WezM.netThe weblog of Wesley Moore

A friend asked the fol­low­ing today, the reply was big enough I decided to post it:

So Wes, you’ve had your iPhone for a week now - what are your ini­tial comments?

Pros / Cons?

Has it changed your life? Has the bat­tery life been crappy for you? Talk time OK?

Its def­i­nitely the best phone I’ve had. Part of that is due to the tight inte­gra­tion with Mac OS X, which obvi­ously very few com­pa­nies were going to pull off. As a device its bril­liant to use and full of func­tion­al­ity. I’m loving the apps and decent browser. The WiFi is really nice at home. The iPod part obvi­ously works as well and better than any prior iPod.

The on screen key­board is pretty much as described. You have to give it time to get the hang of it and you have to trust it. If you’re typing a word that would be in the Eng­lish dic­tio­nary you’re best to keep on typing even if the word is way off. By the time you get to press­ing space its usu­ally selected the right word, which is selected auto­mat­i­cally upon space. Two irri­ta­tions with typing though. Its less likely to get shorter word right, par­tic­u­larly when there’s mul­ti­ple valid options. There’s no way that I’m aware of to get a list of pos­si­bil­i­ties and choose the one you want. Of course being a small word means its not hard to fix and if you type it cor­rectly in the first place then it isn’t a prob­lem at all. The other minor annoy­ance is when you get to the last word in a sen­tence that is mis-​typed with a cor­rect sug­ges­tion it appears the only way to accept it is to press space (and then delete the space) or grab a full stop.

I haven’t missed MMS at all, espe­cially with a decent email client built in that can talk to Gmail via IMAP and send photos to flickr that way.
I have missed Todo func­tion­al­ity. I have no idea why Apple have not got this sync­ing. The sup­port is there in iSync and todos sync with my old phone (Nokia 6280) just fine. I’m hoping that its one of these things that will make it even­tu­ally. There’s two rea­sons I miss todo, one to track things to be done, the other is for reminders for things that don’t have a dura­tion (which can be put in as cal­en­dar entries). There is no way to do reminders with­out a dura­tion at the moment. Having said that the cal­en­dar func­tion­al­ity is com­pre­hen­sive. It sup­ports mul­ti­ple cal­en­dars, full edit­ing, meet­ing accep­tance and basi­cally any­thing you can do on the desktop.

Another annoy­ance sur­rounds SMS. When on silent you only get a single vibra­tion on new mes­sage, which is easily missed. My old phone did three, which was better. Also when you get an SMS my old phone would show an enve­lope on the black and white standby screen. With the iPhone you have to wake it up to see if you’ve got a mes­sage after the dis­play goes back off.

The App­Store is great, some of the apps are very well done. I’m really liking Byline, Twin­kle, Expo­sure and MoPhoTo. I’m not much of a Face­book user but the Face­book app is very well done. It just the core parts of Face­book with­out all the crap. Of those five, three are free, one is free by ad-​supported (with a pay for ver­sion avail­able) and the other AU$12.99. I think that’s a pretty good spread for some top qual­ity apps. Some screen­shots of these apps are scat­tered below.

Bat­tery life is noth­ing bril­liant as has been reported else­where. You’d prob­a­bly want to change it every day. Today I watched a video pod­cast on the way to work, send a couple of SMSs during the day, added a cal­en­dar event, got a call from Steve, called the den­tist, lis­tened to music, read in Google Reader via the Byline app, read and updated Twit­ter via the Twin­kle app and used the timer to cook dinner and its show­ing half bat­tery. It was off the changer all last night too.

A com­plaint of the old one was that the ringer and mes­sage volume was very low and easily missed. I’ve it plenty loud enough and its only on about three quar­ters. Speak­ing on the phone the volume is good, although I haven’t tried extreme envi­ron­ments like a club.

One of the best built-​in apps on the whole phone is maps. When­ever you want to find some­thing, or get the details for a busi­ness, get direc­tions, just bring up Maps and it will sort it out. Its as good as, if not better than Google Maps on the desk­top. It has the same three views too: Maps, Satel­lite and Hybrid. The loca­tion aware­ness is great and there’s some basic uses of it in the apps so far, hope­fully more cre­ative uses come out. One inter­est­ing one is an app called Expo­sure that is a flickr client with a ‘near me’ func­tion. It shows photos near your cur­rent loca­tion. Doing so at home brings ups photos of St Kilda Rd, the foun­tain in the gar­dens out the front (Pic­tured above).

Maybe I’m easily sold on such things but the UI is truly beau­ti­ful and being solely finger driven is rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ily (on a phone). I’m a happy customer.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.