does. Nothing special about this, but it will help those stock-types keep in touch with their, erm, stocks.

CLOCK
Again, just a clock. Nothing special here. it’s got lots of different clocks, which means lots of different ways for it to be utterly useless. Sure looks nice, though.

IPOD
Ah, the iPod app, probably the reason why everyone wants this, no? There’s only one word that can describe this app: Coverflow. Ever since Apple bought Coverflow from the lonely little developer who created it, they’ve turned it into something special. And the multitouch only does to do it justice. Flip the iPhone sideways while you’re browsing for music and it automatically goes to Coverflow. Then you use your finger to sift around the albums. Nice for selecting albums, and a very good concept. I hope they can improve its functionality in the future beyond just selecting albums.

The rest is just like a normal iPod, except, as you’ve all seen, the menu slides when you “toss” it with your finger. This shares the same mechanics as Safari’s web page tossing. In fact, throughout the entire iPhone, all of the “tossing” mechanics are the same. Once you get familiar with the tossing mechanic, it becomes second nature just to have things slide around instead of dragging it all the way down yourself.

PHOTOS
This might have been what I was most interested in seeing. Zooming into photos has been the “premier” zooming functionality of multitouch since its inception on the modern monitor, and to see that now out in the market is incredibly exciting. So, if you’ve ever watched one of the videos of the guys taking photos on a GIANT screen with one hand, putting two fingers on the screen and magically making the photo gigantic… THIS IS IT! Not only is zooming in and out a breeze, flipping through photos is also easy. I was wondering if there was a way to set the sensitivity of the strokes, but there isn’t. Shame.

I did end up accidentally making the Photo app go crazy, though. At some point, it started randomly flipping through photo after photo in rapid succession, like something was broken and the photos were spinning around their little cycle of photos very fast. Photo after photo whizzed by on the screen, and the “friction” eventually stopped it, but this did not follow any other iPhone mechanic I had experienced. I took it as a bug.

KEYBOARD AND TOUCH
Another very intriguing aspect of the iPhone is how they implemented the keyboard into it. The entire touch screen is incredibly accurate and very smart, considering that your fat little finger is the only tool you have, no stylus. That said, the keyboard is pure crap until you let it learn how you type. That means using on in the Apple Store will NOT give you an accurate rendition of how the keyboard will actually work for you. The keyboard is smart, and learns as you type. Every Apple representative will tell you to start typing with ONE finger for a while, and once the iPhone has learned how you type, move to two. This seems to be the actual proper way to type with the iPhone, and it apparently works very well.

The iPhone, save all of that, is amazingly accurate in its recognition of where you (mean to) touch on the screen. For example, in your contact list there is a bunch of very, very small letters, the entire alphabet in fact, arranged vertically along the right-hand side of the screen. Say you have a ton of contacts, but want to go to the letter “M”. On any other touch screen, you’d try and hit the very tiny M on the right-hand side of the screen, and it would think you’re pressing all sorts of letters and go to a random one, probably not M. On the iPhone, it really does a good job of knowing that your big finger means to press that small little “M,” and it goes there. Nice job, Apple.

AND THE REST
Now, just because the iPhone is quite possible the coolest handheld on the market, and also probably the smartest, doesn’t mean the Apple staff know a bunch about it. They will be able to tell you that it has VGA resolution (640×480), and that it runs apps on “Web 2.0″.Yes, an Apple employee said that to me… I asked him about the web applications, because there will be no third-party apps, only Safari apps. I asked him if these apps would be stored into a temporary spot in the RAM and deleted after the user had finished with them. His response:

“Dude, it’s just Web 2.0. You log in to the site and…” and then he stopped talking. He then proceeded to do a Google search on Safari applications for the iPhone, from the iPhone he had been holding at the time. I’ll admit it, I laughed at his total lack of understanding of what Web 2.0 really is.

So, the long of the iPhone: It’s a very nifty device and is a must-buy for anyone who needs a new phone, or a new half-PDA (this thing isn’t really a PDA). It’s an amazing device, but not many people need all of it. In addition, if you’re an avid Palm Pilot buyer and expect a replacement, this won’t be one. Because there are no proper 3rd party apps, and there never will be, the iPhone will never get a footing in the handheld market. What it will probably do, however, is change the perception that people have of the phone market, and hopefully entice other manufacturers to create their phones as elegant as Apple has, too. Yeah, right.

And the short of the iPhone: It’s incredible. Incredibly expensive. Multitouch. Something I’ve waited years to see on the market. It would be nice if it were affordable.

enj0y y0ur ph0nez.