iPhone

Got to play with one on Sunday, I didn't get to do the things I wanted to (sending and recieving text, testing the voicemail, making and receiving phone calls, taking it out of network coverage and then testing it, etc...)

The good:
It's a nice piece of kit.  That shouldn't surprise us, after all Apple make pretty shiny things.  The interface is fast, the multi-touch is nifty, the display excellent, the browser seemed ok and surprisingly fast for an edge device.  I suspect that having almost 1GB of OS and system memory helps in comparison to the 64MB that most phones are bimbling around in.  The owner confirmed that the battery life was excellent - something I must admit I am flumoxed over, as are all the engineers I've discussed this with.  I'll be interested to see those numbers looked at in real use patterns once people are out of the honeymoon period and once that people actually start really using this as a phone.  

The owner I saw didn't seem to be a heavy user on the phone side, Voicemal wasn't set up and he didn't use SMS at all.

The bad:
The screen gets greasy quickly.  The high impact cover looks resilient but it does get mucky.  The lack of tacticle feedback really does make this a two hand device.  You can't touch dial or handle it without looking directly at the screen.  The "home" button is really essential and I found that you'd use it all the time to get back to the root menu. 

This strikes me as a problem, both from a user perspective and electro-mechanically.  One button that has to be used all the time is going to give out, especially if you're stuck with the same device theorectically for 2 years (oh yes, this is a phone with a 2 year contract and a one year warrenty).

I also don't think this is sensible from a phone perspective.  Phones make phone calls, you don't want to be clicking up from an application to get to a root menu to press another button to call up the phone function.  This makes calling the phone function up a minimum of 2 key presses, 3 or more if you're in an application.  It needs a one touch short cut.  It's a glaring omision because many of the other features seem well though out.

The Downright Odd:
Stuff not included:
 - no cut and paste - but then there are no text or word processing/writing applications in there
 - no MMS and a 1 picture limit on email attachments.  This will probably need to be addressed before the European launch
 - No 3rd party chat - which is up there with the lack of an SDK
 - No SDK - no matter how you spin it, on a mobile device using the cellular network, AJAX doesn't cut the mustard.  There's rumours of an offline version coming, but it's still no substitute for a real SDK
 - no ringtone downloads except through iTunes - again, they'll probably need to address this before the European launch
 - no video capture

Other thoughts:
 - 750MB for the OS is pretty hefty, it'll constrain their ability to pull the BOM costs down in the future.  It's an interesting direction because MS have been pushing in the other direction to reduce the size of the OS and make the UI more open to the OEMs.
 - at that size I am astounded at the reported battery life, if they've really got this and the battery doesn't give up after a few months, then this is a serious achievement - kudos.
 - Radio stability - they've gone for the radio module approach - so there's an Infineon radio on there.  This usually leads to poor stability of the radio, with higher than usual dropped calls and IP stack hangs.  Given how bad AT&T are in the US this probably won't be noticeable.  US users are used to dropped/missed/failed calls at rates which nobody in Europe would accept.  I'll be interested in how the O2 field trials are going.

In all, it still felt like a toy.  Looking at the settings, they were simplified - for example; I couldn't find the network control settings for manually selected the radio network.  This is a pain if you're roaming because sometimes you have to manually change network or force the device onto a network that's better for you.  It might be in there, but it wasn't obvious.

I'll not be buying one.  If I was going for a new shiny, expensive phone toy, it'd probably be a Nokia N95 which does everything the iPhone does but more on top.