rowan.depomerai

I wanted to add a little extra to my post on using and owning an iPhone. All I said there still applies, but there’s a couple of things I didn’t mention.

I ranted about how wonderful an Internet experience iPhone provides, and that’s absolutely true. The one thing which has come under a lot of criticism is the lack of 3G. All I can do is compare iPhone to my previous phone – a Nokia 6280 using T-Mobile. With that phone I had 3G where available, and plain old GPRS where it wasn’t. The 3G was a little faster, but I never found it to be blazing, and the crummy browsing experience wasn’t improved with a little speed boost. On the iPhone, I have WiFi, EDGE and GPRS. Using GPRS is as slow as it ever was, and EDGE is better, though not as good as 3G. That’s what you’d expect, but the thing is, the difference between EDGE and 3G is much smaller than I expected. Furthermore, I would infinitely rather use iPhone’s lovely browser over EDGE than my Nokia’s horrid browser on 3G. And of course WiFi makes everything else look pedestrian, so I use WiFi wherever I can – not an option my Nokia gave me. So yeah, 3G might be nice, and a 3G iPhone will arrive sooner or later (once Apple is satisfied it won’t destroy the iPhone’s battery life – a valid problem). I will upgrade eventually no doubt, but in the mean time, I don’t miss 3G. So there.

On the subject of data, here’s an interesting thing – I’ve said before that the iPhone contracts are a great deal provided you use a lot of data, and rubbish if you don’t. That’s a good thing, as the iPhone is a device geared around data – email, browsing, maps and more. I looked at my usage logs the other day. The amount of data I’ve used since getting the iPhone would have cost over £700 on my old contract – makes £35 a month look cheap!

Next up is an interesting observation about customer loyalty. What company would you say you are a customer of in the mobile phone world? My guess is O2/Vodafone/whatever network you’re on. And with my old phone, I thought of myself as a T-Mobile customer who happened to use a Nokia. Nowadays, I’m an Apple phone customer who happens to use O2’s network. Funny little difference that… Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s probably because I used to see a moibile as a communications tool, making the network the key factor, but now I see the network as something necessary to make my favourite gadget work – it’s the iPhone that I really care about. I guess the other thing is that Apple, not O2, are responsible for supporting my device. If I have a device problem I go to Apple, which is probably a good thing, as every time I’ve used Apple customer service it’s been great, whereas my experience with O2 has been mediocre.

Finally a heart-warming advantage to the iPhone. To any Londoners reading: when was the last time you chatted to a stranger on a train? No, me neither. Except when I use my iPhone. 3 or 4 times now I’ve had people strike up conversations beginning, “Ooh, is that an iPhone?”. It’s nice. We chat, discuss why I love it and what is bad about it. Usually they’re think it’s cool but aren’t sure whether it’s worth the money or not. And you know, not one of these people has been a mugger or a thief. I’ve even given the iPhone to a stranger to play with for a couple of minutes, and he gave it back and it’s still in my pocket. I like this, it’s good to be friendly to strangers. That said, I ought to hand on to my phone tighter now I’ve just advertised to the world that I hand it over to strangers willy nilly. Ah well…

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 1:57 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.