I did it-- I bought an iPhone. I planned to wait for the second generation, but then I thought: why would I do that? If they're really that much better, I'll just have to buy one of those too. If you're in the market, you've read the professional reviews already. I won't waste your time by pasting in all the tech specs here; you can find them at Apple.com. Instead, I'll tell you what it's like to play with an iPhone.
The biggest frustration is the
activation process. If you're like me, when you get a new toy, you want to play immediately. When I bought my iPhone, AT&T had the gall to shut down their activation servers for a whopping sixteen hours for "scheduled maintenance." My iPhone sat, lifeless, just waiting for those servers to come back up. Once the servers were up, it was smooth sailing. You connect your iPhone to your computer via USB to begin the process, which only takes a few minutes. Once the phone is unlocked, you can start transferring music, videos, photos, e-mail settings, Safari bookmarks, contact information, and calendars on to your iPhone. It can take a few hours for AT&T to activate the phone service, but it only took them about 50 minutes to remotely transfer my phone number from my old Cingular RAZR to my new iPhone.
I've heard some grumbling about
rate plans, but they're quite reasonable. As an existing AT&T customer, I simply added a data plan for an extra $20 per month. That's for
unlimited e-mail and web-browsing. It also includes 200 or so text messages, which aren't as enticing anymore when you've got true e-mail functionality in a phone. If you really love text messages, you can sign up for more of those at a higher price. I'm not sure why you'd bother, though.
The iPhone's simplicity is captivating. It has only one button on its face, which takes you back to the home screen from any menu.
The iPhone's a wonderful, multifunctional device. The most basic function, though, the
cell phone, is a mixed bag. In some ways, it's delightfully sophisticated. In others, it lacks the functionality of the cheapest cell phone. When you press the phone icon at the bottom of the screen, it gives you a few choices: you can pick a number from your phone book, from a list of favorites, from recent calls, or just enter the numbers on a pop-up keypad. It also gives you the option to check your
visual voicemail. I
love this feature! Instead of calling a remote server, iPhone shows your voicemail in a list very similar to how it shows your e-mail. You can can select the voicemail you want to hear without listening to all of them in order.
While you talk on the phone, the screen goes black. If you move the phone away from your face, though, several options pop up. This lets you end the call or pull up a numeric keypad if you need one (for example, with a phone system that requires you to make choice on your touchtone phone).
It's a beautifully designed system, but it lacks something that even a free Nokia phone had in 1998: good sound quality. It's not terrible, but for a $500 phone, it should be a lot better.
The
web browser is delightful once you've played around with it a bit. The windows start off on the small side, but you can zoom in or out with pinching motions on the screen. Pages load slowly over AT&T's EDGE network, but faster if you're on a wifi network. My only complaint is that the iPhone doesn't remember account names or passwords, so you have to sign in to a site every time you start a new session.
E-mail is a breeze to use. I have three different POP accounts set up on my iPhone, and each has a dedicated mailbox.
Typing seems tricky at first because the keys are smaller than human fingertips (and I have small hands), but there's a trick to it:
don't hit the keys dead-center. There's a sweet-spot that is ever-so-slightly above each key's center, and once you start to hit that instinctively, you'll make fewer typos. And if you do make a lot of typos, just keep typing; iPhone's spell check does a great job of cleaning up as you go.
As an MP3 and video player, iPhone is even more enjoyable than my 30GB iPod. I love the widescreen, and I love sliding through album covers to select songs. Unlike iPods, the iPhone has an external speaker. This is a nice feature, but it's no substitute for real speakers if you want to fill the room with music. With only 4GB or 8GB capacities available, iPhone is not a a proper solution for the audiophile who wants to store his or her whole music collection on one device. I keep about 1000 of my favorite songs on my iPhone, but everything else (including a hundred hours of video) is on my 30 GB iPod.
So far, I'm impressed with my iPhone's 2 megapixel camera. You're not going to get large, photo-quality prints from two megapixels, but this is a step-up from the BS cameras included with most cell phones. One thing the iPhone lacks, though, is the ability to record video.
The Google Maps feature is pretty trippy. When was the last time you pulled up a satellite image of your house on a cell phone? The iPhone isn't GPS enabled, but you can use it for maps an directions.
The weather and stock widgets are nice features on the go. YouTube isn't especially useful, but it sure is fun!
Battery Life is an oft-discussed issue all over the internet. I've heard rumors that the iPhone's battery was designed to last for only 300 charge cycles, but this is patently false. The official word from Apple is that
a properly maintained iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. You may choose to replace your battery when it no longer holds sufficient charge to meet your needs. If you spend a lot of time watching videos on YouTube over WiFi, you'll be at 80% capacity in about thirteen months. If you use it more for e-mail over Edge, to listen to music, and as a phone, you'll get two years or so until you're down to 80%. That's no worse than any cell phone I've ever owned.
I can't comment on how long a charge will last with typical use since I've only been using my iPhone for twenty eight hours, but with some fairly intensive play, I got about six hours on the first charge.
Random positive thoughts
• I adore my iPhone's beautiful screen
• I love that I can set my iPhone to lock automatically if it's inactive for a period of time.
• The ringtones sound much clearer and deeper than the ones on other cell phones.
• It's very "Apple." Every feature is polished, and there are no clumsy transitions between screens.
Random negative thoughts
• There are only a few ringtones, and there's no way to legitimately get more. You can hack the iPhone, but I'm not sure what that does to the warranty.
• No cut/copy/paste. Ugh!
• No bold, italic or underlined text in e-mail or notepad as far as I can tell.
• No ability to automatically check for e-mail at intervals shorter than fifteen minutes. I'd prefer if it checked every five.
In the box. The iPhone comes with very little: there's a little dock, a cleaning cloth for the screen, a USB cable, and a set of special ear buds (with a tiny, attached microphone) for music or hands-free calling. There's no
case, so I bought a
Belkin Acrylic Case when I purchased my iPhone. Big mistake. It went back this morning, and now I have a wonderful InCase black leather iPhone case instead.
A tangential aside: don't wait in line at the Apple Store for an iPhone
Apple has set up a website to show you the iPhone availability at local stores, but it's not very useful. All it tells you is if your local store will have a phone when it opens in the morning; there's no way to know how many it will receive, how fast it will sell out, or if you'll get the size (4 GB or 8 GB) you want to buy. When I decided to buy my iPhone at 6:30 PM on Saturday night, the Apple store was sold out, and still had a line out the door. I didn't even go in. I walked right on by and into the empty AT&T store that had ample stock of both the 4GB and 8GB iPhones. Some folks may think there's an advantage to buying at Apple, but everything from the warranty to the activation process is identical at both stores. If you want a phone, don't wait in line at 9AM-- head over to AT&T instead. Do not, however, get snookered into buying any accessories at the AT&T store; Apple has a much better selection of those. / end rant.
4GB or 8GB?
For me, it was an easy decision: this is, first and foremost, an internet device. 8GB isn't enough to hold all my digital video anyway, so I went with 4GB. With the exception of storage capacity, the phones are identical.
Final Thoughts
I adore my iPhone, but I recognize that much of my enthusiasm is still for its "wow" factor. I'm withholding the fifth star for now. I've been using my iPhone for only a day, so the bloom is very much still on the rose. Stay tuned. I'll be back to report on the thorns!
Update 12/28/07
My iPhone is going strong, and I have to say that I like it even more now than I did when I bought it.
- The sound quality on phone calls is as good as it is on any cell phone I've ever used
- I LOVE that I can turn songs from the iTunes Music Store into ringtones, but I'm still so happy with "Marimba" that I rarely do this.
- Apple's added the iTunes Music Store to the phone. Nice!
- The battery life hasn't diminished at all. I use my phone for e-mail and browsing all the time, and I never run out of juice in a single day.
- I still hate typing long messages on my iPhone, but typing on it really does become second nature.
- My kingdom for GPS. Its the one thing this phone needs to truly be the coolest handheld device on the planet. A GPS iPhone is something I'd buy tomorrow if it were available.
- As an early adopter, I qualified for Apple's $100 refund when they lowered the iPhone's price. I know a lot of people were mad about this, but I was thrilled. I wandered into the Apple Store and left with a $100 iHome.
- Still no cut/copy/paste. Ugh!
... more as I think of things.
