Chillin’ at the Apple Store

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kt-at-the-apple-store.jpgBlogging at the King-of-Prussia Mall Starbucks with Kevin Tofel of jkOnTheRun (right) was really just an excuse to get hands-on with an iPhone at the nearby Apple store. Sum-up of my impression: keyboard is difficult but gets easier to use; something I was doing on the touch screen kept kicking me out of applications; EDGE connection is way too slow for Web browsing (don’t know why the Apple store wasn’t using its own Wi-Fi connection); everything about the interface is really, really pretty.

Here’s something interesting about the Apple store, though. There’s now a whole section dedicated to external hard drives (there was a Western Digital, among others) right beside the section dedicated to photo printers (most, if not all, HP). Clearly Apple wants its gadgets to be multimedia hubs, but doesn’t mind if you offload content to another dedicated device for certain functions, like storage and printing. A wise move in my opinion. Though I wonder what the plan is for .mac…

UPDATE: See this post on iPhone storage and .mac

9 thoughts on “Chillin’ at the Apple Store”

  1. I’d imagine they’ve intentionally kept at least one iPhone per store off the Wi-Fi so that you can see what the performance is like on the AT&T network. Worth checking if you have another chance to see what the signal strength is. Suburban malls are notorious for having massive metal structures that really clobber cell signals.

  2. During my iPhone experimentation, every unit I played with (probably a half dozen?) was using the cellular network. It didn’t surprise me at the AT&T store, but I also wondered why they weren’t using WiFi in the mall Apple store. I wonder if they’ve got some sort of in-store repeaters set-up.

  3. Dave,

    Will you just get it over with and buy one of these things? By the way, there are Apple stores closer to DC than the King of Prussia Mall ;)

  5. Oops,

    My sad attempt at humor in my previous comment is not nearly as funny seeing that Mari wrote this post and not Dave. My bad.

  6. Didn’t I say that write-up the other day was my last post on the topic? ;) When they add iChat and stereo Bluetooth plus a music subscription service, I’ll consider a purchase.

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