Is it really possible to write blog posts on the iphone? We’ll see. The text correction is pretty good, but it does make mistakes — it’s easy to type ‘food’ for ‘good’, for instance, and the auto corrector can’t do anything about that. Look up “t9 book” for another example of this. On particular it does not detect erroneous spacebar hits instead of, say, ‘n’.

Still, this is at least as good as any other tiny keyboard I have used.

Overall: it’s pretty good. I find some of its features a bit awkward to use, but this may be entirely the result of it being a new interface that I’ve had only a few hours’ experience with. Time will tell.

Specifics:

Network: It works well with my home wireless network, even though it doesn’t broadcast the SSID and is encrypted. Everything seems to work reasonably well on the EDGE network, too, though I haven’t played with that as much. It’s slower than Wi-Fi, of course, but the things I’ve been reading like ‘excruciatingly slow’ are overstating things. YouTube works fine without Wi-Fi, though you have to wait a few seconds for the video to buffer.

One potential bug: when I’m on the phone, it doesn’t seem to see my Wi-Fi network. I mean, the network disappears and I cannot re-connect to it. I’m not sure if this happens consistently, but if it does, it’s a serious problem. When on the phone, you cannot do other network-y things unless you are also connected to a Wi-Fi network.

Headphone Jack: Apple, to its credit, uses a standard size headphone jack, though with more contacts to allow for stereo sound, a microphone, and a remote control. However, after deciding to go with a standard jack (which means that my old wired stereo phone headphones with microphones won’t work, because they use the tiny plugs that have heretofore been the standard), they decided to recess the jack into the case about 1.5mm, which means that none of my ordinary headphones will actually plug into the thing without an adapter that sticks out at least the height of the plug, or about a half inch. That is, the plastic housing of the plug body and the case of the iPhone get in each other’s way. This is insane. Presumably most headphone manufacturers will come out with models with slightly altered plugs that’ll fit in there with no adapter necessary, but for the time being this means using the naff, white, uncomfortable Apple headphones, or using an adapter. The only adapter available at this time is 3″ long and thus entirely ridiculous.

Mail: It’s not bad, but it’s a step backward for me. On my Treo 650, I’d been using Chatteremail, which has a real dog’s breakfast of a user interface and which crashes a lot, but which is unbelievably fantastic when it’s working properly. Apple’s iPhone mail application displays messages very nicely, but it doesn’t seem to allow the kind of control that you’d be used to on a desktop, or that Chatteremail provides. It also apparently does not do IMAP IDLE, which would seem like a glaring omission. IDLE is an IMAP command that allows a suitable e-mail client (like, say, Chatteremail) to work like Blackberry e-mail; when a message comes in, the client is notified of this and it makes a beeping noise, all within a couple seconds. Hey presto. The iPhone appears to only check for mail on a schedule, except for Yahoo Mail accounts, where it does ‘push’ email (presumably using IMAP IDLE, but I haven’t sniffed the network yet to see).

Switching between e-mail accounts is cumbersome — you have to back out to the top e-mail screen and then drill back down to messages in another account — but I am probably something of an edge case in the number of different e-mail accounts I use. You also can’t set different mail check intervals for different accounts, or different new-mail alert tones. You don’t seem to be able to set a ’sleep’ time during which the phone won’t check for new mail. When you tap on the home-screen Mail icon, it takes you back to wherever you were in the mail app the last time you used it; which can be the Wrong Thing if you’re looking for a new message it’s telling you about. It’s up to the user to back out to the main mail screen and look for the account(s) with new messages.

Mailboxes are an all-or-nothing affair. Either you see all your IMAP mailboxes, or you see only your inbox. You can’t seem to tell it to hide certain ones.

The mail application needs serious work. It’s not a matter of besting the Blackberry; the e-mail on this thing is, in many important ways, nowhere near as good as the Blackberry. At this point, in some ways it’s a matter of catching up with the Treo.

And I appear to have found an actual bug. I was viewing a message in my inbox, and then viewed an attached PDF (as it would happen, this was the receipt for the iPhone). After this, when tapping on the inbox took me to that message, not the message list — until I tapped on a different mailbox, whereupon tapping on the inbox took me to the inbox list. I haven’t been able to reproduce this yet, so I’m probably wrong about the cause; but it’s possible for the thing to refuse to show you the inbox list.

Keyboard: Overall, surprisingly good. But see below.

Safari: This is undoubtedly the best web experience ever available on a pocket gadget. However, there are a number of real problems. If you use websites that you need to log into — and you probably do — you’ll soon find that this is a pain in the ass on the iPhone, because it doesn’t remember form contents like a desktop browser does. I can see why they made this decision; if the phone is stolen, that’s bad enough without the miscreants also having access to all my password-protected stuff online.

However, entering usernames and passwords on the iPhone’s keyboard is difficult. The keyboard is based around predictive text input; Apple expects you to make mistakes, which the phone will then correct by looking words up in its dictionary. For ordinary text input, this works shockingly well. But it obviously doesn’t work when you’re entering a password like ‘n9v705q%’. Or even a password like ‘password’. And, unlike on many mobile devices, there doesn’t appear to be a way to tell the thing to show you the password so that you can make sure you’ve entered it correctly.

You get to see the usernames you enter into login forms, but the text-correction still doesn’t work properly here. I use a lot of sites where your e-mail address doubles as the username, and the iPhone doesn’t appear to be smart enough to know that when I type ‘tino@t’ the next letters are, 100% of the time, ‘inotopia.com’. It does appear to have picked up on ‘tino’ — when I type ‘tinp’ it corrects it to ‘Tino’ — but it always capitalizes it, which can cause a problem with certain (broken) websites that are looking for ‘tino’ instead of ‘Tino’.

All of this is totally unnecessary; the phone should allow me to explicitly load a user dictionary of words and phrases that I use all the time (and, in fact, it should pick up on my e-mail address, which is in the address book, on its own), and add these to the auto-correction hopper. It should also store my web passwords and usernames in an encrypted form, and offer to autofill the forms upon my authentication to it using some method that’s easy to use in the iPhone’s UI. It’s particularly galling that the text-input system is optimized for writing fairly long streams of ordinary English text, rather than short bits of semi-gibberish; the semi-gibberish of usernames and passwords is probably going to make up the majority of what you type on a device like this. The problem hasn’t really come up in a big way before because most of the kinds of websites you need to log into are barely usable, if that, on most mobile devices. The iPhone’s strength in web browsing exposes its weakness in text input.

iPod: The ‘best iPod Apple’s ever created’ does not have a sleep timer, which really cramps my style. At night, I usually put on an audiobook and set a timer for 15 minutes. Looks like I’ll have to keep using my old iPod for this.

The iPod application also fails to take much advantage of the new interface opportunities available to it now that the input isn’t limited to a wheel and a button. The iPod has driven me nuts for a while now because you can only view tracks organized by artist, title, album, or genre, and by choice I rarely use any of those. In iTunes, I most often view songs according to the date they were added to the library, with the most recent on top. When I want to listen to a particular song, I search for its title.

The ‘best iPod Apple’s ever created’ can’t do any of these. You can’t search for anything; though with only 8GB of storage, this isn’t really that big a deal. But you also can’t jump around at will. If you’re listening to a Beatles song, for instance, you can jump to other songs on the same album pretty readily; but you can’t tap on ‘Beatles’ in the track description and jump to the Beatles list. Instead, you have to back out to a point where you can select the Artists list, and then scroll down to Beatles, just as you have had to do with all previous iPods. I’ve never liked this, but I’ve accepted it as a constraint dictated by the nature of the user interface. Now, though, the continuing existence of this annoyance is a result of either laziness, lack of time, or lack of imagination at Apple.

In the song list, you get only the song title — not the artist. As I am an aficionado of cover songs, this is particularly annoying. The album list shows the artist, so that I don’t confuse The Beatles’ Abbey Road with Abbey Road by Sha Na Na. So here, there’s definitely a way for the thing to show more than one line of information per item, but it doesn’t.

With the touch screen available, you should really be able to view your tracks in any way that makes sense to you; there’s no reason to be limited to the views that the older iPods used because of their simplistic UI.

Phone: Really good. This is a pretty simple application, so it has better be really good. Setting up Bluetooth headsets, switching between them and the wired headset and the regular phone and the speakerphone is easy and can actually be done while you’re on the phone. It is possible to use other features of the phone while on a call. Of course, Apple has told us as much, but what I mean is that in practice it is actually possible to do read your mail, connect other calls, play music (you can start iPod tracks playing while you’re on a call; it’s only audible to you), etc. without at all worrying that you’re going to hang up on someone. It may sound pretty fanboyish to compliment the way the thing switches between different audio sources, but this is something that most phones do unbelievably poorly.

Calculator: Inexplicably there are no keyclicks in the calculator app. This is a good example of the kind of problems to be expected with version 1.0 products.

iChat: Instant messaging doesn’t work very well on the iPhone. In fact, unless you jump through some serious hoops, it doesn’t happen at all: there’s no instant-messaging support built in. There’s not much excuse for this; plenty of lesser phones have had IM support for a long time, and Apple has encouraged the use of IM systems for years now with the inclusion of its excellent iChat software with OS X. I’m pretty sure that the lack of IM support is due to the need for some kind of proxy system to maintain a steady connection to the instant-messaging servers and to queue messages to and from the phone while it doesn’t have a network connection. This is a solved problem, though, and I wish that Apple would have got this running before the iPhone’s release. We should see some kind of usable IM support within the next week or so, and a native IM application before too long.

Third-Party Applications: None. This isn’t too surprising, as even if Apple did provide a way to get third-party applications onto the iPhone, there wouldn’t be many, or any, worth bothering with at the moment. Most of the iPhone-optimized web-based AJAX applications announced with many flourishes over the past couple of weeks don’t actually work that well with the iPhone, either. I’m of the belief that the prohibition on third-party apps is due to a lack of documentation from Apple; not just a lack of API documentation etc., but also a lack of documentation about how application user interfaces should work on the iPhone.

Overall Verdict: It needs a software update; there are at least a couple serious bugs I’ve found, and some really annoying missing features in the various applications. This isn’t surprising for something that was released to the public 18 hours ago. Other than that, the only serious problem is the stupid headphone jack issue, which should disappear once the headphone manufacturers make slight changes to the shape of their plugs. My main concern is that Apple will decide that there’s no need for a sleep timer, or arbitrary sorts, or the ability to jump around, in the iPod, that we’re better off without third-party apps, and that if we were Right-Thinking, we’d naturally conclude that we don’t need IMAP IDLE on regular e-mail accounts.

This is always the gamble when doing business with Apple, or with any other company based on control-freakery. Do their ideas coincide with yours? Much of Apple’s reputation for ease-of-use is actually based on limiting the user’s options; while OS X is pretty flexible due to its UNIX base, Windows is actually a lot more flexible and configurable on the surface. This ability to configure everything leads, of course, to the ability to misconfigure everything.

As the so-called competition for the iPhone is, on balance, much worse, Apple might be tempted to continue to outlaw flexibility on its phone. If they don’t — if they open the thing up a bit — they may well find themselves with a very, very large chunk of the mobile-phone market.

If they keep things closed for too long, on the other hand, they’ll likely find themselves selling a vastly superior product to a tiny minority of the popuation. If any company understands why not to do this, it should be Apple.