The long awaited Apple iPhone finally debuted on June 29th at 6 P.M. No, I didn’t get to wait in line to see the magic device. I had to leave work and go pick up my dad from coming home from being out on the road for work for the week. After which, we came home and dad rested and I worked on some projects. Later on we went out to eat at a restaurant near an AT&T store. While we were eating dinner, the sky opened up and it just poured. After about 10 or 15 minutes, it let up some and we left and drove over to the AT&T store. And I experienced the first ever, Apple iPhone mobile phone device. This thing is amazing as it is now, although it is lacking some features; major features in my opinion.

I wasn’t able to get a good chance to tinker around with it - not because of crowds - but the batteries were dead from hours of continuous use. Right up front was the iPhone display. A tall, white, gleaming rectangular ‘tower’ with a TV display and two iPhones docked for display and usage. Sitting side by side on a shelf there were two slick, shining, elegant iPhones.

At first touch, they seemed to possess a since of ‘alien-like magic.’ That this thing couldn’t have been developed by the human race. It’s thin, light weight construction and simple design set it apart from any MP3 player, Video player, Internet tablet, or Smart-Phone device on the market. A slight touch of the button sitting on top awoke the iPhone from it’s charging slumber. Just as it was shown in the demonstration and commercials, it had the time, wallpaper, and a “Slide To Unlock” message on the screen. A slick, merciless slide gained access to the iPhone’s features - Calendar, Settings, Camera, iPod, Stocks, Photos, Notes, Weather, Clock, YouTube, and - of course - Phone applications. One graceful tap and you’re viewing your iPod libraries, a touch of the “Home” key and your back to the home screen, a tap on camera brought up the camera feature. Back home and to contacts, a flick of the finger scrolls you up and down your contacts list. And the display alone is something else. Take your cellphone and look at it. It might have a pretty good screen size and decent screen resolution; but imagine a 3.5-inch screen, and the quality of, say, HDTV - in the palm of your hand and you have the screen of the iPhone.

Now, you can read about all the high-tech stuff that’s in the iPhone. About how it uses an accelerometer to determine portrait or landscape modes, about how it does Cover Flow in iPod mode, and how Safari is a fully powerful Web browser that pulls down the real Internet, and not a watered-down version; and how the soft, on-screen QWERY keyboard uses an intelligent spell-check to predict your keystrokes. But the iPhone is not matching 100% of it’s hype. That’s right; I, Mathew M. Maher, a recent Mac switcher, and a long time user of the iPod mini, and a die-hard fan of the iPhone’s arrival, has found several key flaws in the iPhone that have made me wait for it’s revision later this year.

There are about 2 features that my almost 2 year old Moto Razr can do that the iPhone doesn’t do; and there are a handful of features that the iPhone doesn’t do that I had expected it to.

Prior to it’s delivery, the iPhone received an added feature of accessing YouTube data and videos from it’s website, with this announcement, I expected the iPhone to sport video capture mode so users could create a video and post it directly to the YouTube website, but this is not so. Below is a list of my “Why doesn’t it do that already?” list of missing iPhone features:

1. Video Capture
2. Multimedia Messaging (MMS)
3. Self-portrait mirror (Psst - the Apple logo isn’t a mirror)
4. High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) - commonly known as 3G.
5. Instant messaging Application - since partnering with Google and Yahoo, I expected to see a version of Yahoo! Messenger and/or Google Talk loaded up - or at least iChat Mobile.
6. 1500 Text Messages for $80+ plans.
7. User changeable battery, or options for higher-capacity batteries.
8. Music-based ringtones - use a song from your playlists as your ringtone
9. Landscape mode for SMS/MMS text/media messaging
10. Bluetooth connectivity between computers, printers, and other devices aside from a handsfree wireless head set.
11. iTunes mobile account - download music, movies, or TV shows via iTunes on the phone through 3G data networks
12. Larger capacity drives. 4GB is too small, 8GB isn’t better, and I’ve seen ads selling 10 and 16 GB drives.

Now a real “eye-candy” feature would be to have a mobile Photo Booth application loaded up so users can take silly pictures of their friends or of themselves - just as Mac users do now with the built-in iSight cameras.

I’m not sure how the ‘Notes’ feature works, but it would be nice to have the option of organizing the notes from your iPhone onto your Mac or PC, either inside iTunes or inside Mail 3 on Leopard, or Microsoft Outlook on the PC or Microsoft Entourage on the Mac.

I also didn’t have a chance to check out and see if the iPhone had an alarm clock feature. I assume it does since it has a “Clock” icon on the home screen, but I did not have a chance to preview this area of the phone’s software.

I have read reports/reviews about the iPhone’s built-in speaker phone and vibrate features not being up-to-par with competing manufactures such as Nokia and Motorola. My concern is hearing the ringtones on the iPhone. In the “How-to” videos on Apples websites, as well as the TV ads, and Macworld 2007 Demonstration, the default ring “Marimba”, does not seem to be ‘loud’ enough to be heard during a busy mall or driving with the radio on. I’ve set up my almost 2-year old Moto Razr to play ‘The Price is Right’ MP3 for my calls, it would be nice if I could do the same thing with the iPhone.

Something I am curious about is if the iPhone will work with 30-Pin Dock-based FM Tuner car adaptors that have been developed for iPods and iPod nanos/minis over the years. This is something I would like to see happen. Ideally, the iPhone FM Tuner will have a built in speaker phone, so should you get a call in, it can be answered automatically with the tap of a button and answer with speaker phone turned on, so the driver doesn’t have to give a lot of visual attention to the iPhone’s button-less/key-less interface.

Over all first impressions are very satisfying. The iPhone gives off the “I’ve gotta buy it now.” feeling of coolness and sexiness factors; but there are still some major improvements that need to be identified for the iPhone to truly compete against other Smart-phones (and even some ‘Dumb’-phones).

Foreseeing future impressions: Verizon Wireless might’ve been a better choice for Apple to develop and launch the iPhone. With their V-Cast mobile TV and VZW’s EVDO data network, I think Apple would’ve been able to offer faster data plans and live mobile TV over V-Cast if they had gone with Verizon Wireless. Although, the saving-grace with AT&T for me is that I don’t have to transfer my number because I’m a (former) Cingular customer, which is nice not having to transfer my number, nor have to worry about terminating my contract.

In a nutshell:

The first release of the iPhone is a sweet package, but it still needs to be polished up. Steve Jobs said in his Macworld 2007 announcement that they plan on rolling out 3G versions of the phone in the future. I’m hoping the future will be October - along side the release of Mac OS X “Leopard” 10.5 - which I will buy on it’s debut and will report on that once I get it installed.