I succumbed. I got an iPhone.
It reminds me of the Christmas I was 7 and got the most amazing (to my eyes) dollhouse. I could hardly tear myself away. But unlike a dollhouse, this toy I can take with me.
To my surprise, it’s every bit as gorgeous as the hype led me to believe. I was prepared to be more disappointed than I am.
Of course, it’s not perfect. The biggest disappointment involves my main reason for getting an iPhone — that is, how it renders web pages. It starts to recognize the wireless connection in my house, but then flips over to the cell phone connection, at which point, it costs cell phone time and, worse, it crawls.
The pace it renders web pages reminds me of 1995 on some ancient modem attached to a machine with almost no RAM. Surf the web? Ha. Back in those days, I’d call up web pages and sometimes they’d come in fairly quickly, but sometimes I’d wander off and do little chores, like the dishes, while waiting for it to respond. That’s how slow the iPhone connection is right now.
The good news is web connectivity is likely to improve soon. I’ll either figure out how to configure things differently, or Apple will fix some glitch. No matter what, though, I can’t imagine choosing to call up sites using ATT’s network. In a word, it’s dreadful.
Once you do get to your website of choice, be it church or state, it looks wonderful — like a dollhouse version. It shrinks down as advertised, and zooming in and out is great fun. It doesn’t recognize Flash, so if you have a Flash-dependent site, you’re out of luck. But the biggest issue is once you get to a page, it’s so slow you’re anything but motivated to go to another page.
So for now, my jury is out on the impact of the iPhone on designing church websites. Will you need to design an iPhone friendly version? And if so, what does that mean? Those are still the biggest questions in my mind. I’ll keep you posted as I get more answers.
