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While I worked yesterday, I decided to take a look at all of the coverage of the iPhone.  I read all of the reviews that the popular gadget blogs linked to yesterday. 

• Walt Mossberg, WSJ
• David Pogue, NYT
• Steven Levy, Newsweek
• Edward Baig, USA Today (McPaper)

All of the reviews say pretty much the same thing.  The iPhone is actually a pretty good advancement over current cell phone technology.  The battery life surprisingly lives up to the predicted usage times from Apple, and the web browsing experience is pretty good.  Most of the aforementioned reporters, though, are known to suckle from the Apple teat quite regularly, so some of their comments should be taken with a grain of salt.  It has been pretty entertaining to see the number of lemmings who have decided to buy an iPhone on these glowing reviews.  I sometimes wonder if Mossberg wrote an article that said jumping of a bridge is a “spectacular experience,” how many of his lemmings would follow. 

There were criticisms common to all of the reviews.  For one, the slow EDGE network on AT&T’s cellular network hampers the usability of the web experience on the iPhone.  Since AT&T doesn’t have a widespread 3G network along the lines of Sprint and Verizon, the iPhone gets a much slower data transfer rate.  Another criticism appears to be that the virtual keyboard–although pretty good at correcting typos–still takes some getting used to, especially if you are familiar with Blackberry and Treo keyboards.  The iPhone also does not have a tremendous amount of storage for the price.  It only comes in 4 and 8 GB models, and you lose some of that overhead to installed applications on the iPhone.  If a user tends to get a bit iTunes-happy, they can rapidly approach their storage limit.  The storage problem is further compounded by the inability to add any other storage to the iPhone, as it has no slots for an SD card, for example. 

As for my opinion on the iPhone, I certainly won’t be one of the many lemmings who will be standing in line at your closest Apple store just to be able to drop a rather large amount of money on a phone.  $500 is a lot of money to shell out for a phone, and that does not even include my monthly charge for my service plan.  I also wonder if the phone will be plagued by what typically happens with 1st generation products, e.g., Will it fall apart?  Will it inexplicably burst into flames?  I am also curious as to how great the full web experience is going to be on a slow data network.  A cell phone with built-in Wi-Fi capability is pretty cool, but Wi-Fi coverage is not nearly as ubiquitous as cellular network coverage.  How fun is it going to be to browse the web on a slow EDGE connection, especially when the full versions of web pages are being loaded as opposed to the mobile versions most smartphones load now? 

I think the iPhone is certainly going to push the other phone manufacturers to re-examine their current models, and there is already a visible effect on some of the recent phones that have been announced.  I think it is the closest thing we have to the much-promised convergence of phone, email, and entertainment in one portably package.  I am more interested to see how version 2 of the iPhone stacks up.  There is definitely some room for improvement on the iPhone.