“During a meeting with Apple’s vice president of iPod products Greg Joswiak, I finally got to play briefly with one of the highly anticipated iPhones,” Jeremy Roche reports for ZDNet Australia.

Roche reports, “The iPhone is one of the most elegant and ravishing phones I’ve seen so far, due largely to its simple, sleek design and impeccable, intuitive user interface. While fashion phone fans used to teensy handsets might disagree, the iPhone doesn’t feel too unwieldy and at just under 12mm thick, it is certainly pocketable.”

Roche reports, “Although the iPhone runs a version of Mac OS X “optimised for the handheld experience”, Joswiak explains it’s not an open platform and any updates to applications or software will come through Apple. This closed model, although secure, means you can’t install additional custom or third-party apps — does this mean it isn’t defined as a smartphone? It’s a model that Joswiak says will continue in the foreseeable future.”

Roche reports, “While the room we were in was dimly lit and conducive to making displays look vibrant, the screen didn’t fail to impress. It is bright, colourful and seems like a very high resolution for its size. To get an idea of how to type messages on a buttonless phone, I ducked into SMS… Using two thumbs to type a quick couple of words, the touch-sensitive QWERTY worked well — my accuracy might have been better if I had longer than 3 minutes with the phone. However, I think the virtual keys and the lack of a tactile click feeling won’t be everyone’s preferred way of text entry.”

“Orientation changes as expected when the iPhone is tipped on its side, allowing you to see Web sites, videos, maps and photos in landscape mode. Multi-touch is a fantastic feature for zooming in and out and panning. Apple isn’t mentioning how much system memory is onboard, but we didn’t notice much of a lag between menus or applications — mind you we didn’t push the iPhone’s multi-tasking abilities to the extreme,” Roche reports.

Roche reports, “We were unable to demo the synching process with iTunes, and are disappointed that Wi-Fi can’t be used for synching or for direct communication with other iPhones… Joswiak claimed an advantage of the wired connection is that it’s faster and that it charges the device at the same time… Addressing the iPhone’s lack of 3G connectivity at a time when HSDPA services are flourishing internationally and the impact of future WiMAX technology, Joswiak said that Apple ‘made some choices that make sense today.’”

Full article here.
3G is coming to future iPhones. Steve Jobs said so himself during his keynote presentation. iPhone is a US-only release at first: June for the US, Q4 for Europe, and 2008 for Asia. Expect to see different iPhones just like you see different iPods and different Macs for various needs at a range of price points. As for Wi-Fi, that’s a software decision for Apple to make. The Wi-Fi can be used to do whatever Apple wants in the future; the main thing is that it’s in there. Remember how early this is: there are parts of the iPhone that are not being shown, that are still being worked on for iPhone’s June release.

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