One of the main benefits of having a smartphone is having access to information while on-the-go? Not just contacts and calendar information, but a “world wide web” of information. That is what smartphones are for.
After attending an opening at the City Art Gallery in San Francisco tonight, we wanted to find the address and directions to the Parea Wine Bar in the Mission area. With the iPhone and Google, that was only a few taps away. The Google search helped us find the address and the map. Zooming in to the street details was easy by “pinching open” a couple of times.
Searching the web and finding maps using smartphones is not new and I have actually done this with many of the smartphones I have reviewed in the 81-day-experiment (Treo 700p, 700w, Motorola Q, BlackBerry Pearl, T-Mobile MDA, BlackBerry 8700, Nokia E62, Cingular 3125, aT-Mobile Dash, BlackBerry 8800, and Samsung BlackJack). However, what is new is the ease with which it is done and the ability to manipulate the information and make it usable.
The iPhone Calendar
My iPhone Calendar is now synchronized with my Outlook Calendar. When I tap the Calendar icon from the iPhone home screen, I can see my appointments and schedule new ones. I am now in the month view. I can switch to the Day view or the list view and I can add an appointment by tapping the “+” button, and then typing the appointment information. As soon as I tap on one of the fields, the keyboard gets displayed. I can then set the start and end date and time, with an interface that looks like the “slot machine” that we saw a few days ago in the alarm clock. I can make the appointment recurring, and set a reminder, and most importantly add a note.
The Calendar interface is easy to use and is likely to satisfy the needs of most users. More about this later in the experiment.
More pictures taken with the Apple iPhone at the City Art Gallery. By the way, you can “pinch open” here too to zoom in on the picture, and you can “pinch closed” to zoom out. And if you turn the iPhone sideways, the picture orientation is automatically adjusted, and if you want to play a slide show, just tap the slide show button.
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