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Okay, everyone's heard about the iPhone by now... now, how good is it REALLY? I have been using the iPhone for a week now, and I have found it has some fantastic features as well as some not-so-great drawbacks. The iPhone is not the first cell phone + PDA + music player combination, however, it manages to put those features together far better than any other device I have seen so far.

First, the good: The physical design of the iPhone is great. It is classy, timeless, beautifully crafted. It doesn't feel cheap at all (unlike many cell phones). The touch screen interface is very well thought-out. I found it to be very easy to use. Furthermore, the multi-touch interface tries and does a good job imparting a feeling of manipulating physical objects in a virtual world (dragging things, moving things around).

 
The applications on the iPhone work very well, and are very well-integrated. I appreciate the fact that I can send an email of a picture or a note to someone in my contact list, or that I can touch a URL I have entered for a contact to go to their web site, or that I can instantly see the Google map for the address of a contact. The visual voicemail works quite well. It gives an email-like view of your voicemail. I think the audio quality of voicemail messages could be better though. The built-in email application works with GMail, Yahoo Mail, or any other POP3 mail server. It's fairly basic, but, just simply works! You can set it up to only check mail when you want it, or to check automatically every 15, 30, or 60 minutes (it's not as immediate as a true "push" email, but it's a reasonable approximation).

Web browsing with Safari is not bad. About as good as could be expected from such a small device. Using WiFi, sites load and render at a moderate speed (I wouldn't say it's fast, but, it's definitely usable). I think if they had a slightly faster CPU, the browsing experience would be even better. Using the EDGE cellular data network was not bad either, though definitely slower. Usable but, of course, I wish it were faster. At this time, the iPhone doesn't handle Flash sites (but it's rumored to be an upcoming feature update). Over the course of a week, Safari has crashed a few times, but, I expect they will fix these issues with a software patch.

The built-in Google Maps application works very well. It's a very nicely done portable mapping application with local search built-in. It has the standard street view as well as a satellite image view. And, on top of that, it also can show real-time traffic status.

The iPhone has an video iPod built in. It is beautifully implemented, with CoverFlow, video playback, and of course, audio playback. They do need to fix a few small issues, such as the fact that there's no way to view detailed information about podcasts, and they should scroll podcast titles that are too long. Also, my standard headphones don't seem to work with the built-in headphone jack. The iPhone also has a speaker, making it the first iPod to include one. I find that I use the speakers quite a lot (they are very tiny, and also very tinny, but, very convenient). As a PDA, the iPhone excels.

It has a simple but useful calendaring application with support for periodic events and alerts. It also has a great contact manager application. The Notepad application is really basic- I wish it had some more features. And, I wish they had built in a voice recorder. You can sort-of fake it by leaving yourself voicemails, but, it's not quite as good as a true voice recorder application.

The built-in camera is probably the weakest point. Although it's a 2 megapixel camera, I found the image quality to be fairly poor. It will not replace your existing camera. It's okay for occasional snapshots, but the image quality is not going to win any awards, by a long shot. Sharpness is lacking, and there are no camera controls whatsoever.

One of the controversial aspects of the iPhone is the touch-screen keyboard. How is it to type on? Well, it does take some getting used to. I find it usable for short messages. The auto-correcting feature works fairly well.

I think the iPhone is a ground-breaking product for Apple. It not only puts them on the map in the cell phone world, but also puts them at the top of the heap. It's a product that works well, and integrates so many useful functions into one device. The screen is great, the user interface works very well, it's easy and intuitive to use, and, it's just plain cool. However, it is only the beginning, and you can't help but wish for improvements and extensions. Surely future versions will tempt you to upgrade.

 

Posted by spotsearch at 05:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just got a new iPhone!  The process of buying it on opening day was quite smooth.  The Apple Store in Palo Alto had everything worked out, and things were so streamlined that even with 200-300 people in line in front of me, I was out the door with a new iPhone in less than half an hour.

However, Activation Hell began when I tried to activate the iPhone.

It is unfortunate that the iPhone is almost completely useless without activation (you can't use iTunes, you can't browse your calendar, you can't view pictures, you can't browse the web on wifi).  The only thing you can do is turn it on and make a 911 call.  So, anyways, the activation system on iTunes sent me an email saying this was going to take a while.  So, I waited, and waited, and waited, and 9.5 hours afterwards I got an email:

"We're sorry. AT&T has identified a problem with the information you provided.

For more information, call 877-800-3701."

So, I called customer support at AT&T, and after a 2.5 hour wait, the person I talked to said things were fixed and it should be active in an hour or so.  Well, I waited, and waited, and waited, and, 24 hours after starting all this, I still had no ativation!  Calling customer support again (and waiting an hour on hold) I got through to someone that ended up calling in a supervisor.  Anyways, the supervisor did some magical thing and, 5 minutes later it was activated! 

 Well, maybe not.... although the phone was activated, but the wireless service was not- it was getting no signal connection at all.  I figured I would just wait and maybe it'd come up later.  Well, 38 hours from the start of this process, got another email saying my wireless service plan was not compatible with the iPhone!  Guess what- they are FORCING me to switch to a more expensive plan, despite the previous statements (and the activation signup screens) stating that if you're an existing customer, you can use your existing plan but just add a $20 data plan.  Nope, the greedy company wants to force me to a plan that's 34% more expensive than what I have (a $39 plan vs. my $29 plan) making it $59/month with the additional $29 data plan.  I think this is unethical and very anti-consumer.  Another catch- when you switch to your new plan, if you had an international plan, that disappears, so, unless you explicitly tell them to, you will get the default outrageously expensive international rates.  The "new AT&T" as they call themselves, is all about squeezing as much as they can out of the customer. 

AT&T should have been prepared for this.  They knew Apple's iPhone was going to launch with a lot of interest, and they should have had a smoother process.

 

Posted by spotsearch at 01:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)