So, it’s day 6 with my iPhone. I thought I’d give my impressions so far.
I’ve talked on it for 20 minutes. As a phone, it’s ok. I think I have a problem with the voicemail. Once I listen to a voicemail and try to listen again, the screen goes black and I have to lock/unlock the phone to get it back. Not sure if that’s a feature or a bug. Reception is better than T-Mobile with AT&T at the office. The earpiece volume is decent and mic seems to pick up well so far (again, only used for 20 minutes). Bluetooth in my Lexus IS250 works just as good as my Wing did.
I tried using it as an audio player once while walking the dog. Once. As an audio player, the iPhone is horrible. Yes, I said it! There is no way to use the iPhone without looking at it to see the controls (play/fwd/rev/etc). You can’t just slide it in your pocket and go for a walk unless you never skip past a song. With my iPod, I can feel the indentation in the case where the wheel is and can click the Forward button to skip a song. The iPhone has no dedicated media player buttons, so unless you’re looking at it, you’re firing blind. On top of it all, touches don’t register through clothing, so even if you knew where the buttons were, you couldn’t touch them.
All of that aside, I never planned on the iPhone replacing my 60GB iPod anyway, so I’m not completely bummed. It’s a shame, though, that as much as it wants to be a convergence device, it fails because of a lack of click-y buttons.
As a video player, however, it’s pretty snazzy. Since you’re looking at the device anyway, you can see the controls. Navigation is basic, but functional. The screen is nice. The built-in speakers are perfect because you can share a video without having to share headphones.
I keep having problems with Mail. It doesn’t seem to like my SMTP server even though it works fine in Mail.app on my Mac and I synched it in order to get those settings. In-line pictures is nice. Viewing attachments is also nice. I haven’t tried any Office docs yet, though. It’s too bad you can’t just copy PDFs over to it, though. I’d love to have my D&D 4e books on there for quick browsing.
Web browsing is good, but not great. It’s a far cry from Pocket IE on WinMo, that’s for sure. Still, if you scroll pretty far, it doesn’t render the whole page (gives a checkerboard background), so you have to wait a second for it to catch up. Also, when you’re zoomed in on a page and navigate to another page, you lose your zoom level. I can see advantages and disadvantages to that, but it just didn’t behave like I was expecting it to. I like placing bookmarks on the launcher, though. For pages that I access often (like Google Reader), it beats having to launch Safari, then navigate to a bookmark.
The apps are a mixed bag. Browsing and downloading are easy (now, at least. At first, I couldn’t get any apps to sync correctly). The content is pretty sparse and the apps are often buggy. I’ve had some apps crash and some apps reboot the phone. I have yet to pay for an app, so maybe you get what you pay for.
The two major complaints of other users are also two of my major complaints. No cut/copy/paste, and no background processing. On several occasions now, I’ve wanted to copy an address from Safari and paste it into Maps. Apps like AIM and Twitterriffic can never reach their full potential without being able to run in the background. On top of that, you have to stop what you’re doing in one app just to open calculator, add a couple of numbers, then open the first app back up and type the result in. I went over my thoughts on this previously, so I will only reiterate that this stinks.
The software keyboard is better than Windows Mobile, but worse than my Wing’s hardware keyboard. The word correction is not horrible, but I still feel like the nanny is there slapping my hand with a ruler.
In the end, I’d give the iPhone 8/10. My Wing would be about 7.5/10. Apple could make this a 9.5 device by adding background processes and system-wide copy/paste. Without hardware buttons, it’ll never replace my iPod, though.
Oh, the 3G features? 3G data is a battery hog and only truly useful when using Safari. Apple should enable it automatically when using data-hungry applications like Safari and leave it disabled for checking email in the background. GPS is a bit of a let-down. Reception is not that great and it takes a while to get a good lock. It’s better than nothing, though. Maybe more location-enabled apps will come along to make it more useful.
What apps would I like to see?
- Adium (or another multi-protocol IM client, but would require background processing to be truly useful)
- A push-to-talk VoIP program (like a voice IM or Skype, again with background processing)
- This
- ScummVM
- PDF Viewer
- File Manager
- A unique roleplaying game
- PuzzleQuest
- A Flickr uploader
