On the iPhone

01 Jul 2007 · #techtalk

Quoting from John Gruber’s iPhone first impressions:

Sleep/wake is effectively instantaneous – far faster than any Mac.

Comparing a phone’s sleep/wake time with a full blown computer? How about comparing it with other smartphones?

The simple one-button remote on the earbud microphone is genius.

Genius? I’ve got to find out some detailed review of this earbud microphone to see how it differs from the kind shipped with Nokia, Sony, Samsung, et. al.

I’ve been curious what Apple planned to do with the standard Cut/Copy/Paste clipboard commands. With no menu bar, there’s no Edit menu. With no keyboard, there’s no command-key shortcuts. The Newton solved this with magic gestures. The iPhone solves this by not having a clipboard at all. No copy, no paste.

Solution or cop out? You be the judge! :-) This will probably be one of the most frustrating limitations of the iPhone. If the iPhone supported native 3rd party apps, I bet the first app would be a clipboard!

I’ve also read somewhere that the system data on an iPhone comes to around 700MB. So large apps are being read off a slow media (HDD) as opposed to other smart phones where relatively smaller apps (the system data would be < 50MB) are read off a faster media (Flash). I am curious to know how this affects app startup time and general task switching latency on the iPhone.

Anyway, it’ll be a long, long time before the iPhone reaches these shores.