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Been fiddling around with my new iPhone a lot since I got my hands on it last week. I can only say that I am so amazed by its capabilities. Despite some problems(solvable ones), I still think that this device has the potential of reaching perfection to the needs of business users.

1. Onscreen keyboard. While it is only onscreen, this feature works excellent be it during writing your next blog post or your next email. It does not do word suggestion like a windows mobile does but it remembers your writing trends, ie the most often used word or even the width of your typing. What I really like about the keyboard is that you accept the word suggestion with a space and you refuse it by tappin on the word suggestion. Perhaps Apple really thinks typing mistakes is a common thing. This is highly intuitive. You can also complete your sentence with a double tap on the space.

2. The safari browser. This is the best mobile browser I have ever used. AJAX pages work with minimal limitations. Sites using extensive CSS look just as they would on a desktop browser. The only drawback is the lack of java and flash support. Perhaps it is a strategy to do so. If flash and java are going to be supported, many people might switch to mobile computing instead. I’ll be waiting anxiously for Sun and Adobe to get their respective platform released on the iPhone.

3. Third party apps and the app store. This could be Apple’s gold mine for future mobile apps. Since this is not limited to only the iPhone, iPod touch users can also join in the fun. But seriously the platform for developing iPhone app is vast and only the hardware limitations of the iphone will restrict the growth of the app store. Apple made the iphone development platform almost similar to mac osx development. A mac osx developer can switch to iPhone development with little difficulty. And for the non mac developers, Apple has made vast resources available to any participating developer. The resources and samples are pretty good and they are almost like real working apps on their own.(Ok maybe not… with some apps being refused entry to app store)

More to come…

Yes finally got my hands on the iPhone 3G. It has been a really long wait. Even though i am under an unhappy situation(my grandma passed away the afternoon before the iPhone launch day), i was determined to get my hands on it asap. And so i did, on 22 August about 3:20am after queuing up for 3 plus hours at Singtel Comcentre.

It has been a really great desire of mine to venture into mobile application development. Before the iPhone, we only heard of apps done with Windows Mobile, J2Me and symbian. J2Me coding really sucked since Java did not have a trait of having nice user interface. Windows Mobile or symbian were the other potential platform however you have to pay quite a sum(IDE, etc) to develop on them.

Time to learn some objective-c and fiddle around with the iPhone SDK!

Steve jobs has just announced the scheduled February ‘08 arrival of third party SDK on the iPhone/iPod Touch. This is gonna be exciting with the revolutionary user interface of iPhone/Touch.

… With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

Steve

I like the idea that Apple is attempting to reach out to the third party developer community. Now i can only wait for February to come. Time to save up for an iPhone/Touch. I might consider getting the Touch.