Jul
2
my iPhone review
July 2, 2007 | 5 Comments
Yes, I went out on Friday afternoon and waited in line to buy an iPhone. We don’t have an Apple store here, but we have two AT&T stores (within a mile of each other). So we picked the one outside the mall. We honestly figured there was not going to be a line, that my wife and I would be the only two people there. Luckily, we were wrong. We were 12th and 13th in line. We got there about 4:30. Just 2 minutes after getting there and finding a nice hard piece of the sidewalk to sit on, a rep from the AT&T store came out and explained the process. He handed out numbers so no one could cut in line. I don’t think he was expecting any more people to show. He informed us we could only buy 1 unit per person. Kind of lame, Apple said we could buy 2 and we planned on it.
Around 4:45 the local media stations arrived. One setup their cameras right in front of us. The lady next to me was nervous. She was supposed to be at her nephew’s birthday party! I was elected to do the interviews. One for the 5:30 show on one station, and one for the 6:00 show on another station. The reporter (Corinne Rose) was awesome. She hung out with us in line the whole time, very cool.
The iPhone in Fort Wayne from mkrisher and Vimeo.
So, 6 came and we were quickly in the store. My wife went in and got hers and then I went in next. While my wife was in, she heard a guy in the back room say something about half way through, which would work out to them having about 25 units. I was first surprised by the line, and second surprised that a store in weeee little Fort Wayne received more than 2 units. So, we got there, waiting in line about an hour and half, got interviewed by two news stations, and both went home with cool little boxes. We had a great time.
So, onto getting home and activating. I wasn’t up to date on OS X10.4.10, argh! Software Update died three times trying to grab it. Luckily, Apple posted a DMG. Got it, iTunes 7.3 and quickly ran through the process of activation. Pretty smooth for both my wife and I. I had been on T-Mobile for almost 7 years now, and the number port went smooth. My wife will get hit with an early termination fee since she was still on contract with Verizon. But we both really thought the activation was well done through iTunes. We finished up the iTunes part of activation about 15 minutes before the West Coast folks started their activations. Once activated and sync’d we headed for dinner.
While at dinner we received our confirmation emails and SMS letting us know our accounts were active, our numbers were ported, and we could start making and receiving calls. Only took about twenty to thirty minutes. The whole thing was really easy for us.
Next, the first impressions. The screen is amazing. The UI is living up to the hype. We have not seen a mobile device, specifically a smart phone, with this well done of a UI. And I don’t just mean pretty graphics. The multi-touch is really cool. The keyboard does take some getting used to. My wife has a hard time using it because of her nails. Women with nails will have extra work to do with the onscreen keyboard and multi-touch for sure.
The email client is nice. Not as advanced as others, but for a first version, it is nice. The inline view of attachments is something I’ve become used to with Mail.app on my PowerBook. I would like small things like being able to turn off ‘quoting of original message’ when replying. A lot of times, quoting the message you are responding to is not needed and just eats up bandwidth. But overall, email on the iPhone is acceptable.
The version of Safari, I haven’t really played with yet. I loaded a couple of pages including a LinkedIn invite, I received, and was able to login and accept the invite. If that is a test, the iPhone passed. And I don’t think EDGE is as bad as we people were saying. My T-Mobile data connection was no faster. Some people with Verizon EVDO might be spoiled, but overall EDGE works.
The iPod features are cool. I like being able to use speakerphone with the iPod songs. The scrolling Cover Flow is awesome. Flipping through your album covers with your finger is engaging. It “feels” really good. I haven’t tried purchased video yet. The YouTube video works well. I’ve never been into YouTube, but quickly finding videos through the YouTube app is kind of cool. The video quality isn’t the best, but that’s a YouTube user thing more than a YouTube thing or even an iPhone thing.
Photos is cool as well. Kind of like flipping through albums in the iPod, flipping through photos is equally cool.
The biggest selling point for this phone, is going to be the user’s showing it to other people. Flipping through photos and album art is impressive to the average “I use my phone to make calls” cellphone user.
The phone has some great features, like quickly adding a third party to a call. The interface works. Dialing from contacts is easy, and if you have a lot of contacts put your most used contacts into your favorites list for speed dialing. The voice quality seems to be right on par with my Nokias. I actually find dialing numbers and making calls easier to do on the iPhone than I do a phone with a tactile qwerty keyboard like my E60 just because of where the number buttons are placed in the grand scheme of the keyboard.
Back to the UI a little. I thought the one and only “home” button was a little funky when I saw the keynote, but it actually makes sense. It is very easy to use, kind of like Google’s homepage only having the one search box. You can never be confused and more than one click away from getting back to all our apps.
The onscreen keyboard isn’t so bad. I am starting to get used to it. I thought it would take a long time after my first attempt. It doesn’t really “learn” your words though. That is kind of frustrating. Predictive text should be installed some point in the future through a software upgrade I am guessing.
Now a couple of things my wife and I have found that we don’t really like. The volume. Voice volume seems ok but could be louder, rings aren’t very loud either. I figure this can be solved with a software update as well. Next, it would be nice to turn on a recursive alert letting me know that I missed a call. The iPhone sticks an indicator graphic on the Phone button letting you know you missed a call, but it would be nice to turn on an audible alarm as well in case I don’t turn on my phone, slide to unlock, and then look at the “home” screen. Also, the camera is a bit lame. 2MP isn’t too bad, but the sensor is very sensitive to light. I tried taking a photo of my son in a dark room and you couldn’t see anything. My Nokia 6680 from two years ago is a better cameraphone. Sorry Apple. We also want a little more detail out of the User’s Guide. Some things are very obvious to Mac users, but to an everyday user some things might seem hidden, or just not obvious.
And what is with crippling Bluetooth to only work with headsets???????????????
The automatic WiFi switching is very nice. My phone knows the networks in my house, my in-laws house, at the sandwich shop down the street, etc… When I am in any of those places, it grabs my email over WiFi rather than the cellular network. This is very cool. It makes data on the device fast and easy to use. The calendar syncing and contact syncing is finally a nice thing to have on a mac. Sure third party hacks and iSync were available for other phones, but after experiencing ActiveSync on a Windows Mobile device, I’ve really wanted to have the same experience on an Apple device with my PowerBook. I always tell people that if I were using Windows(which thank god I am not) I would use a Win Mobile device because ActiveSync is really really amazing.
Simple things on the iPhone make me think ‘duh’ why hasn’t the mobile industry thought of this before. Like putting a hardware switch for turning a ringer on or off? That is just simple and beautiful all together. Visual voicemail is another of those ‘duh’ things. It makes sense to receive messages with visual indicators in a similar fashion to email. Apple nailed that one.
I am anxious to see what apps fill up the fourth ‘obvious’ row on the “home” screen. I am anxious to get my app working with the iPhone and it’s screen real estate. I am anxious to show more people how fun this phone is and to get everything dialed in like calendaring, etc…
I still need to test things like popping the SIM out and seeing if the data plan is available to my other phones or not. I won’t use it often, but it would be nice since I can’t couple my iPhone to my PowerBook and use it as a modem. Or the fact that the phone is locked to the network. I would like to use one of my other world phones while still here in the US during the first part of my trip to China later this year so when I am in China I can just use a prepaid SIM.
I really hope they open this up. I can think of some great apps that are missing, like a Jaiku client, a native Google Reader client, and terminal client for things like SSH. I’m not looking to hack the phone, I just want to create some more things that I would use on a daily basis on this wonderful new data device that has me always connected to the Web.
I haven’t been this excited about a handset since my early Nokia days. This device is a winner and will force the hand of the cellphone industry to evolve. The UI and screen alone is worthy of note, but throw in the bundled data plan, the marketing of data services, the ease of use, and the pairing with a computer via iTunes and I think Apple has a real winner.
I’ll be posting more iPhone experiences over the coming days with more specific details comparing the phone software to Nokia and others. For now, that is good. I haven’t written an uber-post like this for some time. Cheers!
Comments
5 Comments so far
Excellent post. The iPhone’s been a long time coming – I’ve been writing about it since 1979…
Nice post. I really want to get one but I’ll not be buying one unless I can unlock the network- since i travel a lot I do sometimes use a foreign pre-paid SIM.
Thank you for excellent and thorough report, i think it was definetly one of the best I came across with. Can’t wait when it will be available in UK.
Many thanks
my friend bought the iPhone …
its really kewl …
but cant use it outside US … and we are in maldives …
that sucks …
but still … its very kewl …
hehe …
I have always been a loyal Apple customer, but will never purchase another Apple product again….it’s a decision based on principle. I just got back from the last apple store in my state to have iphones. The website indicated that the store had phones left last night, so I went at open and they only allowed about five people to purchase phones, because they only had a few left. In sum, I had to make three tripes to Apple stores over the past five days and, because I didn’t have time to wait four hours at a time, was never able to get an iphone.
I believe this is all because Apple has decided to ONLY sell the phone at Apple stores and not stock enough of them in order to increase hype and publicity around the product. They are using their customers as pawns in a chess game, in which they win a few extra billion dollars.
I’ve decided, based on principle, to refrain from buying an iphone or any other Apple products in the future. They should think about their customers first and worry