I picked up a shiny iPod Touch this weekend and I’m very happy I did.  In fact I made a deal with my wife to sell my wii to pay for it (anyone interested?).

The Touch is incredibly thin and it feels very solid.  I’m pleasantly surprised by the keyboard and the integrated iTunes store is awesome.

Now for the downsides :)

The wireless seems to connect and disconnect every few minutes so it feels a little flakey.

I’ve run into a couple of freezes in the Safari Mobile.  I can’t click links or enter any inputs until i open a new window and close the old one.

Other than that the big issue is sites that support iPhone versions by checking the User Agent.  I guess iPod Touch has a different one so sites like meebo and getleaflets show full browser versions.  I’m sure they will fix it soon!

Overall, I would recommend the iPod Touch to those who are waiting for a 3g iphone and live in a area with hotspots.

Apple has released a set of documents for developing your iPhone optimized web based application. I’ve been working on an iPhone styled app over the last few weeks and this document will certainly provide me some of the tools I need to provide a nice looking application.

In this document, Apple covers five areas developing and designing websites optimized for the iPhone. The areas include the new type of UI (finger events), keeping with standards, integration with iPhone apps, page readability, audio and video and safari supported technologies. In the iPhone apps integration is where you will find iPhone specific properties and meta tags you can use to control the size of your design area as well as how to talk to the phone, email and maps programs all which use basic html. The document is a must for ensuring a great user experience when browsing with Safari on your iPhone.

Enjoy.

I was able to get my hands on an iPhone this Friday, I did wait in line but only for a few hours at a local AT&T here in Connecticut. It turns out I didn’t need to wait at all since all the Apple stores seem to still have supply, but the excitement is always fun. So I’ve had the weekend to really get my hands on it and my thoughts processed.

Overall, I am blown away by the quality of the phone, it is seriously a gorgeous device that puts every phone I’ve looked at and held to shame. It’s the same quality Apple puts into its iPod and other hardware devices, but it seems they put a little extra polish on this. The first thing I noticed was it’s weight, you were sure there was something substantial in your hand unlike many of the plastic phones on the market, but I’m not saying it’s heavy. The second quality I noticed was the gorgeous, crisp, super high-resolution display. You have to see it to believe it, but the graphics on the iPhone are the best on any handheld device.

Prior to actually using one, I’ve read all the problems everyone was expecting and hoping that the iPhone couldn’t ever live up to it’s massive hype. I can honestly say I, there is no way anything can really survive that sort of hype, but the iPhone sure does come close.

I’ve only owned about 3 phones in my short time ever having a cell phone account so my experience is limited. I do, however think I am qualified of saying that they do suck. I had a Motorola V710, which as you may know spurred a class action lawsuit against Verizon for disabling BlueTooth, then I got the much hyped (not iPhone level hype however), LG Chocolate which had a cool slide effect but probably had the most unusable user interface I’ve ever used. They all suck - even the ones I’ve tried for a few moments, they suck, even the ones that can do email, send MMS, customize ringtones… they all suck!

Okey, back to the iPhone. The user interface is really a dream because it so easy to use and it works just like you watched Steve, there are no tricks - it just works. The animations are completely smooth, no hiccups or oddities, not even a hesitation. I’m not over exaggerating either. I’ve shown my friends and family the phone and they are really impressed at the movements, and how easy it is - they event commented on how I’ve mastered it so fast. That’s really the beauty of the UI, is that its a very simple UI with very little hidden secrets, though I am probably wrong, David Pogue already has a 300+ page book on the iPhone.

One of the best features of the phone is it’s web browsing ability, as I mentioned in a previous article, the mobile Safari is going to change how users browse on mobile devices, how developers begin to develop mobile applications and what users will start expecting from mobile applications. I am very excited about the possibilities here. Just take a look at 3.rdrail on the phone in widescreen mode - looks gorgeous! Safari is 90% of what you use on your desktop now. We’ve all read “There’s no Flash, so its not a real browser..”, whatever - I don’t think any phones support Flash anyway.

Safari supports Javascript, CSS and AJAX(XMLHttpRequest) just like the desktop version. It even will read and write cookies so you can login into websites which require cookies to be turned on like shopping carts. It’s a real web browsing experience - nothing like Brew on Verizon which is almost pointless.

Using Safari over Wi-Fi is excellent, pages load very fast. The Edge network for me is tolerable. I kind of see it as a bonus since I am around Wi-Fi quite a bit (at home, at work and lots of book stores and cafes around here). I’ve walked to the beach with this, and played on the internet - yes it’s slow but not dog slow - it’s tolerable slow. It was as good if not better as my experience with Verizon in terms of speed.

Another area that seemed to have people on the fence was the keyboard. The first few times I stumbled - it was weird. Then I tried to let iPhone work with me and correct my mistakes. After I ‘let go’, I got pretty good and it felt really natural. I like the keyboard. I am sure there will be users who just won’t get the keyboard and fall all over it, but just like anything - it’s not for everyone.

Johnny Bruhaha created a popular post at Howard Forums on the day of the release of the phone. So he must of used all of 3 hours before he decided there were 20 things he didn’t like. I found the post more of a wish list or complaint list than any real problems, and some are just odd. He finds that the camera having only a single button is problematic, he wants another? Johnny isn’t a fan of he keyboard - like I said above, some won’t like it. He finds picture pinching novel but not very useful. Maybe, but its easy as hell to zoom in on pictures and websites. Johnny wants games. Get a PSP. He wastes spot number 19 to complain about the price - have you looked at the LG Prada? It’s $800 with a black and white touch screen, and a virtual T9 keypad, is that supposed to be impressive?

Anyway, I’m not here to tear apart the list he spent his night on. I’m just here to say I really like the iPhones even with it’s massive potential to be the end all of cell phones, version 1 rocks.

Development for mobile devices will see a big change in style once the iPhone is released in a few weeks.

Currently, most mobile web sites are light in features and style mostly because of the size of the screen and the limited bandwidth on phone networks. Mobile sites often look a little too bland, boring, and are static in their nature since you can’t interact with the page elements. Part of this is due to any browser scripting support, and partly due to not being very usable considering the user interface doesn’t lend itself well enough to interact with page elements. Pages also have to be written with a limited set of HTML with poor to no CSS support. It’s like being back in 1996 when I surf the web with a phone.

Enter iPhone.

Last week at the WWDC, Apple announced quasi-third-party development using HTML/CSS/Javascript/AJAX through the mobile Safari browser. With this setup you can build a fully functioning web-based application without holding back on cool web 2.0 features. With a full set of tools and a fully standards compliant browser, mobile web apps are going to be wicked powerful. Take a look at this emulated site built with Javascript/CSS and the digg API. The iPhone will surely innovate the mobile web and without a doubt influence other phone manufacturers to build better web browsers. If this is any indication of where phone apps are going, I am looking forward to the future mobile web platform. What do you think, is this the next cool development platform?