Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] iPhone - my brief review

["Jonathan King" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 7/2/07, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> That makes sense.  Wouldn't a metal stylus work?  If it conducts
> electricity well, wouldn't it have the same potential as the fingers it is
> touching?

Yes and no. the interface between your (bare!) hand and a stylus might
be expected to be pretty good, but you would find a surprisingly high
(and often oddly floating) impedance between the skin and the stylus
(here used as a pseudo electrode). Or, to put it another way, you have
to do a fair amount of skin preparation to get conventional electrodes
to do a decent job, so I'm not sure how well this would work (although
you could certainly try it).

> The stylus would be good for precision, but it wouldn't allow for Apple's
> outstanding new multitouch feature.

Yes; the multi-touch feature is truly outstanding. I had 20 extra
minutes today when I was in transit from one meeting to another one in
downtown Bethesda, so I stopped in the local Apple Store there to play
with this thing.

It is pretty darn obvious that that one "killer app" for this
technology is a wireless "web tablet" you would use in the home. On a
sufficiently big screen, an on-screen keyboard with good
prediction/correction built-in would serve the needs of a lot of
people. Or you could just use your bluetooth keyboard with it.

The design and human interface isn't perfect, but it's shockingly
better than anything else I have seen out there (with the prominent
exception of the keyboard, of course). It is very strange that they
don't include any games, though, since the device is just so fun to
play with. One interesting thing was that they had all of the demo
units in the store set to use the AT&T network rather than to use
wifi. This was a clever move, because you could see that the network
was clearly slower than wifi would be, but not unusable slower. If
they had push email for this ala RIM, they might even be able to wean
some people off of their crackberries, which would normally be
unthinkable here in DC.

> I guess Apple's new touch design implies that multitouch doesn't work with
> old-fashioned touch screens like the one on my Treo.

The problem with touch screens requiring pressure is that it is very
hard to make smooth, quick gestures. So the really great navigation
interface is a lot harder to do, and if there's anything that's
important to Apple, it's the interface.

jking

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