iPhone - What you haven’t heard

Okay so there’s plenty of hype going on about the iPhone, and it seems that just about every blog and news website out there is content on reposting the same stories over and over. Having bought an iPhone on day one, I’ve had a fair amount of time to get a good feel for it.  Here are my thoughts.

After standing in line for an hour and a half and plunking down $650 for a new phone, about the last thing I wanted to do was go home and get on the computer. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what you have to do to gain access to your phone. Without registering it, you can’t even write notes or use the calculator. This puts a big damper on the excitement level, which isn’t exactly fabulous.

So I get home and start to activate. Everything went smoothly for me (lucky I guess) but I was a bit irked at the fact that I still had to go back into the store and have the sim card replaced in order to change my phone number to my local area code…so day two I had a new sim card…I was literally the first one the store had to pop out. I know that it’s not all Apple’s fault (AT&T’s system is crap) but the registration through iTunes didn’t help out any.

Time to start playing with the phone. One of my biggest concerns was regarding the keyboard being too small. I figured I could always just turn it sideways though and have a bit more room to type. Well, my concerns were fairly correct with hitting multiple keys and the prediction not catching it that well, and I found out that the sideways mode only works for Safari. Fortunately, typing at hyperspeed seems to get the guessing engine working better so the results turn out okay, but if you try to type slower and you miss keys, you could be doing a lot of deleting.

I have a Mac that I use for all of my iTunes, email, and Address Book stuff, so everything went fairly smoothly there (aside from some weird issue with duplicate contacts with one of them being empty) for me, but it didn’t seem to akin to work with Windows. All of my contacts from my old Razr were already in my Address Book because I had synced them via iSync and bluetooth. While the iPhone supports bluetooth, you can’t transfer files or sync data through it, which is a real bummer for my car (more later).

I was a bit worried about the fact that Apple decided to only allow Safari on the iPhone. As a web developer, I really don’t like WebKit due to it’s rendering inconsistencies and quirks. As suspected, it held up againt some average plain-html websites, but anything having to do with JavaScript or flash and you’re done. The support for them are very limited and they tend to crash Safari. Not exactly “breakthrough” Apple.

Mail works fairly well. I’ve set it up with a few Gmail accounts, a .Mac, and a Yahoo without problems. If you use Google Apps or any other POP3 mail server with non-default settings, though, you’re screwed. You can’t change ports at all on the iPhone. Perhaps this will change with an update, though.

Phone? Oh right…it’s a phone. I almost forgot. Surprisingly, the reception on the phone is a notable improvement over that of my Moto Razr V3 (original black). I have only dropped a single call and I was in a fairly remote location, so it was quite understandable. I have had a few instances where I was showing No Signal and I couldn’t get one for a few minutes, but again, nothing outrageous. Voice quality is fairly good, though I haven’t spoken with anybody else that also was on an iPhone. It almost seems as though the iPhone is filtering out noise at times, since voices usually come through really clear on the built-in speaker. The speakerphone on the iPhone is nothing to be considered, though. It’s quieter than any other speakerphone I’ve heard, so you practically have to have it up to your ear anyways.

The earbuds with a built-in microphone work surprisingly well. Voice comes through them perfectly clear and I haven’t had a single person ask me to repeat myself due to them not hearing me because of noise or otherwise. You can easily continue to use the phone for browsing and email and such while you’re on a call, but you can NOT access EDGE while you are on a call, which is a bummer for me since I routinely get calls asking for help to things I have to Google.

Speaking of EDGE, the time it takes for a connection to establish to a website is subpar. The transfer rate is slow, we knew that, but it does fine for most websites. The connection time is really what kills you though. It took me over 5 minutes to get a connection to a single page on Wikipedia.org.

SMS/Text messaging is quite fun on the phone once you get used to the keyboard, and though its functionality is fantastic for seeing previous stuff in the conversation, the keyboard does get irritating if you’re not sitting still and giving the phone your full attention. While a message is sending you’re prevented from starting to write a new one, which is a bit of a bottleneck. I’ve learned to write my full message in a single text and then just let the network do whatever it needs to to get it delivered.

The visual voicemail is quite a treat, though I really don’t get much voicemail. The quality of voicemails is crap, though, and to get them to playback through the speaker was like a treasure hunt for me at first since the “Audio Source” button wasn’t displaying like it was during calls.

The screen is tough and durable. I haven’t had a single scratch on it yet, even when carrying it in my pocket unprotected. Apple’s choice to go with an anodized-like backing instead of the polished look of the Video iPods has really been a bonus for preventing scratches. While the phone is fairly well put together for the most part, I have been getting some hairs stuck in between the screen and the trim…which is pretty irritating when you go to hang up (you get another hair pulled out). The touch-registration has worked fantastically and I have no real complaints with it.

Battery life hasn’t been fantastic for me. The first full day with my iPhone I did a lot of playing around and showing off. I wound up with a dead iPhone within about 6 hours (not straight use). I’ve since taken care to keep the phone plugged in wherever I have a charger when I’m near it and I haven’t experienced any problems.

The bluetooth hands-free works great in my car, except for the fact that I can’t transfer my address book to the car from my phone like I could before. As many people have said before, it would be nice if the phone supported bluetooth GPS receivers, since then I could get directions using my vehicle’s GPS and my iPhone (much more user-friendly than the built in GPS).

All in all, I think it was a pretty good buy. If Apple plans a version two, some of the most important things they focus on would be longer battery life, a user replaceable battery, support for more bluetooth devices, more widespread Wifi usage (transferring files, etc), a smudge-resistant screen (like the anti-glare one used in the MacBook Pros), and 3rd party developer support.

Sorry for the incoherent order of this post.