Quick Note: This was written PRE 1.1.1 … and I have not updated my iPhone so I’m not covering the new stuff. I’ll follow up in another little while
Alright … on with the show. Please note – This piece is written by me. I’m not a journalist and I don’t pour sunshine on anything so you may or may not get offended by some minor language in this article. I’ve made every attempt to keep it family friendly. I promise this isn’t the same dry point by point technical junk you’ve read up till now and there’s not a lot of techno-babble in this one… just one guy and his opinions. This is not all encompassing either by the way. I could write a book and still not cover it all.
The Phone
I can’t recall where I heard this, and honestly I may not have ever heard it – but the iPhone’s “killer app” is the phone. Let’s be honest here, the key goal of the Apple iPhone is in fact the phone. Sure it has some short comings but so far in everything I’ve done with this device, the one part that continues to impress me every time is that the dammed phone works. Sure it has low volume (both in the earphone and the ring tone) but no matter what else you’re doing on the iPhone when someone calls you – the world comes to a stop and your phone rings.
Unfortunately that’s just not something I can say for any Windows Mobile device I’ve used. Sure most of the time they work, but every once in a while you’ll get one rogue application that could care less you’re about to find out you just won the lottery – it thinks you need to stay working. How many folks know without looking exactly where the reset button is on their WM Device and have had to use it because the phone rang? Yea … thought so.
The phone is the killer app. Enough said. Is the phone perfect? Definitely not. If you choose a soft ring tone and someone turns on the TV you can pretty much forget about hearing the phone ring. Like having your windows down in the car? Forget it. Plan on hearing anyone with a soft voice? Forget it. Again the phone is not perfect – how the application works is pretty darned close.
MMS = Nope. SMS yes, but MMS is a no go. Send an email. I think this was a pretty big oversight for some folks, but I’ve not ever sent a picture message so I personally haven’t missed it not being there. The SMS threading rocks and I think rivals my Treo 750. I’m definitely not a texter so don’t quote me on any of this, but I think it works great and can easily match up with any other SMS app out there. Not much else to say about it. I am a little annoyed that it doesn’t give me the number of characters I’ve typed though, since AT&T likes to break up large text messages into multiple messages which I assume is to charge you more – because that’s what big, greedy butt heads do.
Let’s see… what else. The Favorites tab you have to love. Why? Because it keeps you from having to scroll through that stupid assed list of names that they call a contact list. While a great little novelty item, Apple can take the no-search havin contact list and flick it right out the flippin window. Again, a total novelty and a total waste of time. There NEEDS to be a search functionality in the contacts list. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been flicking my way down the list, flicked right past the name I want and then flicked my way right past it again while flicking back up the list. Rubbish. I think that’s a bad word… if not replace it with something more meaningful. And don’t tell me about the little letters on the right hand side. I know they are there. The pretty are pretty much rubbish too.
Call Log is pretty much horrible. No call durations listed so you have no idea if you spent 10 minutes or 2 hours on the phone. You can immediately call someone back from the log which is nice, but don’t expect much in the way of details, just the phone number and black or red depending on if you answered the phone.
Visual Voicemail is another cool feature. I really like not having to press and hold 1 and then listen to that annoying voice lady walk me through a couple key presses to listen to another one of my friends who hasn’t figured out that leaving me dead air instead of an actual message IS NOT FUNNY!!! So while something I thought would be a somewhat useless function has turned into a pretty useful feature that frankly I hope makes its way onto every phone everywhere.
Ringtones don’t even get me started about. I personally don’t think this has anything to do with Apple being crappy about buying them from the iTunes store … I think this is all RIAA bullcrap and Apple bending over backwards for the record labels to make sure they start onboard with iTunes, because let’s be honest iTunes would dissolve overnight if all the labels pulled out.
iPod
Um … yea. It’s um… an iPod with Coverflow. Plays music, does video. Kicks Media Player’s ass.
Seriously. Makes WMP look like a Pinto next to a Porsche.
Some minor gripes about the iPod controls but nothing I consider deal breaker. I have noticed some slow down in other applications while playing music, but again nothing deal breaking. Surfing and listening is still very functional. A2DP. Nope. But that’s a software fix I really hope Apple fixes. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be allowed to use a pair of BT headphones in stereo on Apple’s Best iPod Ever. And what the heck was the thought process behind the headphone jack?!
If you don’t know enough about iPods or Cover Flow you must not read the Internets too often. Heck I’m sort of wondering how you found us 🙂
PIM/Smartphone
For a little more info on what the heck Web 2.0 is check this great article out from O’Reilly. For the purposes of this discussion though you can think of Web 2.0 as “the web as a platform”.
First and foremost I definitely wish Apple would step up to the plate here and take a look into some kind of third party on device application support. Web 2.0 is a wonderful concept in THEORY but realistically it just doesn’t work when it is little guys like you and me that throw Web 2.0 stuff together and host it. There’s a bunch really cool, well developed applications – but they are useless when the server you need to access is offline (and holding all your data) or when you’re in the back of the Super Wal-Mart and don’t get EDGE signal at all. Not to mention the somewhat rare but not completely unheard of times when AT&T’s data network goes offline and you can’t connect for nothin.
In a nutshell this my biggest complaint with the iPhone (ok aside from no 3G, that stupid headphone plug and the other things I’ve griped about so far). I need to have some third party application support that goes above and beyond the standard PIM applications built into the iPhone. Things like a wallet application for holding passwords and personal data just cannot be hosted on someone else’s web server. The myriad of information leaks of sites that host personal information pretty much says it all.
Apple needs to confront this major deficiency in the applications. I don’t however want them to fix the issue by opening the platform up to any idiot with an IDE/programming app. The biggest issue I see with Windows Mobile is that nearly anybody is able to program up an application and release it without any concern for the stability of the devices that it gets installed on. I’m not saying Apple needs to lock down the phone as they have, but some sort of application certification program that helps ensure the iPhone stays stable would be great. I don’t think this would be too hard for them to implement… and it would do wonders for the platform.
WIFI/EDGE
EDGE = Sucks. Hey Jobs… next time drink some more of your own kool-aid deliver as you suggested you would:
The second reason is more profound: they have spent and are spending a fortune to build these 3G networks, and so far there ain’t a lot to do with them. People haven’t voted with their pocketbooks to sign up for video on their phones. These phones aren’t capable of taking advantage of it. Youv’e used the internet on your phone, it’s terrible! You get the baby internet, or the mobile internet — people want the REAL internet on their phone. We are going to deliver that. We’re going to take advantage of some of these investments in bandwidth.
WIFI = I wouldn’t have bought this phone without it. This was a HUGE selling feature for me since the iPhone shipped with EDGE. The AT&T Denver network (as I have repeatedly complained about) isn’t 3G yet (and may never been at AT&T’s pace) and that was the one thing truly missing from my Treo 750. If the Treo 750 included WIFI I can’t really say if we would even be having this conversation right now.
Combining the two – EDGE/WIFI – and what you get is an incredible experience unlike anything you’ve ever seen with a Windows Mobile device. Imagine this if you will my Windows Mobile friends: You’re heading into the office. Just got out of your car, turned on your trusty 8125, 8525 or whatever and you hit start > messaging > sync and start to connect over EDGE to check that non-push (cuz your boss is cheap) pop3 account. Anyway, walking along happily you enter the building, walk down the hall and hit the front door of your office. You open the door, look down and see you’ve instantly connected to the company WiFi (thankfully because EDGE dies for about 10 seconds between the front door and your cube). Without a second of pause your phone switches from downloading those tons of emails on slow as snot EDGE and begins to rip them from the Internet like it’s going out of style. Sound like a fairy tale? Well it is. Because we all know that seamless transition between EDGE data and Wifi on a WM device is a near impossibility. Not so on the iPhone. Matter of fact – that’s pretty much exactly how it works. Seamlessly.
Safari
Alright, remember that killer app is the phone thing? Forget it. Safari is the killer app. Having used PIE for what seems like forever, Opera Mobile for a while as well as a few other browsers I can comfortably say that IMHO there is not a single other mobile web browser that can come close to Safari. Does it have flash? No. Does it have a bunch of other plug-ins you want? Not likely. Can it do the web like a desktop browser and look incredible doing it? Absolutely.
My favorite site. Now if you’ve visited JAMM pre-mobile plug-in days you know how horribly it rendered in PIE. The left menu bar scrolled for a mile before you got to the content and the right menu bar would scroll for a mile before you got to the bottom of the page to hit the previous posts link. Not on the iPhone. It renders the page as it was meant to be seen and allows you to zoom in to what you want to see.
There’s a couple things that amaze me about this browser. First it seems almost as if it reads your mind. Those little links – yea you can click those without zooming. Somehow it just knows which one you want even though there may be three of them under your finger. It’s nothing short of incredible. Second is how it can format the text to fit the screen. All I did in the above screen shots was double tap the paragraph and it zoomed in to fit that section of text to the screen. You have to use it to really understand – and I highly recommend if you have an AT&T or Apple store nearby you stop by and have a play. Safari alone sold me on the iPhone.
Other Stuff
Admittedly, I’m not a camera phone type of person. I’ve got a Canon Rebel XT that handles my photo needs so taking pictures with my iPhone is a very rare occurrence. I have taken a couple the other day so you can see how well it does.
And no … I didn’t buy this Civic. I sooooo wanted to, but it’s just not in the budget right now – so I get to keep rockin my old Acura Vigor. Hopefully next spring. Too bad too because this bad boy was actually a couple thousand under KBB price!
Anyway, so the camera works and actually takes pretty good pictures. No flash so plan on using it outside during the day for the best results.
The weather app is nice to have. I wish the icon was dynamic (like the Calendar icon) but it’s a simple click away so not too much of a worry. I’ve found it to be fairly annoying when you’re in a low speed EDGE area as it takes a good few seconds to pull down the new data when you launch the app. Again this all boils down to Apple trusting the network a little too much and it ultimately ends up hurting the user experience a bit. But, I always had at least one weather program loaded up on my WM devices so its great that Apple thought to include one and I can deal with some slow downloads to have the app handy.
Maps Rock. Not much more to say … if you’ve used Google Maps you’ve used the iPhone Google Maps. It’s still cool as hell though and has saved my butt a couple times trying to find last minute directions. I’ve also found that reliability of the app depends on your data speeds. Wifi makes the user experience much better, but maps still remain very useable under EDGE.
Um … it’s got world clocks. And no – I didn’t have to download a patch for the new time change “save fuel” thingy. I still have no idea why I have to do that with Windows Mobile 6. Just retarded and something Microsoft should have fixed.
Gotta have my mail. I wouldn’t say I’m addicted but I would say that if someone tried to sell me a device that wasn’t email capable I think I’d just laugh at them and walk away. The iPhone obviously does support email – pop and imap – so rest assured junkies your email will be waiting. There’s a few pre-configured setups you can use or you can add your own. Gmail setup for took about a minute and only requires your email address, name and password. Very simple …
I have a few complaints that I don’t really consider deal breakers, but they are somewhat annoying. First up, some messages don’t seem to want to download. I’ve not figured out what causes it, but every once in a while you’ll touch on an email and it will just sit there downloading. Eventually it will timeout and tell you that it has not been downloaded. Leaving the mail app and coming back a minute later seems to solve the problem.
Second switching accounts is a pain. Apple really needs a drop down menu to select the account you want.
One big bonus with email is the ability to turn off accounts when you don’t want to use them. For example I sleep with my phone beside the bed. I really don’t need my email downloading and making binging sounds all night (since some of the JAMM readers are overseas) so I just turn off my email accounts. When I get up in the morning I turn them back on and they download automatically. It’s also nice if you want your personal email to come in, but want to turn off the work email once the work day is over…
Wrap Up
So, I’ve definitely got a lot more I could ramble on about, but it’s getting late and I’ve got to get this “review” off my plate. There’s just so much to talk about with the iPhone that I can’t pull myself to finish it all up. Maybe soon I’ll do a “part 2” look a couple more weeks out and cover some more… maybe…
Anyway, there’s my 2 pennies about the iPhone after a couple weeks use.
Key take away(s) – Apple has a solid device here. No matter what you see around the web, the iPhone is a quality tool both in usability and design. It’s most likely not going to be the best device for a real power user (unless you app unlock it – but that’s another write-up) however it’s a great device for John-Q-Public and possibly the best device every released for the average person who wants a little more than the basic RAZR interface.
The applications are great, EDGE sucks and in some cases bring down the user experience. If Apple had included 3G in this version I think the overall user experience would be second to none. With this in mind, it was a HUGE mistake by Apple to rely on Web 2.0 … it just doesn’t work.
Would I buy it again? In a heartbeat.
Continue reading:
- Everything New Apple Just Announced (Septembe
- Apple Watch Pre-Order
- Apple Research Kit launches with 5 Apps
- Apple TV now only $69
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