Mossberg receives iPhone

Technology columnist Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal yesterday received an iPhone from Apple to review during the days leading up to the phone's launch on June 29th. Mossberg offered his first impressions of the handset to college leaders durin ga speech at The Chronicle of Higher Education's Presidents Forum. "I don’t know whether I’ll give it a good review or not," Mossberg said, adding that he will use the device over the next couple of weeks before writing a review. "I can already see some things I don’t like about it. I see some other things that I do like a lot about it." A vital point to distinguish, according to the columnist, is whether the iPhone's touch-screen keyboard at least matches the performance of keyboards on other smartphones.

"They are claiming that through clever software they have figured out a way for this to be actually far more accurate and efficient than you think it will be, and I’m testing that proposition," said Mossberg. "And I can tell you that in the first hour it works a little better than I thought, but I’m still not sure it works as well as a regular keyboard - and the first hour is not a very fair test, so I’m going to keep going at it."

The columnist pointed to the iPhone as the "next level of elevation of the cellphone" after predicting the end of the PC era. Mossberg believes iPhone is the next generation "not because it's better or necessarily better than your Blackberry [...] but this runs a real computer operating system."

by MacNN Staff