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This episode: Sunburn. We’ll have a video on waiting in line for the iPhone on iDay. And then, your first-look iPhone review video. Send your iPhone-related videos to the Mac MediaCast here.

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Click “Read More” to see the full transcript of the iPhone Review.

First impression - awesome. The iPhone experience completely lives up to the hype. The experience is not flawless, with a few quirks I’ve found so far . . . but it is definitely 1000% better than my Treo 650. Hands down. My biggest disappointment was right off the bat - but not with Apple, with AT&T. I started my iPhone authorization at 8 PM Friday night and was not authorized to use my phone until 6 AM Saturday morning. That, for lack of a better word, sucked. Once I was authorized in the morning, the rest was easy. I did a quick sync of the phone — pretty much the same as syncing with an iPod. And I was good to go.

Here’s an overview of the phone:


You’ve seen much of this in all the Apple videos so far . . . but what doesn’t come across is how satisfying the experience is. Everyone (including me) was afraid of having no actual buttons, yet I’m finding multitouch an even better and more intuitive way to do things.

A few of my favorite features:

• Photos works very well. • Web browsing is excellent. Infinitely better than Blazer on the Palm. My Safari bookmarks synced over to the iPhone. • YouTube is surprisingly fun. I wrote this off initially as fluff, but I’m enjoying it . . . especially on my wireless connection. • Google Maps is awesome. A nice surprise feature is that when you’re typing in an address, it tries to auto-complete with addresses from your contacts. Nice Touch. You can even bookmark your favorites. I enjoy using this version better than Google Maps online. • Weather and Clock are pretty renderings of the familiar OSX widgets. The clock also has a handy timer, alarm, and stopwatch. • All of the settings are very easy to navigate - and are very user-friendly to set up. • Typing was better than I’d expected, though I can see why people are saying it takes a little getting used to. Putting periods and commas on another screen is a little awkward, but I do like that the keyboard changes depending on what application you’re using.
My tip is to start slowly — the visual feedback the keyboard gives is amazing . . . the letter won’t type until you let off the screen, so if you miss, you can still slide your finger a little to the left or right, get the right letter, let off, and keep on typing.
• When I called my voicemail, the motion sensor turned the screen off when the phone went to my ear and turned it back on when I moved it to press a button on the keypad. If I had a nickel for every time I put someone on hold or pressed a button with my cheek on my treo . . . So my negatives are minor and could definitely be fixed with software updates later–
• No Video cam is a drag - though the camera takes pretty good pictures. • No Games is also a small disappointment . . . but I bet this will be remedied shortly
• In spite of Apple having Google all over this iPhone, I could not use Google Docs in Safari. I was looking forward to getting some work done on the phone.
To sum up the positives: A broad observation I can make is that every feature on this phone is very intuitive in the way that only Apple seems to know how to do. This phone will be a big not just with nerds like me, but across a large cross-section of people who are tired of their user-UNfriendly phones. The phone has more than exceeded my expectations . . .

Filed under: Podcast Episodes, Product Review, Video