the joy of iPhone
I am the proud owner of an iPhone — inspiring at least 3 green-eyed early adopters to join me since Saturday! — and every moment I’ve spent using it since then has been an unfettered joy.
Purchase
There were amusing scenes at the Carphone Whorehouse in Bristol (triangle branch) where they weren’t able to sell a single handset due to the cash registers being down. My friend’s guess was that the store’s kit is security-programmed not to accept payments outside regular opening hours and no one thought to tell the IT guy to change it for the much-hyped but slightly naff “6:02 launch”. I’m sure CW would deny it but that sounds a pretty plausible explanation.
After 20 minutes of a queue moving nowhere – and not a hint of apology/explanation – I walked out the door and took my commission to a different store the next morning.
Setup
The thing that impressed me most about the whole experience was the ease of setting it up via iTunes, the seamless switching between tariffs and speed with which my new phone was up and on the network (under an hour).
Pleasant surprises
- The versatility and intuitiveness of the touch-screen. Peerless.
- The keyboard is easier to use than I had been led to believe, especially in comparison from my quasi-qwerty BlackBerry keyboard of the last 2 years.
- Wireless browsing. I didn’t even know about the free use of The Cloud wireless network before I bought the phone, but even without wireless I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the EDGE network (and its ease of switching between it and wi-fi when the latter becomes available). People have criticised Apple for choosing a 2G network that only covers 30% of the UK but on balance I prefer saving the battery life of my phone at the expense of a few more seconds page load.
- Battery life.
- The sound quality on the iPod. Now I know why people have been going on about them for so long. It really does sound better than my Creative player.
- Fully-supported javascript and css websites. Lush.
- Camera. It’s pretty good for 2 mega pixels – and so easy to edit/scale and assign to contacts
- iTunes. I’m not really into buying DRM protected digital music so haven’t looked into this yet. But I understand that, from your on-board iTunes player you can by tracks on the move and add them directly to your iPod. Now that’s the future!
Unpleasant surprises
Of course there is plenty that is undesirable about the iPhone but I can’t claim to be surprised by any of those, such has been the level of sniping over the past year and, notably in the UK, the past fortnight. However, there are a few nasty surprises which I wasn’t expecting and which border on the plain evil.
- The closed-ness of the whole thing. I don’t especially mind being tied to O2 for 18 months (well I’ve been with them for 10 years) and I don’t have any desire to deprive them of business (vis VoIP) but why can’t Apple open it up and allow me to add apps of my own? If you’re giving us internet, let us use the WHOLE internet? Skype for example…
- No flash on the safari browser. Haven’t found a reason for this yet (how is the YouTube app working?) but I suspect it’s all part of the policy of #1 above.
- US-centric. Surely they could have put some effort into making it a little more UK-targetted? I’m talking about small things like having to search to the 3rd keyboard screen for the pound (£) sign and the US-style roadsign on the Google Maps icon.
- A proprietary headphone socket (I will need to buy an adapter to use it with any standard headphones)
- Calendar synchronisation. I’m having difficulty synchronising it with my google calendar even though both support the ical protocol. In my itunes it simply says “no supported calendar has been found” but no help. Forums have yielded nothing so far. If anyone can help…
Categories: Technology, iphone
