7. The Interface, Continued

There has been much talk about the iPhone's multi-finger interface. You flick two fingers outward on certain screens to zoom out on an image and flick them inward to zoom in. You move through photos by touching the screen and passing your fingers over them.

Scrolling using your fingers takes a bit of getting used to. You scroll through lists by dragging (really flicking) them up or down with one or more fingers. That works quite nicely. It feels like you're actually moving a piece of paper up or down to read more of it. However, since you open an item, say an email, by touching it, you want to avoid lingering too long over the item while scrolling a list. Surprisingly, I found that a bit of lingering did no harm. When you're scrolling, the iPhone seems to have enough smarts to ignore short dalliances over one or another particular item.

The iPhone in this image is just about the size of a real iPhone. Notice how small the keys on the keyboard are.

OK, there's no way to avoid it any longer. It's time to discuss the graphical keyboard. This is the one place where I'm sure many would prefer a stylus. More negative pages have been written about this little input method than anything except maybe the Devil. Barry to Earth, it's not all that bad. It just takes some time and experimentation. For me the answer is simple and I have fingers the size of a two pound sausage. Most errors are made by hitting the key to the right or left of the one you want.

So, just note which part of your finger you tend to use to press one of the keys. If you use the middle of your finger, then hit the key head on. If you use the right side of your finger, head the finger more to the left and to the right if you use the left side of your finger. Use one of your smaller fingers and, believe it or not, if you've been using your thumbs on a Blackberry or other similar device, try your thumbs. The graphical keys are smaller than most of the mechanical keys on smartphones and PDAs. But, I've found them better than that goofy multi-character keyboard on my soon to be ex-Blackberry Pearl.

I like the display's horizontal or vertical option. It shifts from one to the other when you move the iPhone into landscape or portrait mode. This didn't work with UTube, where videos stayed in landscape mode, but it worked fine with the camera, photos and in other places and with the Safari Web browser, as you have probably seen at least one hundred times now.

Finally, the iPhone has two other mechanical switches in addition to the button on top and the Home button. Both are on the left side of the phone. The first silences the ringer and the other is the volume button. The silencer is much appreciated. You don't have go into the graphical interface to turn off ringing when you're in situations where a ringing cell phone would be distracting and/or rude.