A couple of weeks ago I went to Pittsburgh for what I thought would be a day trip.  Since I was headed back that evening, I didn’t take my laptop, but because of thunderstorms across the Eastern Seaboard, my sojourn turned into an overnight stay.  So I had an opportunity to give a good workout to something I had received the previous day:  a review unit of Apple’s eagerly awaited (boy, that’s an understatement) iPhone.

During my travels and airport delays, I was able to keep up with my e-mail, negotiate my way around the downtown, get tips on the city from an old friend whose number I don’t normally have handy, check the weather conditions in New York and D.C., monitor baseball scores and blogs, listen to an early Neil Young concert and amuse myself with silly YouTube videos and an episode of “Weeds,” all on a single charge before the battery ran down. Now, just about all those things could have been done by devices that are already out on the market. But considering I’d had the iPhone for just a day, and never taken a glance at a manual, it was an impressive introduction.  In contrast, I’ve had a Motorola handset for two years and am still baffled at its weird approach to Web browsing and messaging.   What’s more, with the exception of learning to type on the iPhone, which requires some concentration, doing all those things on that five-ounce device was fun, in the same way that switching from an old command-line interface to the Macintosh graphical user interface in the mid-1980s was a kick.  And when I showed the iPhone to people during that trip and in the days afterward—especially people under 25—the most common reaction was, “I have to have this,” sometimes followed by a quick, if alarmingly reckless,  consideration of what might need to be pawned in order to make the purchase.

And there it is: one of the most hyped consumer products ever comes pretty close to justifying the bombast.  Apple has a history of using cutting-edge technology, slick design and friendly software to break the common logjam in which our machines have the capability to perform certain tasks, but developers haven’t figured out how to make the experience easy, even pleasurable, for users. That’s one reason why people, especially the tens of millions who love iPods, have been so eagerly awaiting the iPhone. “Everyone we talk to hates their phones—it’s universal,” Steve Jobs told me on a call to my iPhone a couple of days ago.  (The control-freaky Apple CEO was just checking up to see how I was doing.) If you’re looking for quibbles, flaws and omissions, you’ll certainly find them in this first version of the iPhone.  (I’ll get to these below.) But the bottom line is that the iPhone is a significant leap. It’s a superbly engineered, cleverly designed and imaginatively implemented approach to a problem that no one has cracked to date: merging a phone handset, an Internet navigator and a media player in a package where every component shines, and the features are welcoming rather than foreboding.  The iPhone is the rare convergence device that actually converges.

Read the rest of the review 

The fifth annual “D” Conference, run by the Wall Street Journal with hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, was so full of digiluminaries that nearly every time the name of some tech macher was invoked, the person in question was spotted in the audience. The highlight of the event was a joint appearance by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs -- closer to a lovefest than a smackdown, but not without some barbed interchanges or two. (Like when Jobs mentioned how much he liked Bill’s Zune team because “they’re our customers” for iPod.)

There were also a host of new products, news of which was embargoed until their release at the conference. I’ve already covered one in depth: Microsoft Surface. Here’s a rundown of a few more. Please note that these are not official product reviews--none of them have undergone careful evaluation in the field:

The New Table Top System: Microsoft's Surface computer

The first example of Microsoft Surface is a table, just short of two feet high, with a 21-by-42-inch top. Under a sheet of acrylic is a 30-inch hi-res horizontal display. That's all you see—the five camera-sensors, the DLP light engine, and the Vista computer that makes it all run are hidden, encased in the body of what looks like a more-fashionable version of the original Pong game. (Presumably, the device runs a version of Vista that doesn't ask you all the time if you're sure you want to proceed.) But the impact of all that hardware is evident as soon as you touch the "massively multi-touch" surface. The machine can process dozens of inputs at once, from one person or a group. Whether you're doing virtual finger painting, moving digital images around like physical pieces of paper, or pointing to something on a map and getting information on that spot, it's clear that the standard sci-fi movie vision of having people interact with virtual surfaces as if they're real (see "Tron," “Minority Report” and many other flicks) has now arrived.