Last Sunday, I got to touch an iPhone for the first time, using a display in an Apple store located a few miles from the apartment.

The iPhone is Apple’s new all-in-one communications device which is part mobile phone, part movie player, part word processor, part mp3 player, and part Internet reader.

As such, this device touches several bases when it comes to usability, but misses out on numerous others.

Now, I knew things weren’t going to be smooth when I called up this website and got the “backdoor” site which I specifically made for low-tech cell phones which don’t read Macromedia Flash.

The next thing I wanted to do was go to YouTube.com to check out the claimed video-playing capabilities. When I went to the actual site through the normal internet connections, I couldn’t play a single video. That’s because YouTube uses Macromedia Flash to play videos on your browser.

Instead, I figured out that you had to do to the specific YouTube interface at the start screen (accessed when you press that recessed button at the bottom of the iPhone). I searched for a video to play. Some of the ones already preloaded were very slow in loading up to play. Others had a very milky quality to the video and were almost unwatchable.

I tried to search for videos on YouTube through the search function, but could not access our vodcasts, or certain videos which I have had a hand in producing over the past four months. Evidently, they haven’t been produced to be played on whatever codec Apple is using for the iPhone.

Now, I’m sure that the innovations that Apple has brought to this device, including the touch-and-drag function to zoom into a certain part of a web page, is going to play a large part in computing devices in the near future. I’m also pretty sure that the sixth generation of iPods will have a touch screen.

As for the rest of the functions? Well, the typing screen is much too small, and it doesn’t allow you to use a stylus, so you can’t really tap out letters with any sort of confidence.

I’ll wait a couple of iterations before considering one for personal use; this one is as clunky as the Newton.