So, I’ve had the iPhone for 7 days, and I’ve been around home and on an out-of-town trip. I’ve used it a lot.
I love it!
Any shortcoming notwithstanding, I love it.
Let’s get a little background out of the way. Since the iPhone came out, I’ve been telling my wife that my next phone will be an iPhone. In my mind that meant something like November or December 2008, after they’d worked the bugs out and after my wife goes back to work.
My old phone has been hurting since the day it went in the pool. Even with a new battery now, it’s standby time is barely 8 hours. That has caused some problems and so, it was with that in mind that my wife decided to buy me the iPhone. I was gobsmacked, to say the least.
I got it, just hours before we left town for our trip, so I had very little time to prepare and it bespeaks well of the iPhone that I didn’t need any preparation.
Irene gave me a gift card for the amount of an 8Gb iPhone (with instructions to buy an iPhone) so I went down to the Apple store at lunch and asked them for a 16GB model. I took along $100 in cash to pay for the difference. They wouldn’t take my cash! I had to pay the balance on a credit card. In retrospect, I suspect that was an overstatement of fact, I probably could have paid for some of the balance in cash and just used the credit card for a token amount. If not, how would I have been able to purchase an iPhone if the gift card would have covered the full price?
I wanted the 16Gb for a couple reasons, first, it’s twice as much storage (duh) and I have over 20GB in my music collection. Second, I knew that the 16GB models must be the latest revision hardware, whilst an 8GB might have been an older on that has been on the shelves for a while.
I didn’t have AT&T for my cell carrier, but when I went home and plugged in the iPod, the process of converting my number from one carrier to another went smoothly. The only thing that I noticed was that, first I received a warning that it might take 6 hours. Soon thereafter I received a notice that everything was complete, and, indeed I was receiving calls; however, I didn’t receive any text messages (except those directly from AT&T) until the next morning, although I was able to send them without difficulty the whole time.
I doubt I have anything particularly insightful to add to all the thousands of iPhone blogs on the web, but I’m generally pessimistic about these things, so perhaps there’s something to be said.
I’ll run through the software first, staring with the four major functions.
The phone. Actually, I have trouble hitting 100 minutes of phone time per month. I’m not a typical cell phone user. The phone is the least important feature to me, all I care about is that I can receive calls if there’s a problem and make one when needed. In that respect, it works fine. I’ve received one visual voicemail, and that worked. Neat idea, but I rarely have enough voicemails to make it difficult to sift through. I have notices a slight difficulty hearing the ringer, so I might get more voicemail than I used to.
The e-mail client. Works well with my .MAC and GMAIL accounts but can only poll them every 15 minutes at the least. The push mail to my Yahoo account works best, but I really hate using my Yahoo account. Maybe that will change. I can’t get it to recognize my lonelocust.com domain IMAP mail from hostmonster.com. I wish I could change the new mail sound, which is identical to the default sound in OSX mail. It’s not loud enough when it’s on my hip, and my holster insulates me from the vibration.
Safari browser. Most places it works great. The lack of a flash player has only bit me once or twice so far. I do wish they’d fix that sooner rather than later. Strangely, I cannot use it to log into my work webmail (Outlook web access) but looking on the net I see that some people have a problem with this and others don’t. Just my luck. Having the full web pages is great, but I do find myself bumping the wrong link with my fingers unless I zoom way in. Landscape mode works better than portrait mode.
iPod mode. In 16GB, I was able to load my entire Japanese soundtrack collection, my James Bond soundtrack collection and my entire selection of pop music rated 4 stars or better and still have a couple GB to spare. I can live with that. I haven’t played with it much, but one time when I did, I was confused when a song started to fade out right in the middle, until I realized it was an incoming call. Nice. Videos look good, really good.
The rest of the stuff is the little widgety things.
- SMS – text messaging, in a sort of iChat way. Works. I wish I could send MMS messages, or send a single message to multiple people. I love that it keeps the old conversations until I delete them. This makes it really easy to send a message to someone I regularly SMS with without having to address to them. I just grab my last chat with them and start typing.
- Calendar – it’s a calendar.
- Photos – Nice. I sync the last couple months work of my photos and they look great.
- Camera – It works, and it takes a decent picture.
- YouTube – I was driving down the freeway to Tucson (I was passenger) watching an episode of Fusion Patrol on my phone, over the cell network. If someone told me 10 years ago I’d be doing that, I’d have laughed at them. Otherwise, as with on the Apple TV, this is a stupid, but somewhat fun function.
- Stocks – Who owns stocks?
- Maps – The Google Maps on this thing kicks ass and takes name. The faux-GPS functionality works well, and the maps, even in satellite view mode are responsive. The freeway traffic conditions were accurate most of the time, too.
- Weather – So you don’t have to go outside to know if it is wet.
- Clock – World Clocks, Alarms, Stopwatch and Timers.
- Calculator – Basic, Non-RPN, Non-Scientific calculator.
- Notes – Notes to yourself, in a comic book font. Can’t seem to do anything with them, like saving them to a computer or loading them from a computer. Makes them less useful than they could be.
- Settings – Yeah. Stuff like that.
- iTunes – Haven’t tried it.
So what about the big picture? The hardware and the OS (if that’s the right word for it.)
I’m sure the whole world has seen the iPhone by now, and it’s a dandy little device. It’s about the right size to hold, and to hold to my ear as a phone.
The touch screen works well, but I find that the left side of my left thumb doesn’t activate the buttons. It’s as if there’s no electrical contact with that part of my thumb. Should I see a doctor?
The onscreen keyboard is too small for me, but it works. The auto correcting is truly frighteningly accurate at times, but if you’re typing non-standard words, it’s a real pain to have the system not correct them. (Accepting auto corrected words is as easy as hitting the space bar. In fact, you can type the entire message without ever looking and the auto correction goes on normally. But if you type something that you don’t want corrected, you have to actually reach up and dismiss the suggested spelling up in the text where you’re writing.)
WiFi and the Edge network. Connecting to WiFi networks is Apple-typically painless, and when you’re connected, it flies. The AT&T Edge network, on the other hand, ranges from tolerable to glacial, with no obvious pattern. When it is good, it’s really not that bad. When it’s bad, though, you’ll be reminded of the dark days of 9600bps modems on a busy Friday night. Still, even a slow connection is a great thing when you’re in the field.
Everybody mentions the physical ringer off switch on the side, and I’m no exception. What a brilliant idea! If I walked into a staff meeting and then realized I’d forgotten to silence my old Motorola phone, there was no way to turn the sound off without making a bunch of noise. How stupid is that?
Finally, I come to the area that I’m so far disappointed with. Battery life. It’s a new toy, and I’ve been using it at every opportunity, and there have been days, especially when we were in Tucson, where I’ve run the battery almost completely down before the day is over. As I’ve gone back to work I haven’t run the battery down, but I still drain about 50% of the battery down. Letting it go overnight without a charge doesn’t seem to be an option.
So, for all it might sound like I’m picking on the iPhone, it’s an absolute joy to have with me. I can easily imagine a time when people will consider such devices to be indispensable. I know my iPhone already is.