Unboxing the Apple iPhone

Last week, after suffering through the appalling un-usability of the Blackberry 8830 "worldphone" throughout DrupalCon -- which followed more than a year suffering from my worst technology purchase ever -- I bit the bullet and swallowed my distaste of Apple's increasingly closed-and-controlling technology, and my lingering resentment of AT&T Wireless (ugh) by going into the Apple store and buying an iPhone.

Yeah, I know. I'm sooooooo late to the party.

I was drawn by the user interface, not the newly "opened" application development path that has gotten all the press. The user interface was enough.

And wow, did my interest ever pay off!

This "phone" has the highest screen resolution I have seen, not just in terms of pixel resolution but also what they do with it. They aren't afraid of going small. This means that the iPhone is the first "smartphone" with a real web browser -- no wonder the iPhone Safari ignores handheld stylesheets. And it's not just the browser that enjoys this detail -- its all the appls. This means that reading emails is not a matter of having to suffer through some clunky awkward font, such as what Blackberry offers.

The iPhone just makes it easier to read stuff.

The fact that there are no real applications available to add to the iPhone is somewhat of an annoyance, although the default apps aren't bad. To be sure, there are some "webapps" available, but in generally they pretty much suck -- all running through the browser with minimal usability.

And the iPhone "keyboard" simply sucks. The buttons are too small, and the "smart" spelling tends to override what you're trying to type.

Don't even think about using txting abbreviations. The iPhone will "correct" those "typos" into totally irrelevant words.

Why the iPhone keyboard won't display horizontally across the landscape orientation of the screen is beyond me. We surely could use the extra space between the buttons.

The unboxing

I took some photos of the unboxing of the iPhone. When I saw that Matthew, who bought an iPhone only because I did (heh), posted his iPhone unboxing, I thought I'd get off of my duff and download the unboxing images and post this blog post.

As usual, Apple gets so much right. Once you remove the flimsy shrink-wrap -- no bullet-proof plastic container -- you're left with just a box without any additional steel-strength tape tabs.

Lift the lid and you see your iPhone (wrapped in an easy-to-remove cellophane).

Funny that this device, which costs 20-30 times more than a DVD, is so much easier to unbox. It's so nice to be treated as a valued customer instead of a guilty-by-default thief.

Remove the iPhone and you are left with a plastic tray with an easy-grip tab. (Boo to Apple for using cycle 7 plastic! How much more would it have been to use easy-to-recycle cycle 1 or cycle 2 plastic? It would have been nice to have a totally recyclable package.)

Each item is easy to unbox. No tools required. Easy. Usable. Inviting.

Are there any product lawyers reading this?