iPhone, Enthusiastically!

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

About two weeks ago, I posted a rumination about the switch from my trusty Treo to the trendy iPhone. I was a little worried about the change, wondering whether I could adapt, and skeptical that the new device would prove useful enough.

Well, I’m now an iPhone fan, and for reasons I couldn’t have anticipated.

My main worry was whether I’d be able to type on the iPhone with the same facility I could on the Treo. After about a week, I noticed that I could. The iPhone’s spell-checker is quite good (not perfect, but quite good), and engenders confidence after only a short period of time. So, I was able to quickly put that worry aside.

Then there’s the Web browsing, which is excellent. The double-tap to a zone of a page works great, and the 3G is fast and reliable. I was able to run this blog remotely, accepting comments and dealing with minutiae without a problem. Doing other things online was equally simple and straightforward.

The camera is great. It somehow makes nearly every picture come out well, and the integration with GPS and email lets me do things (Loopt, for instance) that I couldn’t have imagined before.

Speaking of the GPS, the utility of this surprised me. Twinkle, for example, is a GPS-enabled Twitter iPhone application that let’s you see Twitter posts from people nearby. I thought surely this would hold little value, but instead I find it often interesting and insightful.

The email and calendar integrations with Outlook work better than my Treo’s did, and the nifty little interface tricks of the iPhone make it a simple matter to browse, eliminate, reply to, and skip emails while on the go.

So, I’m sold. Now I’m waiting for my dream machine, a phone I can dock at my desk as my computer, with just a keyboard and a couple of monitors taking over the expansion of my work zone. The iPhone seems to be getting us quite close to this possibility.