HOORAY, the NFL is back! And with a Thursday game, too…

Redskins @ New Jersey Giants(-4)
OK, so the Giants have less pass rush, but then, the ‘Skins have Jason Campbell at QB. I guess he’s not so bad, but somehow I just don’t like the Redskins on the road, so I’ll give the points.

Well, OK, maybe not ever, but it’s fantastic. I love Mythbusters…

So, having been educated as an engineer, I find the notion of conservation of various properties to be fundamentally correct: conservation of mass, energy, angular momentum, etc.

Thinking about this year’s Olympics, I believe there is another quantity which is conserved: age of athletes. By now everybody knows about the controversy surrounding the age of the Chinese women’s gymnastics team. I mean, really, my seven-year-old has more mature facial features than some of those girls.

However, I think this is actually a necessary event. Why? Think of the Little League World Series; there’s an event with the opposite problem. Some of those “kids” have been shaving for five years, no matter what their Dominican birth certificates say.

I think, in fact, that’s what happened—since age can neither be created nor destroyed, and the Chinese needed a few extra years, they got ‘em from the Dominican Republic. Conservation of age.

I hear there are some hockey players in Ontario in under-18 leagues who have some years they’re willing to unload, cheap…

When I first got my iPhone I was leaving town the next day and so I needed a case right away. I wanted something grippy but which was small enough so that I could still keep the phone in my pocket, and to provide a little protection if (OK, when) I drop the phone. There were few choices in the Apple Store, so I left with an InCase Protective Cover, which set me back a cool $30. That seemed steep to me but I didn’t have time to order something on line or to go to another store, so I forked it over.

However, after returning from the first of my many trips, I discovered the HandHelditems Looper case, which comes in more (and better) colors, comes with a screen protector, and is one-third the price. Because I wanted the blue, I went ahead and bought one.

It’s almost exactly the same thickness as the InCase one and has nearly the same pattern on the back. The silicone is a slightly different composition but it’s just as grippy. The hole cut for the “ringer off” switch is better cut on the InCase but the strip across the bottom for access to the dock connector is better on the HHI case. These are highly comparable products—except of course on price.

Unless you really love the pink you can get with the InCase (but can’t for HHI), don’t make the mistake I did; go and get the HHI, not the InCase.

Testing, testing… This is a test of blogging from my iPhone. If you can see this post, then it worked!

I did not have a first-generation iPhone so many of my comments and impressions will not be specific to the 3G iPhone, but rather be impressions of just having an iPhone in general, though of course some will be 3G-specific.

Anyway, one week ago today I stood in line at the Baybrook Mall Apple Store to get an iPhone. I got there a little after 7:30 in the morning and I walked out with with my black 16G iPhone 3G at around 1:30 in the afternoon, so it took me about five hours. It wasn’t so bad as I spent the bulk of the time finishing a very nice novel, The Name of the Wind. My observation was that the reason the line took so long was because a lot of customers weren’t actually ready. The Apple Store employees handed out a little list of what you needed, but once I was in the store it was possible to see how much variance there was in how long it took to process each customer. It took about five minutes for them to process me, but some people were sitting there with Apple Store employees for upwards of 45 minutes, much of it with the customer on their (previous) cell phone. I think a lot of people just didn’t bother to prepare in advance, and that’s what cost everybody so much time.

The reason I bothered to wait in the line the first day was not because of some desire to have it immediately, but because I was leaving the next day to do a month of traveling and traveling is when I most wish I had an iPhone, and I knew the first trip of the four I was taking would really push the iPhone, so I was determined to get one early on.

Activation
I didn’t have even the slightest bit of trouble with activation. I guess by the time I got home from the mall that all those problems had been sorted out, but there was no glitch for me. I’ll count myself as one of the lucky ones.

App Store
Of course, one of the first things I went to do once my iPhone was up and running was head on over to the App Store. I think Apple did a good job with this, as it’s both easy to find and install apps. There are many great free apps, my personal favorite so far is NetNewsWire (I realize it could be better, of course, but for free it’s nice). Having your RSS reader which syncs perfectly with my desktop news reader is fantastic. I also like VoiceNotes as a free voice recorder and I think PhoneSaber is hilarious. PocketPedia is also wonderful, as are the free news apps Mobile News (from the AP) and NYTimes. And I have an AppleTV at home, so Apple’s Remote is also excellent. Overall the App Store appears to be a huge win, and serves as a reminder that the iPhone is really a mobile computer with a phone on it, not just a fancy phone. Oh, and can’t forget PCalc.

As an iPod
Hardly novel, I know, since there are two ways to get the iPod features like this, both the iPod Touch and the original iPhone have this functionality. However, I have to say I really like the iPhone as a video iPod. I like to watch movies when I’m on an airplane, and my 5g video iPod screen is just barely tolerable for this. The iPhone is much better as a movie watching device. Oh, here’s how this is 3G-relevant: 16G means there’s actually enough space for movies; a 4G iPhone would be useless here.

GPS
I’ve never owned any kind of GPS device before and I thought that having GPS on the iPhone would be neat, but I didn’t know how really useful it would be. Turns out it’s fantastic, at least when traveling. Normally I’m very good with directions and navigation, but sometimes when reality doesn’t line up with my mental model (in particular, a highway in Rochester, NY stops being a highway and I became unsure I’d still be able to use that road to get where I was going). GPS let me know all would be well. However, the really killer use was with location-aware applications; I wanted to stop at a drugstore in Erie, PA (a place I don’t know at all) and found the nearest drugstore with the “iWant” application, which I downloaded right when I realized I might want it. iWant was right on the money. I will never go back to not having this. I expect someone will come up with a nice dash-mount kit for the iPhone soon, and when TomTom or whoever else comes up with a nice audio turn-by-turn bit of software for it, I’ll be all over that as well.

Battery Life and 3G vs. EDGE
I knew the 3G battery life wouldn’t be fantastic, but I didn’t realize how not-fantastic it would be. I’m going to have to keep chargers everywhere—home, office, car, at least—because I’m clearly going to have days where the thing won’t make it the full day on one charge. That’s kind of a drag. In some sense, that’s not really a surprise, though, as the original reason cited for not including 3G in the original iPhone is power requirements for 3G. And, apparently, the iPhone 3G does OK on battery life for a 3G device (apparently they all suck). I found that switching to EDGE-only makes the battery last for ages, but of course EDGE is a lot slower; why get a 3G device just to use EDGE? Good question, though I find that EDGE is tolerable for text-only newsfeed reading, but horrible for things like Web pages and app downloading. (This is the same for email, by the way: for text-only email EDGE is OK, but for attachments one needs 3G.) And 3G is definitely good enough to be acceptable for Web browsing and the like.

Gestalt
The whole is much greater than the sum of all the parts. I love having all of these functions in my pocket. While of course better battery life would be great, I think the current state is tolerable. In fact, I’d have to say this is a huge leap forward; this is a reasonable chunk of having a real computer which is always available. Frankly, this is a fantastic device. It is immediately clear to me that it will be worth putting up with AT&T’s crappy plans and all the rest. There was a time in my life—very brief, I’ll admit—where I carried a cell phone, an iPod (3rd gen), and a Palm V with me, and I still didn’t feel like any of these quite had it right. Well, now I have better than all three of them in a single package, only the iPhone absolutely crushes the Palm as a mobile computing platform. I’m much more of a techie than a phone user, but I have to have a phone. This fits what I want incredibly well.

Competitors
Now, I admit that I haven’t owned any of the more recent competitors to the iPhone 3G, though I have played with a few of them at least a little. Having now seen what really makes the iPhone work for me I can’t see how most of them would stand up to it, at least for me. YMMV, of course; just because the alternatives aren’t better for me doesn’t mean I believe that’s true for everyone else. (You listening, BlackBerry fanboys?)

One of the things competitors like the Instinct advertise is that they also have a touch screen. Ugh, talk about missing the point. Yeah, the touch screen is great, but what kind of software do you have behind it? Is it a real Web browser or the typical mobile piece of crap? Can you just touch to select, or can you use gestures meaningfully like on the iPhone? What about third-party applications which integrate with other features like the GPS? Got any of that? No? Then I don’t care if you sell for $70 less than an iPhone; you’re not really on the same playing field, at least for me.

The obvious real competitor is BlackBerry. The only ‘Berry I’ve played with much is the Pearl, which is a pretty stripped-down model. I’m sure the Bold is (err, will be) much better overall—but will the Web browser still suck? Regardless, the Bold will have a lot of stuff on it that the iPhone lacks and only a complete idiot wouldn’t acknowledge that it’s a legitimate competitor. For me, the physical keyboard is one of the major drawbacks of the Bold. Most of the time I’m using the iPhone, I’m not typing. Reading news feeds, surfing the Web, playing games, looking at the GPS, etc.: for those things I don’t need a keyboard and, more importantly, I don’t want to give up the screen space to have it. When I need it, it’s there. Now, if my primary use was email, that might be different. I have read and composed email on my iPhone and it works fine, but that’s only one of many uses. So, for me, the Bold would not be better, but I can see how it would be for some people. BlackBerry seems to be getting that and we’ll see what the Thunder actually brings to the table (it’d better be more than 1G of on-board storage, that’s for sure). Personally I’m hoping the Thunder is awesome so that Apple will be forced to respond, ultimately raising the bar for all phones.

Still, having said all these wonderful things about the iPhone, I’d have to be a fool to miss the fact that it’s not perfect. Some of this stuff I mentioned before I even had one, and having one has demonstrated that these things do indeed bug me, plus some more that I hadn’t thought of at the time:

Desiderata
• MMS. OK, I didn’t think I’d really care about the lack of MMS, but it turns out that I was wrong (that happens a lot). Frankly, I’d much rather send and receive images and such in email, particularly since the iPhone handles email so well. However, other people have MMS, and can send me an MMS, and I can’t read one easily. What happens when someone sends one to my iPhone is AT&T sends me SMS with a URL and login/password to a web site where I can view the original message—as an SWF. Ugh. I’d MUCH rather just see everyone switch to email, but that probably won’t happen soon. I’d much prefer AT&T take the incoming MMS and turn it into an email rather than deliver it as a crappy Web page. I know, hoping for something from AT&T is like hoping for a no-mudslinging political campaign. Oh well. It’s still not a big deal but it’d be nice if this were fixed.
• Modem. I’d still like to use my iPhone as a modem for my laptop, either tethered or via Bluetooth.
• Keyboard. No, I don’t want a physical keyboard built into the phone—screen real estate is still the limiting factor for many things, as I said—but if I have a Bluetooth keyboard handy, I’d like to be able to use it, to continue to preserve that precious screen space.
• Copy and paste. I haven’t wanted it nearly as often as I’d have thought, but when I have, I’ve been annoyed to not have it. In particular, when replying to an email, I want to quote only a part of it, not the whole thing, and there’s no easy way to make this happen on the iPhone.
• Voice dialing is coming from a third party, or so I’ve been led to believe. Sooner would be better.

I still can’t believe all the hate out there leveled at the camera and lack of video recording. Look, I’ve seen pictures taken with 4 and 5 MP cell phone cameras, and you know what? They aren’t much better than the 2 MP pictures from iPhones. Why? Because there is a lot more to picture quality than megapixels. In particular, there’s the issue of a decent lens/optics, and virtually none of those are going to be solved dramatically better on a cell phone platform; throwing more pixels at the problem means virtually nothing. If you want good pictures/video, buy a dedicated camera; you can get a really nice 7-8 MP pocket-size job from Canon or Sony or whoever for like $150. If pictures are that important to you, it should be well worth it. Cell phone cameras are for quick-and-dirty snapshots, and that’s it, no matter how many MPs are stamped on the thing.

As I suspected, the lack of voice dialing on the iPhone is going to be tackled by third-party developers. Here’s the first entry into the area that I’ve found: iSpeak.

So, AT&T just announced the iPhone 3G pricing plans. The individual plans are basically what was expected: $30/month above the regular wireless plan for unlimited visual voicemail and 3G data, plus additional charges for SMS messaging. Yes, it’s more expensive than the original iPhone plan but the the phone is cheaper and you get faster data plus GPS, so that’s all fine by me.

But then look at the family plans. The entry level family plan (700 minutes) is $130/month. How much is a non-iPhone 700 minute per month family plan? $70/month. That’s double the $30 upcharge for an individual plan—why? And do note that’s not for two lines of 3G data, since additional iPhone lines are $40; non-iPhone family plans have additional lines at $10/month, so there’s the extra $30 for 3G data. So what’s the extra $30/month for? It makes no sense. But wait, it gets worse: there’s only one option for SMS for family plans, which is $30/month for unlimited SMS. What if someone only wants a few hundred messages to share among the family members? Nope, gotta pay an outrageous 20 cents per SMS there; no $5/month for 200 messages like with the individual plans.

So, if I want to get an iPhone and my wife wants to have the same service provider as me so we only have one monthly bill and get free calls to each other, but she doesn’t want an iPhone, it’s actually cheaper for us to get entirely separate plans, as an iPhone individual plan with 200 SMS is $75/month and the basic AT&T non-iPhone individual plan is $40/month which comes to a total bill of $115/month. The entry level family plan is, as noted, $130/month and includes no SMS. Is that completely moronic or have I missed something? By making family plans more expensive (not less, which is the usual model), AT&T appears to be actively trying to discourage people from switching their family on to AT&T if only one family member wants an iPhone. Brilliant business strategy

Ugh. I think maybe my wife will just keep T-Mobile, since they have a $30/month individual plan.

There are no shortage of iPhone naysayers out there, and one of the criticisms has been the service provider. That appears to be a pretty valid point.

So, what marketing genius wants to take credit for the family pricing plans?

I guess it could be worse, I could be in Canada.

So, the big event finally arrived, the new iPhone is out there, or at least the specs are. And, of course, several people have asked me for my thoughts, so I thought I’d blog it so I only have to answer once.

First and foremost, way cool. 3G speed is awesome and full GPS is a really nice bonus. I don’t have a strong reaction either way to the plastic (as opposed to the old aluminum). It would be great if the whole thing could have been thinner, but the total size is about the same and that’s OK. With 3G and better battery life (well, more or less), I wasn’t really expecting them to be able to make it smaller.

What I am bummed about is the later release date; I was hoping for the June 18th date that was a popular number on the blogosphere. It’s not so much the waiting I mind as the timing—I’m going off on a family camping trip with all my zillion in-laws starting on July 13; not exactly the prime environment to tinker with a new techie toy, you know? And this looks to be a good toy.

The fact that you can’t buy them on-line, and the perception that you have to have it activated right there in either the Apple Store or an AT&T store is kind of a drag. (Though there’s a hint that such activation won’t actually be required; this will need to be sorted out.) If I do decide to try to get one right on the 11th, I’ll have to try to decide where to make the attempt. There’‘s an iPhone-supporting AT&T store right around the corner from my house but I’d kind of rather get one at an Apple store, especially if there’s going to be a long wait while they activate everybody. Then I have to guess which Apple store (there are three within reasonable distance of me) to head over to at 5am. Yes, I’ll probably get up really early to try to get one on the 11th. Well, probably, anyway.

The piles of new software for this thing (actually, for any iPhone) look to be amazing. I was completely blown away by the game demos. I’m not really all that much of a gamer, but just the fact you could even run something like Kroll on an iPhone is impressive. I thought the AP application was also pretty cool; for free, too, which is excellent.

There are some other topics to be attacked yet, though, which even deserve their own headings:

Price
Hooray for the price drop; one has to think at $200 they’ll sell these as fast as they can make them.

However, as some people have noted, AT&T’s price for unlimited data will be $10/month more with the 3G data plan, meaning that in a 2-year contract you ultimately pay $240 more in fees to AT&T. This, some are saying, means the iPhone 3G is actually more expensive. Nonsense, it’s still cheaper. I mean, yes, the total number of dollars you’ll shell out over two years will be higher, but the value of money isn’t constant over time. Besides inflation, there’s inherent value in deferring payment. Let’s say you’re buying something non-techie—a couch. There are two choices: pay $600 now, or pay $300 now and $300 in one year. Which do you think most consumers would choose? It’s the same amount of money but people will not be indifferent to the choice.

So, overall, I’d say the price situation has improved, but of course it’s not effectively half the price, as the Apple Web site is claiming. Frankly, for 3G and GPS, I would have been willing to pay more, so I still think this is a win.

I will admit that I wonder how the new iPhone pricing by AT&T will fit in with all their other stuff. When I switch to AT&T my wilfe will almost certainly want to switch as well. And, since I have AT&T for my home landline and DSL, how does this fit in with AT&T’s package deals? If I could get the package deal AT&T just offered me ($99/month for landline, DSL, and family wireless plan) and just add the $30/month for unlimited iPhone data on top of that, I’d be on that like white on rice.

Bummer Missing Features
Some things about the 3G/2.0 situation aren’t entirely clear. You’d kind of think that the lack of copy-paste would be fixed in software; is this part of the 2.0 software? I would hope so, but if not, well, shame on you, Apple. That’s just dumb.

I am very surprised that it doesn’t have voice dialing on it. However, since the address book is part of the core API, I’d be even more surprised if some third-party developer doesn’t release a voice dialer almost right away. So maybe this will be OK. Still a bit odd.

The other feature I’m even more bummed not to see is support for using the iPhone as a modem. At 3G speed, this would actually be worthwhile. If the phone supports 3G and Bluetooth, why shouldn’t I be able to use it to connect my laptop at 3G speeds? I’m not going to pay an additional $60/month or whatever to buy a 3G laptop access card when I’m already paying for unlimited 3G data. I think Apple really missed the boat on this one, though I wonder how much pressure they got from AT&T about this.

Expected Missing Features
As in, I didn’t expect Apple to do these anyway, though it would be nice if they did. Expandable storage via MicroSD or some such would be a bonus, but it’s not that big a deal. When the original iPhone was released I said I was hoping for more like 12GB for $500 and now it’s 16GB for $300, so I think the storage situation is at least OK.

I guess I was a little surprised that they didn’t include some kind of flash for the camera, but this isn’t really a deal-breaker for me as I don’t take a lot of cell phone pics now (my current phone doesn’t have a flash either), and it just isn’t that big a thing for me.

Irrelevant Missing Features
Of course, here I mean “irrelevant to me.” I don’t care about video recording (I don’t know if anyone else has bothered to point this out, but videos recorded on cell phones universally suck). My current phone has video recording and I never, ever use it. Since the iPhone has a full email client, the lack of MMS isn’t that big a deal; I’ll just email photos or put them up in an on-line gallery anyway. (MobileMe actually looks pretty good, by the way; this looks to be a real improvement9 over .Mac. assuming it actually works as advertised.) Lack of stereo Bluetooth is also radically overblown; the sound quality of your typical BT headset is so low that this hardly matters; I’ll use wired buds or cans when I care about audio quality, A2DP or not. I also don’t really care about the lack of Adobe Flash support, either—Flash also pretty much sucks, and I try to avoid Flash-based sites on my desktop as it is. If anything, the lack of Flash on the iPhone and the market share Apple will command might actually encourage Web developers to stop using Flash, which IMO is actually a win.

So, on Friday I test drove four cars. As I noted in that day’s entry, I love my 2002 Mazda Protege5. However, it is getting a bit long in the tooth and I wouldn’t mind a more updated car in terms of saftey and gizmos—and I’d love something faster, of course. I love the size and handling of my Pro5 so I’m looking for something like that; a fast small car with good handling and updated content. Automatic transmissions need not apply. Now, I have two kids (they’re still small) so a strict coupe is out. To be honest, I also don’t really need a new car right now, as my Pro5 has been rock solid. But I just got a raise so it’s fun to look.

The good news is that there are some great cars in this segment and I liked everything I drove. These are all worthy cars and any one of them would be terrific. Of course, I liked some of them better than others. In worst-to-first order:

4th: Honda Civic Si
While overall I liked this the least—but let me be clear, I did like it—the Si has a fantastic shifter. Totally smooth, perfect snick into each gate. On the other hand, this is probably the slowest and worst-handling of the four. The steering wheel provides a little less feedback, the ride is a little too smooth, and it has the standard VTEC engine “torqueless wonder” problem. It’s possible to coax decent response out of the engine, but the thing is almost completely gutless until you hit about 6000 rpm. Now, this is actually doable, but requires a lot of rowing with the shifter. That’s actually kind of fun, but fundamentally the car just doesn’t seem as tight and responsive as the other three. The low torque is indeed smoother when not pushing the car and there’s something to be said for that, but it’s just not enough. Also, this particular Si didn’t have the upgraded tires, so perhaps it would have been better, but it just didn’t stick to the road the way the other cars did.

Also, I have to comment on the utterly inane speedometer. Digital speedometers are a horrible idea. It was a horrible idea on GM cars in the late 1980s, it’s horrible on the Prius, and it’s horrible in the Si. Rate of change is almost impossible to assess, it creates distracting flicker for night driving, and pretty much nobody wants to know that their speed is 57. Maybe the driver wants to know if s/he is above 55 and below 60, which is a very quick glance at an analog speedometer (is the needle in the region I care about or not?) but is harder with a digital. It’s just a bad idea.

Also, a comment to all floor sales managers: when you’ve talked to a customer who has clearly done his homework and knows rather a lot about the car, don’t send a sales guy on the test drive who knows nothing at all about it.

3rd: Subaru Impreza WRX 5-Door
The recent re-design of the Impreza line is pretty substantial in some ways and not in others. It’s a very similar engine, though the improvement in the size of the power band is certainly welcome. The body and interior are totally different, and IMO much improved. The old wagon (5-door, whatever) was ugly, and the interior more than a little on the Spartan side. The 2008 WRX has a dramatically more comfortable and well-appointed interior, and I’m in the camp that thinks the exterior also looks a lot better, too.

The ride is also a lot smoother. In fact, it’s too smooth. It still handles very well, but it’s not as stiff and responsive as the old WRX. The AWD is nice and offsets this a little bit, but Subaru’s obvious attempt to “go mainstream” here went a just a smidge too far and it took the fun edge off just enough that this car came in a bit behind the other two—but only a little bit.

In some sense the WRX is the jack-of-all-trades, but master of none. It’s not as fast and the cabin, while nicer, is still not as nice the Mazda. It isn’t as fun and with the content of the MINI, but rather strikes a nice balance between those other cars. But this is a race where I felt like one car had to be the winner at something, and this wins only at having AWD, which is nice but really not all that big a deal here. The AWD also makes it the big loser at the pump. Considering that this isn’t the high-miles car in the family (that’s our hybrid), that’s not my primary concern, but 25 highway? Really? Seems pretty awful.

Second comment to car salespeople: being knowledgeable about your product is good, but if you spend half your contact time with me denigrating the competing cars, that makes me think that that’s all you have. Sell me on what’s great about your car, not what you think are the flaws of the other cars. If your product is actually superior, that should be good enough.

2nd: Mazda MazdaSPEED3
This is the sub-$25,000 compact car equivalent of being shot out of a cannon. The Speed3 is just teeth-rattling fast. Given the numbers—263 horsepower and a whopping 280 lb.-ft. of torque—this is not a surprise. However, throwing that at the front wheels, well, it seems like a recipe for the worst torque steer ever. What was the most amazing thing to me about the Speed3 is how well-controlled the torque steer is. Apparently the computer works the limited-slip differential and limits turbo boost to manage the torque steer—and it works impressively well. Besides that, the handling is tight and responsive and feedback from the road through both wheel and tires is excellent. Certainly some people won’t like the ride—it’s very stiff—but I rather like it that way. It’s communicative and the tires seem good and sticky.

And it’s strikingly well-appointed—the interior is outstanding, particularly for a car in this price range. The driver’s seat is very good, the ergonomics are sound, the backseat and cargo area are generous (36.3” of rear legroom, which is more than some mid-size sedans); this is a terrific car, practical as well as a kick to drive. And the price is sweet. (Though I’d have to seriously consider factoring in extra expense for speeding tickets.)

I have four minor quibbles: you can’t get a moon roof (laugh if you want, but being able to vent hot air when parked in the Houston summer is not a trivial feature; note that the WRX lacks this as well), the color choices don’t appeal to me (they just dropped both the blue and the silver), no daytime running lights, and there’s a couple minor creature features I’d like (Bluetooth and real iPod integration), though those are indeed minor features. The other thing which was kind of a gotcha for me was the shifter. I think the problem is that in so many other ways it’s similar to my current car, but the gates are closer together in the Speed3 than in mine (which makes sense, since it’s a 6-speed) that sometimes I’d miss, particularly the 3rd gear gate. I think I’d get used to that in, oh, about two days. Or maybe the shifter really is a bit notchier than the other three. Hard to say for sure.

Fundamentally, this is the sensible choice. It’s what I should get if I were to replace my current car. In fact, if I really were going to replace my car now what I really ought to do is go back to the dealer on Monday and grab the last blue one before they’re all gone.

1st: MINI Cooper S (and Cooper Clubman)
I know, the MINI just seems so wildly impractical, but the new “Clubman” version seemed like it could be just big enough that with two small kids it could work.

Now, let me be clear. I am, generally, not into “retro.” However, there is something about the look of the MINI that just really grabs me. And, of course, being a lover of small cars, the size is just wonderfully appealing. But of course with two kids, the pure coupe—I don’t relish the idea of climbing over to buckle and unbuckle our 4-year-old—and the nearly zero trunk just would not work. But the Clubman looked good on paper (well, on the Web), so I had to check it out.

The dealer didn’t have a Clubman S. This is hardly a surprise, the Clubman is very new and they’re still pretty hard to come by. However, the dealer had a regular Clubman and of course many Cooper Ss, so I drove the one Clubman and an S.

First, the Clubman is a trip. When I first saw it, I had to say my impression was that of a really miniature limo—it looks just like a regular Cooper, but stretched out. I mean, it’s really not all that stretched out; the Clubman is only 9.5 inches longer, bringing the total length of the car up to 155 inches, which is still 16” shorter than my Pro5. And it drives… like a MINI. That is, spectacular road feel. The whole marketing brochure nonsense about “go-kart handling” is, in fact, not just marketing nonsense. There’s a button marked “Sport” in the car which tightens up the steering and improves throttle response—I don’t know why anyone would ever even consider turning that button off. (Well, OK, actually I do: supposedly the car delivers better mileage that way.)

And the Cooper S is just fantastic. No, it’s not rocket-fast like the Speed3, but the road feel on the MINI is just so much better than the other three cars that it feels almost as fast. The shifter is great, a very close second to the Honda, and the feedback through the steering wheel was easily the best. The cockpit is, of course, a little quirky. The truly gigantic center-mounted speedometer is weird, but unlike the speedo in the Si, this turned out not to bother me at all. I dislike the power window control not being in the door (it’s on the center console), but the driving position, pedals, and steering wheel are all very well-configured. It is simply a blast to drive. Hands down, the most fun driving experience of the four.

Being a BMW brand, just about every feature under the sun is available on these. There are a zillion options, from checkered flag side markers to Bluetooth and full iPod integration. Obviously this means it’s possible to really jack up the price, but all the gizmos are certainly available. The BMW thing also means reliability is only about average, but all maintenance included for the first 3 years/36,000 miles. The boys will outgrow the bitty backseat in not too long, so three years of total coverage would probably do the trick—that’s probably about how long I’d keep it anyway; I’d probably lease.

Oh, and the mileage is crazy good: 26 city, 34 highway. The salesman reset the trip computer when I took the wheel on the S, and I drove it very hard and still pulled 24 mpg for the trip. Again, not my primary concern but it certainly would offset the price tag a little.

And there’s no issue with color choice on the MINI. Gorgeous British Racing Green, anyone? Check this out:

As much as I’d love to jump in and lease it right now, the wait on an order for a Clubman S is now 16 weeks. Four months is quite a while. So, I think I’m going to wait for a while longer and see if availability improves and see what kind of track record the Clubman generates over the next year or so. But it’s wild good fun and I’m very positively inclined.

Always park bonnet out, right?