That’s an enlarged image from BloodhoundBlog on the iPhone. Cathy and I spent about an hour yesterday at the Apple Store at the Fashion Show Mall toying with demo units. We’re rarely early-adopters, so we have no exigent plans to switch, but the phone is a lot of fun to play with.
The iPhone’s strengths are well-documented. We had no trouble figuring things out, and doing things — anything — is a pure delight. But: The phone’s short-comings render it less than ideal as a laptop killer for Realtors:
- As Will Farnsworth reported here, neither Zillow.com’s nor Trulia.com’s mapping seems to work
- Our MLS system did not fail in the Safari browser, but I could not get search pages to fully load, leaving me in doubt about listings pages; this may have been the fault of the MLS system, since I’ve had the same failures in MSIE 6/7
- The YouTube integration is H264 video only (that is, iPod/Apple TV video), not YouTube’s vast library of Flash-based video; if you’re doing iTunes video already, you don’t need to duplicate your content in YouTube
Connectivity over EDGE was not horrible, although the in-store Wi-Fi was much better. Tabbed browsing was wicked easy.
The iPhone needs Flash and Javascript — the essence of AJAX for real estate — but those can easily be added with a software upgrade. I need to satisfy myself that it can handle our MLS system. Beyond that, it was fast, intuitive and fun.
cindy@staged4more says:
On a side note about iPhone. The seafood restaurant Pacific Catch in the iPhone commercial got 300 phone calls the first day iPhone aired. They received calls from all over the country, even as far as Africa. People saw the ad on the internet and was curious about the real restaurant. Its business has drastically boomed! This was on the local news yesterday. Talk about great free publicity, huh?!
Cheers,
Cindy
July 4, 2007 — 8:55 am
Doug Trudeau says:
Researched the iPhone months ago, even blogged on it. Down side for Realtors who need infrared, there is none. So we still need another device to open key locks. Wrote to Apple about it and the benefit of having infrared to over a million Realtors. Their response was that they don’t accept unsolicited requests.
A friend bought one, and we were checking it out. Looked nice for what we saw and did with it. But, still lacking. So, it looks like Palm Treo for me when its time to replace my phone and PDA. I’d like to get the iPhone, but, Apple needs to include infrared before I’ll look at it as a consideration.
July 4, 2007 — 9:13 am