So I Bought an iPhone, But Maybe Not for Long

After deciding a few weeks ago during iPhonePhrenzy that I would not buy one of the nifty little gadgets, I came up with a need today that seemed like the iPhone might well help with. I'm in the midst of a significant Web site revision and redeployment for my primary client. One of the teams I work with is in New York. It would clearly be necessary for me to be better able to interact with the team both in terms of reviewing Web pages and in terms of exchanging emails to keep the project from getting bogged down.

I spent about two hours trying to get my Palm Treo 600 to do these tasks and got very frustrated. So I broke down and went and bought an iPhone.

The good news is that this is one slick user experience. I've never used an iPod so I was ga-ga over features most of the early adopters of the iPhone probably glossed over. The graphical quality of the screen is amazing. Web pages show up brilliantly and it didn't take me long to figure out navigation, searching, and other such tasks via Safari on the iPhone. And a lot of the coolness factor is indeed extremely cool.

That said, it seems to me after a few hours with this beautiful and tantalizing beast that it may in fact not do what I need to do. And that, in turn, may indicate that what I want just can't be done with any hand-held devices yet.

I use Google's gMail for my mail. I love the program. I love its spam filtering. I love its labels which make categorization so easy. I love the Web 2.0-style UI. I have all of my POP email accounts forwarding to it and I do all my email with it.

But it appears unworkable with the iPhone. Even though Google has a set of services tailored to the iPhone, including gMail, the virtual keyboard is the second most painful thing on which I've ever tried to type. It took me 10 minutes tonight to compose a two-sentence reply to a colleague's email. The problems I ran into:

• My long, fat fingers are clearly far too big for the keyboard. Hitting the right key is almost an evil video game.
• The type-ahead does not work at all as far as I can tell. I type "tom" hoping for a completion option of "tomorrow" and I get "toj" even though I've clearly typed "tom." Not once did the type-ahead help provide any useful assistance.
• Randomly, I found that pressing on the backspace key ONCE would result in the backspace key being entered so many times that the entire message is erased. This happened to me twice, including once when I was two characters from being done with the message.

Maybe I just need to spend more time practicing with it. I don't know. I have 14 days to return the phone and if this were Day 14, it'd be gone.

But I'd miss it.