So yeah. New iPhone. All hail Apple.

A little over 24 hours have passed since I bought this thing yesterday, so I think I have a sufficient amount of experience with it to put together some first-impression-type feedback.

To say that the iPhone is a thing of beauty is largely stating the obvious, but I figure I’m allowed one small gush: this thing is marvelously engineered. Its face is bevelled black glass and a single Home button, while the back is a matte, brushed stainless steel surface. The software is mostly identical to the iPod Touch, except for the fact that the iPhone has more applications (Safari, YouTube, Photos and the standard PIM apps are all you get in the iPod Touch), and of course it has telephony functions. The multi-touch interface is a real wonder too after you’ve gotten used to the idea that everything on the screen will respond to your finger tips, it becomes second-nature.

Using it was, as always, crazy simple: Without bothering to read any documentation, I pulled the iPhone out of its padded box (all black in there, as well) and pressed the Home button. It does not need to be connected to iTunes to be activated because the iPhone I bought has already been pre-activated and is the hacked, unlocked and jailbroken version that will allow me to install third party applications and for it to be used here in the UAE with an Etisalat SIM card. I just popped its USB cable in and started setting up the various sync processes.

The main thing that you have to keep in mind with the iPhone is that they’ve got fairly tiny storage: just 8gb and 16gb available. This immediately ruled out syncing my whole collection across, as I have about 60gb of music stored in 3 separate devices. So setting up proper synchronization rules was going to be key: after a bit of thought I decided that I’d create a smart-playlist. (A smart-playlist is a dynamic playlist that responds to criteria set by the user. In my case, I wanted a playlist that contained only the songs that I had added within the last 90 days, any songs that were rated 4 or 5 stars, and any podcasts that hadn’t been listened to yet.) Once the list was setup, it was just a matter of pointing the iPod at it so that it would automatically sync whatever happened to be in the playlist at a given moment.

The other consideration was how to handle videos. I watch a lot of TV shows, but they’re usually in formats that the iPhone can’t handle (XviD isn’t a particularly mainstream codec), so if I wanted to watch anything on the iPhone, I’d have to convert the videos before copying them over. Unfortunately, this was not as easy as I thought, the main challenge being the fact that converting movies take time, and I couldn’t figure out how to properly automate the process. (My definition of automation: any video files in my “TV Shows” folder is converted to MP4, added to my iTunes library and then deleted from the folder. I found an Automator script that looked like it might solve the problem, but I honestly didn’t have time to test it out.)

The video converter I’m currently using is Visual Hub, an app that takes about 9-10 minutes to convert an XviD-encoded 45-minute episode to an iPod- and iPhone-ready MP4. (For now, I’m manually doing the conversion; my only other option would be getting all my shows from Podtropolis or ipodnova, which isn’t all that appealing.)

Actually watching the video on the iPhone proved to be a real joy: the screen isn’t the best I’ve seen, but the frame-rate is flawless and the player is very responsive when you’re seeking. Like iTunes itself, the iPhone remembers where you left off for each video in its library, so you can pause-and-resume your viewing at will. If you’ve ever watched a video on Quicktime or from within iTunes, there’ll be zero-learning curve here, as the controls are nearly identical.

Of course, this being a review of a mobile phone which is also a portable music device, I should probably mention that the audio quality is pretty good as well. The included stereo earphones with built-in microphone are an updated version of the slightly chunkier white-boxed Sennheisers that came with my 4th-gen model, but the quality seems about the same. With it, you can listen to music, videos, and phone calls. Use the built-in microphone to talk. Click the mic button to answer or end a call. When listening to iPod, click the button once to play or pause a song, or click twice quickly to skip to the next track. Generally speaking, the sonic fidelity you experience is largely dependent on the kind of headphones you’re using, and the included earbuds are average at best. If you’re a mobile audiophile, replacing these with a decent pair of in-ear phones would be your first priority.

Coverflow works great and the interface for browsing through your collection of “CDs” is just friggin’ brilliant. I did run into a small annoyance here though: Coverflow on the iPhone (and I assume, in any of the new iPods) can’t make guesses about album-art in the same way that iTunes on the desktop can. For example: I have 11 tracks from Eraserheads’ Ultraelectromagneticpop! album and only one track has the cover-art embedded in it. Desktop iTunes would know that these 11 tracks belong to the same album and displays the correct cover-art even when you’re playing a track that doesn’t have it. iPhone Coverflow doesn’t seem to be capable of this logical leap, and so you end up with a ton of tracks with no album art, which can be especially annoying when you’re listening in Shuffle mode. (If you’re wondering why I’m making such a big deal about the album-art, well, let’s just say that being able to flip through album covers with my fingertips was one of the main reasons why I wanted this thing so badly.)

The mobile Safari browser is the feature I’ve spent the least amount of time with, but I did visit AJAX-enabled sites like Gmail and basecamp, and couldn’t spot any show-stoppers in either of them. I also watched movie trailers on the Apple Quicktime site and was impressed to find that it plays the videos in fullscreen automatically. I also spent sometime configuring a personal start page at mockdock, which lets you collect mobile-enabled sites into a single iPhone-like interface. Fun stuff.

Entering text such as urls or login names was a little difficult at first, as expected. The software buttons on the iPhone are as large or larger than the hardware buttons on most QWERTY-enabled mobiles, so it shouldn’t take me that much longer to get used to it. At a glance, the browsing experience is easily the best I’ve ever used on a palm-sized device (and I’ve had quite a few devices over the past 4 years to compare it to, believe me). It’s startling how quickly you can get used to the squeeze-and-spread gesture for zooming in and out of pages quickly; when I had to use mobile Opera on my smartphone afterwards, it was downright painful. If Apple has revolutionized anything with the iPhone and its variants, it’s definitely the mobile-browsing paradigm, and when they get around to building the multi-touch interface technology into their full-sized computers, it’ll totally change the way we use those machines as well. I’m still waiting for the time when our workstations will essentially be nothing more than one very large screen that sits in front of us at an angle like an architect’s drafting table, and has a pressure-sensitive, textured surface that’ll impart real tactile feedback; it makes me smile just thinking about it.)

Overall, I’m quite happy with the iPhone. I know that it does make sense to a lot of people to buy it rather than an iPod Touch because of its cost and the fact that you could buy an unlocked and hacked iPhone anywhere nowadays at the same price.

The build quality is great, and considering that it’s mostly glass, it feels very solid and light. Apart from those niggling user-interface issues mentioned above, I rather like the iPhone.