According to David Pogue in the New York Times, the accessibility features like VoiceOver introduced with the iPhone 3GS make it one of the easiest smartphones for the blind and visually impaired:

First, you tap something to hear it. You can tap icons, words, even the tiny status icons at the top of the screen. As you go, the voice tells you what you’re tapping. “Messages.” “Calendar.” “Mail — 14 new items.” “45 percent battery power.”

Once enabled in the settings, Pogue details how new gestures like double-tap to launch, two-finger upward flick to read, three finger flick to scroll or go to next/previous screen, and three finger triple tap to turn the screen off and save power.

You can also use "the rotor", a two finger circle, to change the way other gestures work -- proofreading text character by character rather than word by word, for example.

Supported languages included Bahasa Indonesian, Chinese (Cantonese), Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Dutch, English (US), English (UK), English (Australian), Finnish, French (Canada), French (France), German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), Swedish, Thai, Turkish.

For more on VoiceOver, see Apple's overview.

figure 1: It is with a heavy heart that Pogue informs us that the latest Windows Mobile phone from T-Mobile blows.

David Pogue has an excellent article on how the iPhone really broke down a bunch of barriers in the smartphone world, the best he claims, is "the way Apple took veto power away from the cellphone carriers."

So yeah, that's just the first sentence. The unfortunate part of the article is that most of the rest of it is a review for a T-Mobile Windows Mobile device. The good news is this: if you want to think about how awesome your iPhone is compared to a poorly-implemented Windows Mobile device, the second half of his article will really interest you. There's a silver lining in every cloud, right?

It looks like David Pogue (of the NY Times) and Steven Levy (of Newsweek) have finished their respective reviews. The gist of it is this: all the hype? They say it's more or less well-deserved.

• they did not get quite as much battery life as Apple has recently advertised, though I'm guessing they didn't condition the battery fully before using it (24 hrs or at least overnight). Pogue says charge every other day, Levy says every day
• it takes a few more key strokes than Pogue would like to make a call, he marks the call quality as average. Levy doesn't mention sound quality but loves the extra features and conference calls.
• both loved the ease of setup, calendar, iPhoto, mail, and Safari's web browsing.
• Levy loved Google Maps; Pogue longed for GPS but thought of live traffic as a swell consolation prize.
• Both longed for instant messaging instead of just SMS, and both mention the space for more apps on the main screen.
• Pogue noted the lack of Adobe's Flash and Sun's Java, Levy noted the absence of Flash, Windows Media, and Real Media.
• both mentioned the resilience of the touch screen -- Pogue had no scratch marks; Levy had only some and put it in the same pocket as keys and coins.
• AT&T's network is the big iffy part, and both complained of EDGE speeds: Pogue

  "almost ached for a dial-up modem."

• Pogue thinks the keyboard issue is overblown and that most people will get used to it fine, Levy says he's still having trouble with it and it took a few days just to get single finger typing down. Quoth Levy:

  "If you are considering a phone primarily to monitor and reply to mail, you may stick to your Blackberry."

  Quoth Pogue:

  "... still, text entry is not the iPhone’s strong suit. The BlackBerry won’t be going away anytime soon."

• Pogue's article title is "The iPhone Matches Most of its Hype" (and there is a lot of hype -- as I said before, if hype was gold, I'd be a leprechaun), and his closing feelings:

  "But even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles. In other words, maybe all the iPhone hype isn’t hype at all. As the ball player Dizzy Dean once said, 'It ain’t bragging if you done it.'"

• Levy's review is best summed up with another quote:

  "So smart consumers may well wait for [later iPhone hardward and software revisions]. But meanwhile they can only look with envy as the person sitting next to them to them on the subway, or standing ahead of them in the Whole Foods line, is enjoying the phone that finally fulfills the promise of people-friendly palm-top communication and computing."

Whole foods here we come!