SlashGear

If you’re looking for someone else’s firsthand opinion of the iPhone, you might want to see what David Pogue has to say about it. Take the time to watch the video that’s after the jump. It’s good for more than a couple of laughs.

video after the jump

First, the phone looks and feels just as we’d all hoped. It puts other smartphones to shame. The screen is beautiful. Yes, it gets smudges very easily, but they wipe clean without and issue, and you don’t need to worry about scratching it. Apparently that’s not an easy thing to do.

The visual voicemail is revolutionary, no more listening to that dreadful voice drone on about the details of your message. You just click on what you want to hear and listen. Easy as pie. The web browser was probably what really did it for him. It was so easy to view web pages, zooming and rotating were a breeze.

Of course the iPhone is well known for its easy to use interface. “It’s fast, beautiful, menu-free, and dead simple to operate. You can’t get lost.” I bet even a cave man could use it.

Unfortunately, with the good comes the bad. The battery life was somewhat shorter than expected. He was 2 hours shy of the 7 hours of video playback, and just 1 hour shy of the promised 24 hours of audio. Granted, he had his WiFi enabled the entire time, so that makes up for a good portion of that.

We all know that one of the biggest concerns is the keyboard, and he admits that it’s not as easy as other smartphones with physical keyboards. But the word correction and completion made it bearable. Apparently there is a leaflet that comes with the iPhone telling you to just “trust” the keyboard. According to Pogue, that’s really some good advice. If you aren’t second-guessing yourself, you can actually type fairly quickly.

Here is what will probably end up being a deal breaker for some. While the internet moves quite quickly when you’re hooked up to a WiFi connection, AT&T’s EDGE network is painfully slow. “The New York Times’s home page takes 55 seconds to appear; Amazon.com, 100 seconds; Yahoo, two minutes. You almost ache for a dial-up modem.”

The phone has its ups and downs. But at the end of the day one has to admit, it is revolutionary.

David Pogue takes on the iPhone [via MYiTablet]