People queued overnight outside shops for a telephone and I have been trying all week to decide whether that tells us something about the product or about the marketing, and I think the honest answer is both.
The queues were real, the opening weekend numbers are substantial for a device at this price, and anybody who predicted a flop was wrong. I did not predict a flop. What I said in March was that three questions could not be answered from a stage demonstration, and now that the thing is in shops, here is where those landed.
The typing works. Not as well as a good physical keyboard, and better than every virtual keyboard that came before it, and the gap closes with practice in a way that suggests the prediction software is doing more work than the layout. I was prepared to be unconvinced. I am not. This was the biggest risk in the whole design and Apple has cleared it.
The network is exactly the problem I expected. EDGE is slow, the browser is the best mobile browser anybody has built, and putting the two together produces a device that is a genuine pleasure on Wi-Fi and an exercise in patience on a train. Apple has shipped a 2007 phone on a radio that belonged to 2004, and every review that describes browsing as revelatory was written by somebody sitting near a wireless network.
Third-party software is still forbidden and the official position remains that web applications are the answer. They are not. A web application in 2007 cannot use the camera, cannot work without a connection, and on this device cannot run on anything faster than EDGE when you are away from a desk. Apple has built the most capable pocket computer ever sold and locked the door to it, and I do not believe that position survives eighteen months.
The activation arrangement is the detail I keep thinking about, because it is the part with the longest consequences. You take the phone home, plug it into a computer, and set it up yourself through iTunes. No shop assistant, no carrier configuration screen, no operator software preloaded. That sounds like a convenience feature. It is actually Apple removing the carrier from the relationship with the customer, and it is the thing I said last September nobody had the leverage to attempt.
They attempted it and won. Whatever else this device turns out to be, that is the part the rest of the industry should be frightened of, and almost none of the coverage this week has mentioned it.
Would I tell somebody to buy one? Not yet, and not at this price with this radio and no way to install anything. I would tell them to look very carefully at the second one.