rowan.depomerai

Well, it’s been about a week and a half since I got my hands on my iPhone. It’s certainly got more attention than any other gadget I’ve ever bought (though there’s been just as many cries of ‘tart’ and ‘mug’ as there have oohs and aahs!), and I certainly enjoy using it. But like anything, it isn’t so black and white…

First things first, Apple have (as always in my experience), given me first rate service. I got my iPhone from an O2 store just minutes after its launch at 6pm on November 9th. Unfortunately, though it was shiny and lovely, I discovered it had 2 dead pixels. On such a beautiful, high resolution screen, this is a bit of a bummer. So next day I was in central London anyway, and decided to pop into the Apple store. There a guy took a look at it, went all American and said “Dude, that sucks!”, and promptly replaced my phone without question, despite me not even having my receipt on me. Now any product can end up damaged on delivery, but let’s face it, many companies would have said 2 pixels isn’t enough to warrant a replacement, and even if they did give a replacement would have required me to wade through days of red tape. Not so Apple – my product wasn’t in perfect condition, so they sorted it straight away. I was happy enough with that.

Now I don’t want you to think I am soo sad (or rolling in money) that I would break contract for this thing. It just so happened that my old (T-Mobile) contract ended about 2 weeks before iPhone launch, so I was able to rush out and buy one without having to pay off the remaining months with my old provider. It’s costing me more (by around £10 a month), and I’m getting roughly the same number of minutes and texts. However unlike some, I don’t see this as bad value at all. The reason is data – it’s unlimited. Today alone, I’ve transferred nearly 4MB of data, and that’s a low usage day. My iPhone is set to check my email automatically every 15 minutes, I browse the web, I check the weather and more. That unlimited data extends not only to O2’s data network but also to the largest WiFi provider in the UK. As a comparison, on my old contract, T-Mobile would sell me “unlimited” data at £7.50 a month, and that has a cap of 1GB, while to get Wi-Fi access too would have been another £10. So really, my O2 deal is better in my opinion…

Anyway, the phone itself. Contrary to what the doubters think, I do not believe this is a perfect phone. In fact, there’s just as many things that irritate me about this phone than about any other I’ve owned. However, there are key differences:

• What it does do, it does incredibly well
• It does things no other phone I’ve had ever got close to
• There’s a hope some of my gripes will be solved. Software updates are simple, easy and free, and they have included numerous new features since iPhone’s launch. With my old Nokia for example, the only software update I ever got had to be done in-store, added no new features, and broke more things than it fixed. No joke.

So, what does it do so fantastically? And what doesn’t it do? So many questions, dear reader. Here’s a quick summary…

• Web browsing. Don’t even try to tell me any other mobile phone comes close. My Nokia had a ‘proper’ web browser which accessed ‘real’ webpages. However it was nothing like using the internet on a computer. Pages got mangled, there was no sensible navigation, no tabs, no AJAX, I could go on… Safari on iPhone is bliss – tabbed browsing with real page layout, which looks just like a desktop browser. Brillian zooming. It’s just a whole new experience. Stunning.
• Email. Once again, my Nokia thought it did email. I disagreed. It told me it supported IMAP, but really it just downloaded messages from an IMAP inbox. iPhone on the other hand gives me full access to all my mailboxes, allows me to move messages around, read attachments (PDF, Images, Word, Excel and more) and view HTML email. It works like a desktop email client. Only a Blackberry comes close, and even that isn’t half as pretty. And the ability to automatically check email every so often in the background is genius. Like ‘push’ email, but without the complicated server. (Though iPhone does do ‘push’ with some servers if you really want).
• Syncing. Yet again a feature which supposedly worked with my old phone, but which broke more often than not. I can now sync everything from contacts and calendar events to bookmarks and email accounts. The little details make a difference too, like the ability to sync contact photos so the same pictures appear when I connect to MSN on my Mac as when someone calls my iPhone. And this is all before I start thinking about how complex it was to get music and photos onto my Nokia. Suffice to say iPhone is as easy as iPod in that sense…
• Google Maps. Wow. It’s better than it is on a PC for heaven’s sake! Nuff sed.
• The keyboard is brilliant. After some initial controversy, most reviewers now seem to agree it’s at least on a par with hardware QWERTY keyboards on Blackberrys and the like, and I think few would doubt it’s much better than a numeric keypad. The intelligence is great – it uses prediction to help correct errors, and not only does it learn words you type, but it automatically recognises things like names in your address book. Plus the keyboard adapts to what it’s being used for; putting a URL into Safari’s address bar? Have a ‘.com’ button. Using a search box? Have a ‘Go’ button. Need an umlaut? Just press and hold the letter you want to add it to, and a list of accents appears. Brilliant.

How about the not-so-good? Well yeah, I have problems…

• The camera ain’t so great. It’s no worse than my 6280 (actually, I’d say it’s a touch better), but something really good like what Sony Ericsson are producing would have been nice. A lot of fuss has been made about the fact it won’t record video, and I can’t say I give a rat’s bottom, but I suspect this may be added in a future software update.
• The battery. It’s phenomenally good really, but it does get a lot of punishment. On an average work day I watch about an hour of video during my commute, send a few texts, listen to 4 or 5 hours of music at my desk, surf a bit, check my emails a lot and maybe even make the odd call. That’s a lot of usage! The battery stands up to that, which is very impressive, however any device smaller than a brick is going to need a charge each night if you use it that much. I must admit, a replacable battery would be nice so I could carry a spare. Ah well.
• The home screen. It’s easy to use and quite pretty, much nicer than most phones’ menus. But one thing puzzles me… The calendar icon always shows the correct date, yet the world clock icon is a static image, as is the weather icon. For these apps you have to tap them to get to the information they hold. If some icons are dynamic, why are others not?

There’s one more issue. And this to me is the only biggie really…messaging. I think we have to understand that this phone comes from a country in which virtually nobody sends MMS (picture messages), and where texting is multiple orders of magnitude less popular than it is here. Where it actually costs you to receive a message, and where calls are by far the dominant way of communicating. I can only hope that the feedback Apple gets from the messaging-obsessed UK market leads it to update the software significantly in this area. Let me explain…

• First some praise. iPhone shows SMS messages in conversations. The visual style is much like iChat on a Mac, though the concept could also be compared to Gmail’s way of handling email. This is inspired – nothing less. Genius. Why, oh why, oh why has no other phone manufacturer done this?! Love it.
• Then the problems start… You can’t send an SMS to multiple people at once. This is surprisingly annoying. A simple fix, so please Apple, get on to this one…
• Delivery reports are not supported. Not the biggest deal ever, but annoying nonetheless.
• More serious to many is the lack of MMS. Yes that’s right, picture messaging is not supported. This despite the fact that the phone has a decent enough little camera and excellent data facilities. You can email pictures (which is nice) but not send them by MMS. Huh?! Absolutely outrageous. Fix this immediately, Apple!
• Finally another small one… While message conversations are brilliant, you can only delete a conversation, not an individual message. This is frustrating, especially since the interface for it is so obvious – in mail and the SMS conversation list, you can delete something by drawing a line through it with a finger (like crossing it out) – simple and intuitive. Yet in an SMS conversation this isn’t available for messages. Grrr!

Overall, I can’t believe how pleasurable this phone is to use. I love it far more than any other phone I’ve ever had. Seriously, the interface is so cool it’s not true. In summary, £269 well spent. Despite its flaws, the closest a phone has ever come to being perfect. Blows the competition away.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Personal Blog. 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.