iPhone + New User = Fascinating
Posted by Clark Venable on 6/30/2007
I did buy an iPhone even though I said I wouldn't (buy this first one). The line at our local ATT store was about 20 people long when I checked at 5:45 p.m. Friday on the way home from work so I waited and snagged a 4GB iPhone. It is as insanely great as the commercials make it out to be. Fast, responsive, intuitive, solid, revolutionary...all those things.
I think the real power of the iPhone is in how easily people who are not tech savvy can interact with it. If Apple is going to sell as many iPhones as they think they're going to sell it will have to be to people who are not gadget freaks. By that measure this device hit the bulls eye.
I gave the iPhone to my wife, showed her how to turn if on, and asked her to perform certain actions without telling her how. She made a call in less than 15 seconds (to me, I'm happy to say) and soon thereafter figured out how to use the contact list to call her sister. She next used Safari to go to her favorite site for weather radar images (what is it with women and weather radar?) and bookmarked it. She took my picture and added it to my card in the contacts. She then SMS's her sister, who chatted right back and she got to see that iChat-like conversation log. Next, out to the garden to take pictures of her flowers.
Every cell phone she has ever owned before this one has had these abilities (contact list, SMS, web browser, built-in camera) and they went unused in every case. Only recently did she start to watch John Stewart's Daily Show and local weather reports in Cingular Video on her V3xx. Not until she got an iPhone did she actually enjoy using all those features and even did so without prompting from me throughout the day.
Tomorrow I'm going to give it to my nine year old son and watch him interact with it. In the mean time I want to thank and congratulate Steve Jobs and everyone at Apple for this breakthrough product.
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