Recently Apple announced their latest product - iPhone. It will not be available until June, but this video gives us a sneak preview of it being used by a human being instead of an animation on their website.

I think this is definately a pretty cool device. I already use a smartphone Treo 700p that can do pretty much everything that iPhone can plus a lot more since I have a choice of 1000s of apps I can install on the phone.

The new multi-touch screen interface is interesting, but I am a bit skeptical about it for several reasons:

How easy is it to type on the touch screen vs. the hard buttons on my Treo? Notice that the this video did not dwell on that. Apparently the phone has an auto-correct feature which guesses the words you mean to type, but how about entering passwords or web URLs which may not have the words from the dictionary? The absense of dedicated buttons for common tasks sounds like a drawback to me. I love the ability to push a concrete button on my phone and go straight to the calendar, email, launch the music player or whatever I configure those buttons to do . On iPhone you have to do multiple taps on the touch screen to switch from one application to the other. I have hundreds of contacts in my address book. On my Treo I can just type the first couple of letters of the person's last name or first name and the contact list narrows down to just the people who's first or last name starts with those letters. Based on this video, on iPhone I have to flick my finger through the entire list until I get to the contact that I want. That sounds like a major pain.

Also there was a clear cut of the video when the presenter was talking about browsing the web. Looks like you can "zoom in on [the webpage] and read it", but that would mean that you constantly have to scroll to read the text using your finger which is placed right on top of the page you're viewing. This is very inconvenient because the finger will block your view. I like the way my Treo renders the pages in an optimized way so that you have to just scroll up and down with the dedicated buttons below the screen.

Another gripe is the absense of external memory card slot. You're limited to 4GB and 8GB of internal memory. Wouldn't it be nice to pop in an SD card with some full-length movies on it? Or take the card out of your digital camera and stick it in the phone to view the photos on the nice 3.5 inch screen of the phone? Apple was never into making things modular. According to the hype, this phone will remove the need to carry two devices - an ipod and a cell phone. Hmm well not for the people who are used to 60 or 80 GB ipods.

Anyway, these are just my thought from what I can see from this little video. I may change my mind once I have this puppy in my hands.