We’re a little over 18 hours into our first foray with the iPhone, and it’s a good time to post up a list of first impressions, and development considerations. For the device itself, I think we’ll be leaving the formal review to the pros. The short: we’re hooked, and couldn’t be much happier with the product as delivered, or the purchase/activation process. It couldn’t possibly live up to the hype, but it comes extremely close.

Right up until the very end when Apple hands the ball over to AT&T and they fumble.

I’ll forgive them the first day, but their systems obviously weren’t even vaguely prepared for the onslaught of activations, and a six hour wait for activation with their new toy might send some over the edge. In short, I wouldn’t want to be on Mr. Jobs’ speed dial today.

Now that we’re up and running, and we’ve really had a chance to use the things at length (both 4 gig and 8 gig models), a few thoughts are coming to mind.

First, there’s no apparent performance difference between the 4 gig and 8 gig model.

Next, the two biggest niggles in early reviews had to do with the keyboard and EDGE data, both of which are non-issues for us. With email automatically synching every 15 minutes, and web about twice as fast as dialup (in our informal tests), we really didn’t have a whole lot to complain about the browsing experience, other than flash support and AJAX apps that rely on jquery (more on this below).

Flash support would be nice, but we really haven’t missed it. Moreover, a ton of Flash wouldn’t work properly without rollover support on the phone, so Flash’s conspicuous absence at launch on the phone is starting to make a lot of sense now.

The keyboard is a little odd to get used to at first, particularly in portrait mode where your finger or thumb is larger than the button you’re trying to push. It took about an hour for us to get the hang of using it, but now we pretty much fly on the keyboard with pretty good accuracy, and the predictive typing takes up the slack. We’re averaging about 20 words per minute right now in portrait mode, about 30 in landscape mode (bigger buttons).

Keyboard hints

If you’re right-handed, aim visually just left of the button you’re trying to push. Visually a hair left is actually dead center to the key, at least based on how we’re holding the device. Lefties, aim just right. Once you’ve gotten pretty good at hitting the mark without trying, just start hammering away and the predictive input cleans up the rest pretty darned well.

32 Flavors

There are tons of Javascript/AJAX libraries out there that developers use to ease development on sites, or add a few bells and whistles. Most of the libraries we’ve tested at any length work flawlessly on the iPhone (Scriptaculous, Spry, Lightbox), with very reasonable performance, even for animated/alpha effects.

The javascript glue we’ve found that doesn’t work so well at the moment generally utilize the jQuery library, a shame, because Thickbox (which requires jQuery) is currently our favorite lightbox clone.

Surprisingly, about 95% of Google Analytics (the new beta) works on the phone, and Analytics uses absolutely insane obfuscated Javascript/AJAX transitions. Unfortunately, the broken part is the initial dashboard block which allows you to choose your date range (and the dynamic Flash graphs). Regardless, this level of robustness bodes very very well if you intend to deliver rich AJAX apps on the phone.

Google Maps mashups that we’ve tested (in-browser) render, however the controls don’t function properly (mostly due to hover/drag interactions), if you were wondering why Google Maps had a separate application.

Contrary to expectations, Google Docs and Spreadsheets do not work on iPhone currently (text input won’t activate), in fact, we haven’t found any rich text editors that will allow the text input menu to pop-up.

Relative Sizing

Most sites that are written in a standards-compliant fashion “just work” on the iPhone. Basically Safari as a SDK is pretty accurate, but there are a few anomalies worth mentioning apart from Javascript issues that we’ve found.

Body text and headlines (h1 etc) are “smart scaled” relative to the text size preferences in iPhone’s settings if font scaling is specified in ems and percentages (best practices for development for IE support, anyhow). If the text styles are specified in pixel sizes, the user won’t be able to take advantage of immediately legible text without zooming (it overrides smart scaling). This doesn’t affect li, ul, caption items, however, which remain at their “normal” browser ratio

The short is, if you use best practices (ems and percentages for text sizes) in your stylesheets, you get a jump on legibility and browsing speed for iPhone users.

In our informal tests, sites with relative CSS specs had legible body copy, even with a 1024 pixel container layout (in landscape mode) without zooming, whereas sites designed for 800×600 needed to be zoomed for text legibility if the styles were defined in pixels.

Again, we haven’t tested every possible permutation of how iPhone’s preferences affect the initial rendering, but this is a good starting point.

Telephone Links

It appears that iPhone automatically hotlinks anything that appears like a telephone number, in the following formats that we’ve tested (212) 555-1212, 212.555.1212, 212 555-1212, 222-555-1212. Pretty slick. You click the link and you get a dialog with the telephone number and cancel / call dialogs for free, and you don’t have to format a special link.

Forms / Login Issues

iPhone brings up a special interface to enter text in form fields or quickly flick through list drop-downs that’s very intuitive.

One gotcha is that iPhone doesn’t offer to remember passwords for sites or any autofill information, but cookies are supported, so adding a “remember me” checkbox will be very welcome on sites that require login.

In our tests, http authentication worked as expected over both http and https, although the “remember password” checkbox that we all know, love and rely on is currently missing.

More testing

We’ll be putting our iPhones through their paces over the following days, so if you have any specific questions, please leave them in the page comments and we’ll test and answer as quickly as possible.