My good ole buddy Tony called me today, ostensibly to catch up, but really to ask me if I was getting an iPhone. He’s no Mac geek, and he’s dying for one. “Do you think there’ll be enough of them the first month?” He lives in the Bay Area, so that may not be a given in that tech-crazy hotspot.

A few days ago, I talked about how the iPhone (5 days to go!) has captivated me. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why.

For starters, If you use a cellphone and have ever sent an email or used maps online, watch this and tell me if you’re not impressed.

Who is this guy? He’s a bit nerdy, even for this audience. Show some energy, man!

If this phone did only the call management features (easy address book management, nice calling interface, etc.) I would probably want it, but not at that price. Throw in the other stuff, and I (I should say, we) are sold.

Many hard-core techies are panning the unreleased device - no 3G (only the slower EDGE for data), no physical keypad, no developer SDK (so we can make our own apps, and displace that useless Stocks widget), and high price. There are certainly phones with more features out there.

What attracts me the most is the interface - the actual act of using the device and interacting with the digital world I use - looks elegant, practical, and fun. Even if I had never used a phone before (much less a Mac), I think I could grok how to use this pretty quickly. This is how human-digital interaction should be done: using my, um, digits in intuitive ways (pinch, throw, slide, tap).

I’ll be writing about some other trends I see in human-computer interaction soon. The drafts are gathering dust, I need to wrap them up.

Posted in Life, Tools, Toys, and Geekery