I had a chance to stop by the Apple Store on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue to check out the iPhone yesterday. My expectations were quite high, but I admit I was impressed. Apple doesn’t make clunky difficult-to-use devices. In fact, its reputation is built on ease of use, but I was amazed that even Apple could make what is essentially a complex computing device so simple to operate.

With no instruction manual or any staff help, I was able to access and use all of the iPhone’s functions, from accessing watching video clips to organizing a music playlist to accessing the Web. The user interface is simply the most intuitive thing I’ve ever used on a handheld device. Even my friend Kristina, who is decidedly not a techie and even claimed never to have seen an iPhone commercial—yeah, right—had no trouble navigating her way through the menus. The only thing that she needed instruction on was how to zoom in on the Safari browser (you stretch the screen with two fingers in a reverse pinching motion), but after learning that simple step she was off on her own, performing Web searches and watching YouTube videos. We didn’t even really have a problem with the touch-screen keyboard, which everybody else seems to be railing against. Granted, neither one of us is accustomed to using a Qwerty keypad on our phones so our expectations were somewhat lower, but we had few problems hitting the proper keys in a timely fashion (Maybe the rest of you all have sausage fingers…)

The big test for me, however, was the connectivity. You’ve heard me complain, on numerous occasions, about how the lack of 3G in the phone is a huge missed opportunity for both Apple and AT&T and sure to result in some POed customers who were swayed by the lightning fast Web browsing on the iPhone commercials. Of course, all of the iPhones on display at the Apple store were using Apple’s Wi-Fi network, so it was a simple matter of disabling the connection and letting the phone link to the EDGE network. Here’s where I expected that wonderful browsing experience to collapse into a world of sluggishness and error screens. To my surprise that didn’t happen. Google loaded up instantly (though Google is admittedly a threadbare site) and a search yielded results in only a few seconds. I decided to emulate Apple’s TV example by loading the New York Times site up over the EDGE network, a process that NYT tech reviewer David Pogue said took almost a minute. There was a delay, but not a long one. Most of the site was fully rendered in 10 seconds and what’s more the Safari browser seemed to intuitively load the top half of the page first, rendering the content that would appear on the iPhone’s elongated screen before the off-screen content.

Now, I’m still skeptical. I find it entirely likely that AT&T is installing pico-cells in Apple stores to head-off the nit-picky tests of people like myself. Once it gets into the wide, wide world of crappy EDGE networks, the performance may suffer considerably. But AT&T claims that it has upgraded most of its metropolitan EDGE networks to support speeds as high as 100 kb/s. Maybe that’s not too much of exaggeration. And Apple has always claimed the Safari browser can render content much faster than other browsers. My skepticism still remains, but I admit, it’s waning.

Contact me at kfitchard@telephonyonline.com