So I have had my iPhone for an entire day now, and I have had at least 4 people ask how I liked it. So I thought I would share my own personal experiences with this here.
First the good. The iPhone appears to be everything it was touted as being. The beautiful interface is intuitive and fast. The Mail client works just like a normal email client (better than most actually). And the browser is pretty good at rendering pages.
I should also not that I was a local celebrity anywhere my iPhone was visible. The people in Circuit City were calling each other over, and even the girl at the Verizon booth wanted to play with it.
The WiFi connection in my house seems to work great, but a fellow iPhone owner I ran into at Circuit City mentioned that his has been spotty in his house, but good in other locations like Starbucks and a local office. So I have to wonder if it’s his router, especially because he is not using an Airport.
The Edge connection is not what you would call fast, but I have to say that it was faster than I thought I would see. I already had it with my Blackberry Pearl, but I don’t remember it being as fast as it is now. There is some talk that AT&T sped it up a bit the day before iPhone launch.
The sound quality of the phone is good. I have been using it with my Jawbone Bluetooth headset, and it seems to work well. Although making a call requires a few more steps than a normal phone. You must first push the “On/Home†button to wake it, slide the touch screen slider to on, touch the Phone icon, and then you can either select a contact from your contact list, or select the keyboard to make a call. It sounds like a lot of work but honestly I didn’t really notice a difference today. And when a call comes in, you just touch the Answer or Ignore button on the screen.
As I mentioned in my previous post, email set up was instant when I plugged my phone in. So far email seems to work well, although it doesn’t seem to alert you when you have email, I have been checking manually. But I’m sure this is a setting in the system somewhere. Yahoo is touting their “Push†email to math Blackberry email server. Hopefully Google follows suit soon.
Another well thought out little feature is a nice little button to keep your phone in vibrate mode. Everyone should practice this when possible.
Now lets cover a couple of negatives. As I mentioned in my previous post, my ears are evidently odd shaped because the ear buds don’t work well for me. So I have a nice pair of Band and Olufsen A8 earphones. But it seems Apple has made a little change to the earphone plug and almost every headphone plug is too short to get into the plug. I check Radio Shack, a local computer store, Circuit City and even Target to see if I could find some sort of plug extender or something to fit, and there was nothing. Belkin and Griffin are making them, but I have to say those don’t look that great either.
I know the official reason for this is because of the microphone in the earphone cord, but I honestly can’t help but feel that some a-hole at Apple decided they were sick of not seeing any money from headphone makers and they needed a way to force them to make their products “Works with iPod/iPhone†.
The idea product here would be something that mimicked the function of the included ear buds and included the microphone with the little “pinch thing†on the cord too. I imagine that will come out within the next couple weeks.
Another short coming is the lack of an RSS aggregater Safari has a built in reader, but honestly it sucks. What I (and most other people who subscribe to RSS feeds) need is something like NetNewsWire that organizes and pushes out the latest unread RSS from the site you subscribe too. Right now I have to bookmark sites RSS feeds.
But I would say the biggest annoyance is the lack of voice dialing. I’m very used to be able to click my ear and say “Call Andy Ball‘s work phone†(which always goes to is voice mail) and it rings. I lose my cyborg like abilities with the iPhone. This is especially annoying while driving. My sincere hopes is that this is a big enough deal that we will see a firmware update soon to add this.
As for other features I hope are coming, I would love to see a Skype , or even Vonage widget button on the iPhone. Imagine being able to use the iPhone as your home phone as well. If AT&T is smart, they are going to try to follow T-Mobile into the VoIP business through the handsets and push something out for iPhone to make and receive calls through WiFi on your cell number.
Overall I have to say that I would highly recommend the phone to anyone. I’m supposed to give my Blackberry to my friend Jim, but he is the perfect candidate for the iPhone. He has a Mac, he lives in an area that is well covered by AT&T, I doubt he has over 6 gigs of music, he takes and receives of lot of pictures of grandkids and friends, and he is not someone that would like to spend an hour trying to get his settings into the Blackberry for his mail. All he would have to do is plug it in, and his music, pictures, mail, contacts, and calendar would be sync’d without doing anything special.
As for who shouldn’t get an iPhone…I guess if you are a die hard Windows person using something besides Outlook to keep your contacts and info, this may not be for you. And of course if you’re not in an AT&T coverage area, you would just have an overpriced iPod. Everyone else should check it out.
Update: Here is the headphone connector with the mic due out in August.
[tags]iphone, review, belkin, griffin, andy ball, apple, outlook, bang olufsen, a8[/tags]
