Apple’s iPhone: does it match it’s hype?

You would have had to be living in a cave not to have noticed all the hype surrounding the release of the 3g iPhone in Australia. When I say cave, I mean a cave 30 kilometers underground, sealed with 10 meters of solid lead wall. Oh, and the cave would also be on the moon.

My Apple days long behind me, I looked at the phone with interest, but nothing made me feel the need to jump. My trusty Nokia was still plodding along, and I’d had enough of the “mobile web” working on 3g applications for Ericsson during the “embrionic” years of 2004-2005. Frankly, I wasn’t really that interested, although I did admire the GUI interface of the iPhone.

As chance would have it, a new job landed me a new iPhone… and you can’t complain about that. So after a few days of exerpimentation…. did the iPhone live up to the endless hype?

In a word, yes. Now I’m not going to say the iPhone has changed my life. I’d like to think I’m a little cooler, but then pigs also regularly fly by my house. Back to reality, the thing about the iPhone that most impresses me is that the user interface takes about 2 minutes to master, and that I can actually use the “internet” on it. Now I’m not talking the “mobile web” or anything like that, I’m talking your standard web experience on a phone. If I want to browse, most sites are a breeze. Gmail and all my usual apps are right there, I can even check on my Adwords and Analytics accounts, although Google Analytics tends to suffer a bit without Flash.

So there it is. I’m sure I’ll find a lot of little niggling annoyances about the iPhone, but for now I’ve experienced zero issues and the setup time was nilch. Now if only I could find a decent SSH client without resorting to hacks….