Playing with toys: iPhone impressions.

I was eating breakfast in a diner this morning while my car was being fixed, and the lead story was the iPhone line at the Rockaway Townsquare Mall. As I wanted to check it out, I stopped by on the way home. They had nine in the center table and people were checking them out. I fiddled with one for a while and can say this:

* The screen is AWESOME. Movies, web pages, and graphics look EXCELLENT.

* Browsing was fairly fast, though that might have been store-enhanced, who knows. The browser was my favorite part, and I especially liked zooming in on specific parts of the page and scrolling with my finger. It was very intuitive.

* The on-screen keyboard was excellent in landscape mode. Portrait was harder and I could see needing a learning curve on it. I kept poking the key to the right of the intended one with my finger.

* The automatic portrait/landscape switch by turning the phone 90 degrees worked intermittently for me. It did get annoying.

* Question: How are cell-phone upgrades going to be handled with this?

Anyway, if I were to pay $500/$600 (and the paper said the $600 phone was much more popular) for a phone, it'd be this one so far. Gotta hand it to Apple, it definitely looks like a phone FROM THE WORRRRLD OF TOMORROW!!!!!, and it will be interesting to see if features trickle down into other cell phones...