5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1

The timer counted down

I can’t believe it’s finally here. Friday, June 29th. After months of hype . . . endless promotional campaigns . . . lots of media exposure; the anticipation; the build up.

At 6 p.m today hundreds came to the Apple Store in Victoria Gardens and local AT&T retail outlets, with 3 things in their pockets and purses (an i Pod, a PDA, and a cell phone) hoping to leave with just one thing . . . the new Apple iPhone.

Everybody had the same goal in mind, to be among the first to lay their hands on Apple’s new I Phone before everyone else.

Does it live up to the hype? You be the judge!

Pros - The iPhone offers an amazing resolution, with a clear, bright screen, and organic-looking buttons and an interface with all kinds of visual cues to let you know what you can and can’t do. For example, when viewing photos, you scroll with a finger flick to the left and right. But what happens when you try to scroll up and down? If nothing happened, you’d think there was something wrong. So instead, Apple has made it so the image moves up a couple of centimeters but “bounces” quickly back down. In other words, it lets you know the phone recognized your action but also shows you the action cannot be done. Also, the “finger pinch” action for zooming in on things will make you smile the first few times you do it.

The iPhone offers a 3.5-inch screen that offers widescreen viewing that looks so good that you can put your laptop in the overhead bin on long flights and watch movies and TV shows on the iPhone.

Cons - AT&T’s EDGE network is as slow as everyone says it is—going to even the simplest Web page takes minutes. But if you are on a Wi-Fi network, things are relatively speedy. You’re not going to throw away your laptop in favor of browsing on the iPhone. But you will use the Net features for quick information hits while you’re in an airport, stuck on a bus, in class, and so forth.

The iPhone’s camera is only a 2-megapixel camera phone with all the limitations of any other camera phone—it has no flash, no zoom and, while the entire screen becomes the viewfinder, it does a poor job of capturing motion or images in low-light conditions.

I was also disappointed to learn that the iPhone will not wirelessly sync with your Mac but syncing is still fairly easy.

The iPhone is not the Perfect Device. But it’s a real cool piece of technology that does a lot of things surprisingly well – And we know the next generation will only get better!